From Claire—we seem to be slightly off-schedule this week. You all did a splendid job yesterday of pretending it was Sunday. May I ask you to keep up the pretense and assume today is Monday? I promise this won’t last more than a week.
Today I’m delighted to introduce Ronald Steenblik, who will moderate our discussion during Energy Week. I should explain that the Cosmopolitan Globalist has a kind of weird juju for attracting exactly the right person at exactly the right time. It’s as if some invisible hand believes in the Cosmopolitan Globalist’s mission and wants us to succeed. The friendly juju is such that the moment I think, “You know, I don’t really know enough about energy to moderate this discussion. We could really use a specialist. Like, someone who used to work for the International Energy Agency and produced the IEA’s first estimates of subsidies to European and Japanese coal producers. Or maybe someone who oversaw the OECD’s inventory of government support to fossil fuels. Someone like that. But where would we find that person, and how would we persuade him to moderate this forum? As a volunteer, at that?”
No sooner did I finish that thought when the DM flashed across my transom. “Hi Claire. My name’s Ronald Steenblik, and I … ”
Now that’s some weird juju, no?
As you can imagine, we are delighted—beyond delighted—that Mr. Steenblik has joined us and so glad that he’s agreed to moderate this discussion. In fact, because he knows so much more than I do about energy, I’ve asked him to take full command of the ship during Energy Week.1
We’ll forward any mail you send us about Energy Week directly to him (use the usual address). You can also reach him on Twitter at @RonSteenblik.
We very warmly welcome all of your contributions, comments, thoughts, and questions—indeed, they’re the very point of this exercise—but please don’t tax his patience by sending him rude emails like you send to me. We simply can’t afford to lose him. (I’m talking to you, Nancy. If the newsletter is too long for you, you don’t have to read it.)
Ladies and Gentlemen, I present your host: Ronald Steenblik. (Cue the round of applause.)
By Ronald Steenblik, Paris
Greetings fellow Cosmopolitan Globalists. My name is Ronald Steenblik, and Claire Berlinski has asked me to moderate this debate.
Since I’ve not posted here before, let me summarize my bona fides. I began working in energy when I was 19, delivering 50-kilogram steel bottles of liquid propane gas in Miami. Now I’m Nonresident Senior Fellow at the International Institute for Sustainable Development.
In between, I worked for a municipal power plant in northern Florida; had summer internships in graduate school at two US National Laboratories, Brookhaven and Argonne; worked as a young professional in the US Energy Information Administration; then headed to the Netherlands on a Rotary Foundation Scholarship, where I worked under the direction of the late Professor Peter Odell, a British economic geographer and expert on North Sea oil and natural gas.
In 1987, I joined the International Energy Agency here in Paris and produced their first estimates of subsidies to European and Japanese coal producers. I then shifted to trade policy at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. In 2016, I took a sabbatical to serve as the Director of Research for the Global Subsidies Initiative of the International Institute for Sustainable Development, where I wrote and oversaw almost a dozen studies on subsidies to biofuels. After returning to the OECD, I supported the G20’s efforts to phase out subsidies to fossil fuels, oversaw the creation of the OECD’s Inventory of Government Support to Fossil Fuels, and chaired the first six peer reviews of G20 members’ fossil-fuel subsidy reform efforts. Since retiring, I’ve been writing about fossil fuel subsidy numbers, trade, and the environment.
My role in this debate is to play the neutral arbiter. I hope, too, to remind people of history. There are reasons, dating back to the 1970s, for the world’s heavy reliance on coal; there are reasons for the widely varying views about natural gas and nuclear power; and reasons, too, for the way rich and poor nations have divided the responsibility for putting the brakes on greenhouse gas emissions.
All of our readers are welcome—indeed, encouraged—to participate in this debate about the central question:
Omnibus perpensis, what’s the best way to provide energy for the globe’s 7.9 billion people?
We’ll be running excellent essays about fossil fuels, nuclear power, and green tech; we’ll be taking all questions from our readers—as well as submissions, should they wish to write at length; and at the end of it, we’ll wrap it up with a Grand Cosmopolicast Debate, followed by the announcement of a winner.
