Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the undecideds are starting to vocally call for Congress to consider a bill. Earlier this week, Senator Tom Udall lead a group of 22 moderate Senators in calling on Senator Majority Leader Reid to bring up comprehensive climate and clean energy legislation for a vote. The letter is especially significant because most of these folks hadn’t been saying much about climate legislation before. And if those in the middle remained silent, that would have deadened any momentum. But they didn’t.
Although none of this guarantees that we will get a bill and it certainly doesn’t guarantee that any bill that moves will be strong enough to address the problems, it represents significant progress. Members of Congress have had a hard week so I hope that they go home over the Easter recess and take a few days to recuperate. When they get back, there is much to do and a lot of momentum to build upon.
Heather Taylor-Miesle is the director of the NRDC Action Fund. Become a fan on Facebook or Twitter.
but I’ll take anything from this session w.r.t. climate change. I know we’re not going to get a major comprehensive bill through. Let’s figure out how to do something.
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p>Transportation:
* get an 80/20 match on rail projects, like tUSA already does for highway projects.
* increase the gas tax, or even just tie it to inflation.
* increase CAFE standards
* spend capital money on regional mass transit in ways which improve QoS and lower the transit agency’s operations budget
* generate more strategic support for Amtrak by building a high quality Acela South on the Atlanta-Charlotte-Greensboro-RTP-Richmond-Fredricksburg-DC run
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p>Electricity:
* National RPS. Even if it’s weak (and allowed to be superdeded by state requirements), it would move the southeast, Appalachian, and Great Plains states in the right direction
* Mo’ better grid infrastructure
* Ratchet up clean air requirements on coal and oil production
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p>Buildings:
* Mo’ better Energy Star like standards
* Mo’ better building code requirements
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p>I’m not holding my breath for a comprehensive cap and trade or carbon tax bill, but there’s no reason why we can’t ratchet up some standards and financial incentives in the different industries. There’s no reason why we can’t change the financial incentives for coal, oil, and gas either. A combination of policies is needed, and taxes aren’t really popular during a recession, so exchange them for subsidization of renewable energy (stimulate!) and increased requirements for future years, when the economy will be improved.
Actually, the House managed to chew gum and walk at the same time all last year. There are 130 bills passed by the House waiting for the Senate to take up.
In the House, only a majority of the Senators is needed. In the Senate, 60 votes are needed on this. Reconciliation, even if it met the Byrd rule is not possible, because the Johanns amendment was agreed to which prohibited the use of reconciliation for climate change legislation involving a cap and trade system. http://www.senate.gov/legislat…
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p>The current plan sounds like it won’t have a system wide cap and trade system, but it likely would be under this prohibition too.
…to blow that 60-vote presumption out of the water once and for all. I’m not sure what, maybe just a presiding officer spoiling for a fight who rules contrary to precedent.
though the House bill was good. The Senate seems to be taking a very meager approach.
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p>Harry Reid needs to learn to ask the Republicans to put up or shut up.
As is giving money to sociopathic globalist Bernie Madoff parasites. A wooden stake into the very heart of global warming the sky is falling scamming crowd.
Coincidentally, this diary comes right next to Bob’s posting about Vermont Yankee.
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p>Unfortunately our senior senator has gone “bipartisan” on climate change, teaming up with Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman with a climate-change bill that includes funding for both nuclear and coal.*
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p>The large, capital-intensive centralized generation plants are the biggest threat to the development of renewables and energy efficiency. Historically, the industry has won enormous subsidies for these kinds of projects, producing huge anticompetative gluts of cheap electricity that then knock out alternatives.
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p>I know that some well-intentioned people genuinely believe in the potential for these technologies to cut carbon, based on the idealized technical specs that proponents promise.
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p>This is ultimately a blinkered point of view that fails to account for the effects of these subsidies on power-supply planning. The result in the past was that subsidized nuclear forestalled renewables and efficiency, not fossil plants.
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p>I hope these issue will come to the fore as the Senate bill advances.
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p>*I know it’s clean nuclear, not like that leaky Vermont Yankee, and clean coal, but I’m just not with the
propagandaprogram on that.is that renewables like solar and wind have an almost zero marginal cost of production, and nuclear is just a smidge higher than that.
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p>Coal, oil, and natural gas have a distinctly larger than zero operational cost. This means that every time a new nuclear, wind, or solar production facility comes online, it displaces fossil fuel. It has to — once the thing is built, it’s far cheaper to generate a MWh of electricity from wind, solar, or nuclear than from coal, oil, or natural gas.
Your analysis assumes the impact of massive nuclear subsidies on the non-nuclear energy sector is zero, other than a megawatt-hour-for-megawatt-hour displacement of generation. That’s a serious error.
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p>Renewables are expensive to build. So are nuclear and coal, but if the the latter are massively subsidized it will not be possible for the good stuff to be built.
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p>Furthermore, a decade of experience with energy efficiency programs notwithstanding, the culture of large centralized generating plants is alive and will in utilities and government bureaucracies across the U.S. Renewables are at a serious disadvantage in the utility planning process when coal and nukes come first.
