Another two-step

Apocalyptic apathy?

So, does anyone have a name for this manoeuvre, or, alternatively, a defense of this kind of argumentation

Psychologically it sort of makes sense, no? If you’re positing the existence of a massive existential threat, it makes instinctive sense if the only way to save yourself is a massive, life-changing project. You’d feel a bit silly if you said “A ten-mile asteroid is heading for earth! If we do nothing, it will smash into the Indian Ocean, and bring about the end of human life in a fiery apocalypse! But it can be diverted by means of a small structure made of bits of tinfoil, carrier bags and bamboo, and the immediate banning of all electric bass guitars.”

And the paranoid belief in this case is, what, the end of the world? The innate evilness of industrial society?

Maybe it’s a sign of Apocalypse Addiction?

Forgot the apathy part–that kicks in when the air condition-loving armchair revolutionary assumes that everyone else is pretty much the same as he/she is.

Well this was more or less the Bill Barnes line in the Wright symposium, wasn’t it:

https://crookedtimber.org/2013/03/23/envisioning-real-utopias-response-from-bill-barnes/

If we look at timing, motivation etc it is perhaps not so weird as you portray it.

You: If we adopt my sensible measures now, then we can beat climate change with little to no pain.

Hypothetical opponent: True. But electorates now won’t stand for your sensible measures, they are going to plough on with business as usual or worse (cf Tony Abbott). By the time the electorate is so scared it is willing to act (in about 20 years), things will be worse and we’ll need much more radical measures, so we’d better start campaigning for those measures now so that we have enough presence in the debate when they finally wake up.

conalboyle: that is a perfect example of this heroic blindness to simple solutions. Forging a link to a Big Sensitive Problem will derail any possible solution without actually taking responsibility for squandering the opportunity.

The Counterfeit Cassandra Contra Dance?

There’s the old story about the fisherman in distress at sea. He’s about to sink, and he prays for God to save him. A Coast guard ship comes to save him and he tells them, “go away, I’ve got God to protect me.” His fishing boat sinks, and he has to get in his dinghy. Another fishing boat is headed back to the harbor, and they throw him a life line. He throws it back and tells them God will save him. They leave, and then his dinghy is capsized and now he’s just floating in his life jacket. A school of friendly dolphins tries to assist him. He kicks at them and keeps praying for God to save him, so the dolphins leave him to drown. He gets up to Saint Peter’s desk for his assignment to eternal life or damnation. St. Peter looks at his life story, and says, “you didn’t have to die by drowning, you know.” The fisherman says, “I don’t understand. I have been a devout Christian my whole life. Why would God abandon me in my time of greatest need?” St. Peter says, “What are you talking about? He sent you a Coast Guard ship, a helpful fisherman friend, even some dolphins.”

Yes, the paranoid belief is to re-invent the Christian end of the world narrative in secular guise.

I can’t remember the exact quote, but I think Nietzsche says something to the effect that Christians don’t usually act like a rational person who seriously believes that sin will result in an eternity of torment. In a similar manner, it is psychologically possible for someone to prophesy the global warming end of the world while not being prepared to do all that much to avert it.

(In an earlier thread at CT, the global financial crisis got called the “Moral Hazard Apocalypse”, which I kind of liked. One could do a version of John’s dialogue between person B proposing modest improvements in banking regulation, vs person A advocating revolutionary overthrow of the entire Capitalist system).

” True. But electorates now won’t stand for your sensible measures, they are going to plough on with business as usual or worse (cf Tony Abbott). By the time the electorate is so scared it is willing to act (in about 20 years), things will be worse and we’ll need much more radical measures, so we’d better start campaigning for those measures now so that we have enough presence in the debate when they finally wake up.”.

Precisely. Both the OP and the people the OP are arguing against are both right. The OP argues that if we acted right now, together, and made this a number one priority, then we could avert the major effects of climate change with no real pain.

But of course…..that’s not going to happen is it? And we all know this (and before anyone pipes up, yes, we do all KNOW this.) What is going to happen (and again this IS what is going to happen) is precisely nothing (except corporate window dressing) for the next 20 to 40 years until the evidence of looming apocalypse is plain for all to see. And then, yes, we really will have to engage in a WW2 type call to action.