Among the essays in the queue is one by Adam Garfinkle, a member of the editorial board of American Purpose, explaining why former US President Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on climate change wasn’t the calamity that climate activists around the world insisted it was. By extension, he asks whether it makes any difference that President Biden has rejoined it.
For more than 40 years, nuclear power has frightened people, even though it’s the world’s best and most scalable source of clean energy. Robert Zubrin, author of the recent book, The Case for Space: How the Revolution in Spaceflight Opens Up a Future of Limitless Possibility, will make the climate case for nuclear power. In addition, Geoff Marcy, an American astronomer, backs him up, arguing nuclear power should be a major component in the electrical portfolio of developing countries, enabling them to raise their standard of living with a reliable, carbon-free source of electricity.
Casey Handmer, however, a physicist and software engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, will offer a Minority Report. He argues nuclear has already lost the market to solar.
Midweek, Alexander Hurst and Benjamin Wolf discuss Europe’s Greens: Are they the political future? Are their proposals any good? If they take power, can they govern? Could their worldview even supersede liberalism and global capitalism?
Next Gareth Lewis, a geologist and 30-year veteran of the oil and gas industry, spells out the unstated assumptions inherent to the vision of a green energy transition powered by renewables, and asks whether these assumptions are correct.
On the business side of things, the Cosmopolitan Globalist’s Editor-in-Chief Vivek Y. Kelkar will file a piece examining key concepts in the corporate world’s philosophy of climate change.
Finally, turning to geopolitics, our subscriber Alan Potkin, a professor at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Northern Illinois University, shines a light on the shady connections between Myanmar’s armed forces and the country’s gas projects. Their outputs are destined for export to neighboring countries, and the Tatmadaw stands to obtain a lucrative cut.
From Claire—I’m delighted, too, to announce that the Cosmopolitan Globalists’ new resident climate expert will contribute. Dr. X, as we’ll call him for now, is a distinguished scientist who works on the mathematical modeling and computational simulation of ice flows and their interactions with the ocean and atmosphere. He’s also one of my old, dear friends, and just the smartest guy ever. Whatever he says about the climate, I’d totally trust it. (When last I asked him, about twenty years ago, how worried we should be, he said, “I’m not sure. The science is really hard.”)
I asked him if he would be kind enough to join the discussion this week to ensure none of us inadvertently descends into scientific illiteracy—since frankly, I wouldn’t know. This was his response:
I’d be honored to serve as a resident climate expert for the Cosmopolitan Globalist. I’d prefer to stay anonymous, at least for now, and to advise behind the scenes. It sounds like you’d be happy with short notes to the effect that Essay A is scientifically sound, Essay B makes some good points but neglects a key counterargument, and Essay C is rubbish. There probably will be areas where my knowledge is sketchy, but usually I know where to look things up.
It’s surprisingly challenging, as a climate scientist, to make oneself useful at anything other than science. Many people, maybe most, who work on climate mitigation and adaptation don’t need to know more science than would fit in a PowerPoint presentation. So it’s good to be asked to go deeper than that.
At the same time, life is full and I don’t want to over-promise. So let’s start with Energy Week and see how it goes.
I appreciate your attachment to the aims and ideals of the Enlightenment.
I hope very much that Dr. X will find the discussion so stimulating that he emerges from his occultation. Failing that, the Cosmopolitan Globalist is—always—impressed by good arguments, unimpressed by credentials. If Dr. X’s arguments are sound, they will speak for themselves absent his name; if they are not, no name and no fame can save him. Not here, anyway. (But they’ll be sound. Dr. X simply would not make an invalid argument, no less one that is unsound. Trust me: He’s the real deal.)
Welcome, Dr. X! So pleased to have you!
Back to Ron—We hope you enjoy the ride. If you have any issue that you wish particularly to see addressed, or a question about energy or climate change, please add them in the comments section, below.
In other words, he’ll do all the work. I’ll meanwhile devote the week to giving myself pedicures and playing Scrabble online. Have fun, Ron!
There have been a couple of items that feel missing from this discussion.
1. PV solar is not PV solar -- as obtuse as that sounds what it means is that you cannot generalize about the cost per unit of energy from PV solar panels. It is completely dependent on the climate where the panels are installed. We have very strong real world data on this.