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p>For example, in North Carolina, Duke Energy plans to build a new coal plant. Regulators there solemnly approved the deal with the condition that Duke go ahead and build a nuclear plant to “offset” the carbon. Meanwhile the state’s energy-efficiency program is undersized. Why conserve energy when you are going to have so much of it?
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p>The nuclear option entails more consumption and less renewable energy. The correct analysis takes into account the resources and efficiency that subsidized nuclear avoids.
There are massive subsidies of all electrical forms of generation, including solar and wind, including nuclear, including fossil fuels.
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p>It’s seems clear that you’re of the mode that higher electricity prices are what’s needed, both to encourage efficiency, to entice more renewables, and to chase fossil fuels out of the market. While that would work, I don’t think it’s necessary.
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p>But that’s simply not true. We’re seeing a large expansion of renewables, as they too are subsidized. 10,000 MW of wind was built last year in tUSA.
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p>I’m ambivalent about nuclear power. On the one hand, it’s quite expensive. On the other hand, it’s about 20% of power generation, and there’s no carbon and no air pollution. Nuclear hasn’t chased out renewables — we’ve had nuclear power long before it was anywhere near efficient to bring renewables online. On the other hand, MW for MW they’re clearly inferior to renewables with respect to cost structure and long term waste.
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p>Renewables are at a disadvantage because they don’t scale quickly. Want to build 1 GW of renewables? That takes a huge number of components, be they 5 MW turbines or PV. You can do it with a single coal or gas or nuclear plant. In many ways, it’s simply easier. That “culture” is one of efficiency. It’s easier to manage a compact physical plant with a single process.
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p>As for your Duke energy example, they wanted two coal fired power plants. They got one, and it was smaller than they wanted — the nuclear power plant came out of that multi-year process. I agree that conservation (through personal action, better building codes, etc) would mitigate though not eliminate the need for new power generation in North Carolina. NC’s wind opportunities aren’t large (though non-zero in the Appalachians), and they’re not great for solar either. Biomass may be their best bet, but that’s got it’s own share of NIMBYism problems. It’s not nuclear and coal that’s chased out renewables in NC, it’s a lack of really cheap renewable opportunities, and NIMBYism w.r.t. mountain peaks. The entire southeast suffers from the same combination of a dislike for gov’t regulation to improve efficiency (or anything else), a relative lack of cost efficient wind or solar, and a culture that demands cheap electricity. Methinks the only way to overcome that set of problems is with federal action — building codes for efficiency, RPS standards (which allow for efficiency to be counted as well as biomass), and so forth. Finally, it’s also a matter of shareholder preference. Duke and Southern are amongst the most obnoxious power companies; their neighbor, FPL, is amongst the best behaved.
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p>I guess this is a long way of writing: you make claims without any strong logical or empirical evidence. Where’s your evidence that nuclear is crowding out renewables and not also fossil fuel power?
The evidence is historical as well as logical.
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p>The old Public Service Company of New Hampshire, back in the day, said they’d love to build some renewables, but “we don’t have the horses for that” because they were building the Seabrook nuke.
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p>This may even have been sincere, as the company went bankrupt shortly afterward.
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p>The dynamic was repeated across the country. Utility executives, already hostile to energy efficiency, used the capacity glut as a giant club against anything that might reduce sales (like efficiency) or compete (such as small-power producers under PURPA).
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p>The institutional hostility to energy efficiency by utilities is well documented and persists to this day in some jurisdictions.
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p>As you point out, once built these big plants become facts on the ground with low operating costs. This makes other resources uneconomic to build (or invest in, in the case of efficiency).
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p>It’s a false economy, however, because the huge capital costs are subsidized, and without the subsidies the nukes would not be built and the energy landscape would be very different.
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p>I do not claim that nuclear electricity never displaces any fossil fuels, which strikes me as unlikely. However, they displace a lot less than your analysis would suggest.
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p>So for a 1000-MW reactor, you should subtract the carbon footprint of that plant (which is not zero, though certainly less than a fossil plant’s), chiefly from the mining, enrichment, and fabrication of fuel, and of construction.
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p>You should subtract the energy efficiency it displaces, virtually all of which would have avoided fossil consumption. Similarly, as utilities use the big projected capacity surpluses to avoid investing in renewables, subtract that capacity as well. What you have left backs out fossil.
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p>In the case of Duke’s nuclear-coal deal, the reactor is enabling 800 MW of coal, which otherwise would not go forward to pump carbon into the skies.
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p>Add this to the above equation and all of that reactor’s carbon-reducing potential may be wiped out. The nuclear component may never be built, and certainly won’t be online for many years, but the coal plant is going forward.
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p>The nub of my argument is that well-meaning people who are grappling with this issue fail to consider the full effect of the proposed subsidies given our economic and regulatory system.
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p>The flaw in your otherwise well-reasoned analysis is precisely that.
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Dear Mr. Lasthorseman,
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p>If someone in your family was gravely ill with heart disease and 97 out of 100 cardiologists said that person urgently needed heart bypass how would you react if we said that that person could not get a heart-bypass because someone like you or Glenn Beck or Sean Hannity told us that it was not a problem?
Thanks for the shout out and encouragement for JK! I’ll make sure he sees this. -roger
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p>Roger Lau
Deputy State Director
Office of US Senator John Kerry