In Germany they produce vast amounts of Solar energy for a few hours a day during the mid-summer months and very little at all during the winter. Nothing at night and then it ramps to mid-day and declines into the evening. Its a temperate climate with a lot of weather and the weather is highly variable. Although Solar can produce MOST of Germany's electricity needs during the day during the summer, about 80% of the time it produces close to zero electricity (nights, winter and bad weather days).
On the other hand, US PV solar installations in the Mojave Desert in CA and NV can produce electricy 8-12 hours a day year round. Winter is less than summer, but there is still a large amount of reliable electricity during that period. This area has very few weather events.
So, when talking about the value of solar you need to factor this in. You rarely hear this discussion.
2) Queuing models are real -- if you rely on electric generation that is intermittent and not very predictable... you will have problems.
In the US, there have been mandates for wind and solar power in most states. This causes a set of queuing issues. Generally, nuclear and hydro power are added to the grid first to meet current needs. They are hard to turn off and on and if its on and you choose not to use it, it is wasted. The grid managers then add wind and solar to meet the government mandates. The remaining needs are met by filling in mostly coal and gas.
The impact of this is to make coal and gas generation less economically efficient. Those plants go away. Because they are running at far below capacity they lose money (and their owners are corporations, not governments). Nonetheless you still need them because of the intermittent nature of wind and solar.
It is not that easy to ramp gas and coal, particularly coal. There has been a movement to implement "peakers" which are gas plants designed to ramp quickly. However during the past winter you saw what can happen when the wind just stops blowing. Texas in the US gets quite a bit of its electricity during the winter from wind. At the point where the wind stopped blowing as a cold front blew in, wind production was very dominant. It had caused most of the gas plants to be idled. They could not ramp fast enough and you had a mess. No..the gas generation systems were not impacted by the cold. It was because they were not operating that it was hard to restart them.
Its hard to maintain your other electric generation capabilities at an economically eroded state when you heavily subsidize wind and solar and prioritize them at the expense of the other sources.
3. Solar production has not been advancing as fast as the media presentation would make it seem. After several decades of subsidies, PV solar is still only a bit more than 2% of US electricity production. Wind is doing better. Its about 8%.
If solar is so great and its cheaper than other alternatives and we mandate it, why is it so hard to get it off the ground? Its because the data that tells you this is theoretical and is not real world experience. 80% of the time its idle in temperate zones. Maybe 60% in a place like the Mojave Desert.
4. Nuclear costs are hard to estimate -- they are overstated. The reason is that they are intrinsically tied up in regulation. You can regulate an industry out of existence. You can also litigate it out of existence. This happens a lot in the US. The cost of nuclear in the US has a very large constituent litigation and regulation component. Plants often get started and never completed because they spend 1-2 decades in litigation around the specifics of regulations.
The same thing happened with vaccines in the US. A vaccine could have a net huge social value, but if there were a small number of cases of problems (or perceived problems) they would be litigated to death. No one wanted to be in the business. The US created a "vaccine court", actually not a court at all, that deals with vaccine claims and limits liabilities. The current batch of Covid vaccines would never have happened if the old rules were in place.
I am not suggesting that there should not be regulations for nuclear power, but that there needs to be a more balanced approach.
The lack of new nuclear plants has led to another problem. The US was once a leader in building safe nuclear power plants. In fact the locality where I grew up was ground zero for nuclear power engineering -- Westinghouse Electric. That is all gone. The US no longer knows how to build nuclear plants... we have to go offshore for capability.
If we want to have a zero emission energy grid then nuclear needs to be a larger part and that means rethinking how it can be implemented more easily.
5. Hydro is a great source of zero emission electricity. The US gets about 7% of its electricity from hydro. We have added virtually no new hydro capacity in 50 years.
Is there no more hydro capacity in the US? I do not believe that.
6. There is no utility level electric storage capacity on the horizon. Some people here are saying this... if it was feasible it would be underway now. Part of the issue is that the amount of raw materials needed to create the batteries for both electric cars, utility level storage and consumer devices is vast. It would leave the few countries where the raw materials are mined as environmental disasters.
It takes 500,000 gallons of water to mine a ton of lithium. The primary sources of lithium are Argentina, Chile and Bolivia in salt flats in those countries. These locations are also mostly deserts... what is the cost of getting enough water there to mine the Lithium? What happens with the polluted water? Often into the groundwater.
Cobalt is mostly in the Democratic Republic of the the Congo...already an environmental disaster mixed with a heavy component of child labor.
The amount of lithium, cobalt and other minerals you need to make all cars electric and to produce electricity storage at utility grade levels is orders of magnitude larger than current production. That is not something that you can blithely ignore... in the real world it is an insurmountable problem for the foreseeable future.
+++++++
If you really want to move toward zero emissions then you need to rethink the overall strategy. The current strategy of PV solar and wind is not producing anything like the needed levels of electricity for current needs, much less the needs generated by converting to electric vehicles. Its just producing an inefficient grid. I have often wondered if Germany's strategy is to make electricity so expensive that people just use very little of it. They charge 3x the residential rate of the US.
We are not even having a real discussion about whether zero emissions is a real need. Anyone suggesting otherwise is just cancelled these days. So I will not go there, but that is the real discussion we should be having.
Great topic and I am impressed with the quality of the responses. Hope I dont sound like a crank.
I am an engineer in the nuclear industry. For the last ten years I have been reading all I can about climate change. I am going to state a series of observations and look forward to them being either corrected or validated.
1. There appears to be global warming taking place, at least in the Northern Hemisphere. Not so clear in the South.
2. The conventional wisdom is that GHGs are causing it, primarily CO2, methane, nitrous oxide and water vapour. But other causes are possible. The sun’s activity or a change in ocean currents could also explain it. (Dr Ian Clarke, a researcher of Paleoclimatology at U of Ottawa, states there is a very good correlation between the sun’s solar energy and global temperatures. He also states that as temperatures increase, the oceans degas CO2, causing increased levels in the atmosphere. So, temperature may drive CO2, not the reverse. CO2 is not a thermostat that controls temperatures. And increased levels of CO2 from human activities may well have beneficial effects.)
3. What is clear is that predicting the effects of all the factors on climate is extremely difficult and the climate models require assumptions and simplifications. So far, the models have not been verified by empirical observations of the climate.
4. Activists claim, and the media repeats ad nauseum, that global warming is causing:
a. Increased forest fires
b. Droughts and floods
c. Increased frequency and intensity of tropical storms
d. Rising oceans to the extent that inhabited areas will be underwater.
e. Polar bears, the poster child for global warming, to struggle to survive in an Arctic without sea ice cover.
f. Myriad other ills which the media breathlessly reports, including racial inequities.
5. The Canadian Forest Service reports that the incidence of forest fires is lower than they have ever been. They show a steady decline over the last 50 years. I suspect if records are consulted, the forest fires in California, Australia, and Brazil, and in less reported Namibia, are all within historical norms.
6. There has been no increase in either droughts or floods in Canada.
7. A meteorologist from Environment Canada forwarded me a Science Brief News report dated March 2021, stating that due to the increased water temperature, models predicted that tropical storms would be bigger and possibly more frequent, and concluded that tropical storms would get bigger. However, included were quotes from the IPCC report stating that since 1900, no trend of increasing frequency or intensity has been observed. So, the models are not validated by empirical results.
8. Oceans have been rising at a rate of about 1 mm per year since 1860 and it is not increasing. In any case, these rates are very difficult to determine because continents rise and fall, and as temperatures change, the volume of water changes.
9. Susan Crockford, a zoologist at the University of Victoria who has been studying wildlife in the Arctic for 30 years, does not believe polar bears are in danger, and Inuit researchers agree. In fact, overall, their numbers are increasing.
10. Judith Curry, an American climatologist has debunked many of the claims of climate activists and is horrified at the lack of rigour in so much climate research.
11. CO2 levels in the atmosphere have risen to about 400 ppm, higher than they have been in recent history. This has no effect on animal life, and greenhouses sometimes increase CO2 levels to 2000 ppm to encourage plant life.
12. Millions of years ago CO2 levels were as high as 2000 ppm. Where did it go? It was consumed by plants and became one of the components of plant and animal life, and ended up captured as carboniferous rock, coal, oil and natural gas, all of which abound. Once CO2 levels reach about 130 ppm, plants struggle to survive. That would be the end of life on earth. Is it possible that putting CO2 back into the atmosphere is a good thing, regardless of any effect on the temperature?
13. History tells us that starting about 800 AD, the Vikings sailed across the North Atlantic in open boats, and settled in Greenland. They raised crops and cattle. At about the same time, grapes were being grown in England to make wine. This was the Medieval Warm Period, well documented. About 1200 AD, the weather grew colder. By about 1600, the Vikings had been wiped out of Greenland, by the Inuit, the cold and the lack of support from home. About 1630, Samuel Pepys’ diary records bitterly cold winters and the Thames froze. This was the Mini-ice Age. It has been warming ever since. The Roman empire reached its peak at a time of very warm temperatures. In travels in Ireland, I visited the site of an ancient agrarian culture, the Ceide Fields, from about 5000 BC. It thrived during a period of very warm temperatures.
14. But let’s assume we have anthropogenic climate change and CO2 needs to be reduced. What would be the impact of net zero carbon? In the developed West, we might be able to achieve this with huge disruption to our economies and our environment. There is not enough land for the necessary windmills and solar panels to power our economy. (See Bill Gates on this.) Nuclear is an option, but the number of plants that need to be built in the next 9 years (to reach 2030 targets) cannot be built in time, and require huge amounts of concrete and steel. Electric cars would reduce smog, but have their own environmental waste. (Note that coal can be burned very cleanly now, except for CO2.) Concrete and steel production? Huge emissions. Presumably, only flights to Climate Change Conferences would be permitted.
15. What about the developing world? The progress made in these countries is due to cheap energy, and the cheapest energy is coal. To deny them access to fossil fuels is to send them back to the Stone Age. Nuclear power plants are technically challenging to build and operate. They require sophisticated systems of education, regulation and quality assurance. Accidents happen in developed countries. Does anyone see nuclear power plants in 3rd world countries presenting the risk of terrorism, accidents or the proliferation of nuclear weapons?
16. The Chinese, the Indians and other Asian and African nations pay lip service to the efforts to control global warming in the hopes that money will flow to them, while they continue to invest in coal, oil and gas infrastructure because they need to feed their people and develop as fast at they can. The Chinese of course are world leaders in the manufacture of solar panels, which they gleefully sell to the West.
17. According to Patricia Adams of Probe International, China is desperate to secure long term supplies of oil and gas, hence its militarization of the South China Sea. Its only secure form of energy is coal, which accounts for 58% of its consumption. China built 38.4 Gigawatts of coal power last year and another 247 Gigawatts is planned. Chinese climate targets are pure propaganda.
18. Bjorn Lomborg, who accepts anthropogenetic warming, states that even if all the Paris commitments were met, which they will not be, it would only affect global temperatures by a fraction of a degree. And in a list of existential threats to humans and to the planet, global warming does not even make the top ten.
19. So why has the world gone crazy? Why do so many believe global warming is an existential threat? Nigel Lawson, former Chancellor of the Exchequer of the UK, says politicians love it. They cannot cure crime in the streets, poverty, homelessness, drug addiction, the potential for nuclear war, or prevent pandemics, but hey!! We will solve Global Warming! We will be heroes, and by the time we are shown to be wrong, or to have failed, we will be gone.
20. And why has it become so politized? So many people on the Left, Obama, John Kerry, Al Gore, the American Guru of Global Warming Michael Mann, academics and environmental activists, believe Capitalism is running amok, causing inequity and all manner of social ills. The existential threat of global warming fits so well with their view of the world. Governments must take control. Most of them have forgotten that their livelihood depends on the taxes from people who mine, farm, manufacture, construct and extract fossil fuels. Odd that the environment in the West is in better shape then it has been in centuries, and environmental degradation is most severe in former Communist countries, where governments have been in control.
21. Technically, we don’t know how to control the climate. If we did, politically I do not see the world agreeing to take whatever action might be required. And economically, the proposed solutions would be a catastrophe.
22. The only action we should be taking is to make our economies strong enough to be able to adapt to whatever changes come our way.