I am perfectly aware that what I am going to say next will mark me out as a complete and total lunatic (as if I didn’t have that reputation already ha ha ha), but nothing is clearer to me than that, assuming nothing is done about the various environmental threats that we are facing (and the associated political and economic threats), then so-called ‘laissez-faire’ ‘free-market’ capitalism is doomed. I know that seems crazy, and I know that the radical left has not been so marginalised since the early 19th century. Nonetheless there you have it. The only possible way to deal with the treats that we will face as the 21st century staggers to its bitter end will be a return to what we saw in the mid-period of the 20th century when we saw a similar crisis in what we laughingly refer to as ‘western civilisation’, democratic control of the economy, meaning (don’t laugh at the back!) a planned economy, mass nationalisation, everything we saw in the 1950s and 1960s EXCEPT Keynesian demand management because this time round the task will be to reduce growth, not expand it, and to increase inefficiency, not increase it (the alleged inefficiencies of nationalised industries will be seen as a positive boon).

As the OP points out all of this is completely unnecessary, and if we are to act now, we could avoid all this.

But we are not going to act now are we?

John, I—don’t think it’s that easy. For one thing, if we make these changes without regulations of CO2 other sources of emissions will pop up. Overall emissions have to be limited somehow. And—are you accounting for population growth? What about other chemical cycles? Carbon is only one of them. There are multiple factors at work, and to get to sustainability they all have to be identified and addressed. I think we are going to have to do more than what you say, and it would be best to try to identify all factors at work, rather than address one and have another take over.

Most importantly, we need to get started. Maybe we really do need something as massive as the apocalyptics suggest, maybe all we need is something as modest as you suggest. (You have read Amory Lovins, right?) But above all we need to commit ourselves to finding a sustainable solution.

Hidari—you are right that capitalism as we know it is coming to its limits. I don’t think that “a planned economy and mass nationalisation” will work as you hope: these things have historically made matters worse, not better. We need something new, and the sooner we start thinking about it, the better.

I’ve been reading Jay Forrester lately and, without agreeing with his entire argument, he makes the excellent point that, when a trend is exponential, everything is fine until just before the end. If something doubles every 20 years and there’s a hard limit, well, it can go for quite a long time…until 20 years before the end and then, boom! Things fall apart in a generation. And, in fact, this is how societies collapse. Everything is fine until just before the end.)

I am haunted by Gregory Bateson’s remark, “If this is your estimate of your relation to nature and you have an advanced technology, your likelihood of survival will be that of a snowball in hell. You will die either of the toxic by-products of your own hate, or, simply, of overpopulation and overgrazing. The raw materials of the world are finite.”

(My somewhat more extended thoughts on this—they are not long—can be read in my 2010 blog post Going Green. It now seems to me naïve in a number of respects, but I think it is still worth a look.)

Cutting vehicle emissions in half won’t help much if you quadruple the number of vehicles. Same story with the air travels. This plan assumes more or less constant world-wide distribution of the standard of living, but that’s likely to change and is changing.

The argument from impossticality? “That’s impossible” becomes “That’s impractical.” The speaker gets the persuasive power of impossibility and the evasive power of impracticality.

26: agree that there’s a definite similarity, but I think that the key difference is that in John’s example the people are saying “we must cut off our legs now to save us having to buy ourselves new shoes in the future” and in your example people are saying “we must cut off YOUR legs now to save US having to buy you new shoes in the future”.

“But we are not going to act now are we?”

It’s unlikely. Pretty much the only way to get to 2100 with an even vaguely acceptable level of global warming is through massive investment in nuclear energy starting immediately (while figuring out how to make real renewables fly). (Which, by the way, will not only slow down global warming, but will result in massive reductions in cancer and cardiopulmonary disease: diesel engine exhaust is one of the nastiest carcinogens there is*. (And burning coal is a really really stupid thing to do.)) But that’s not going to happen.

The problem is that the non-technical types (liberals, hippies) who were on the same page as we technotronic weenies on ozone layer destroying gasses are mostly on the anti-nuke side. Sigh.

So the human race is toast.

*: Cambridge (MA) had electric busses with overhead lines when I was a kid. It was really kewl. The last time I was back in Cambridge, the Harvard Square underground bus terminal was incredibly gross with diesel fumes. And the friggin bus lines are all the same lines they were when I was a kid (50s and 60s). Sigh. Ah, it turns out that some are left.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston-area_trackless_trolleys

The Impossibility of Small Costs … or why I would rather spend $30,000 on a new car than $2000 to fix my old one. And when I plunk down my 30k, it seems like trivial to pay 10% extra for the Convenience and Bling package.

mpowel has a real point. People seem to think if we just make a moral effort to reduce the current emissions -say by twentypercent, then nature should reward us with a stable climate. But this isn’t how nature works in cases where the damage is cumulative. So reductions, as opposed to almost complete sessation of emissions, only change the rate we slide down that slippery slope. But people don’t get it.

Then I’ve gotten into arguments about the merit of attacking the short-term climate gases, like methane -or black-carbon. These would have significant nearterm benefits for modest costs, but do nothing about the longterm trajectory we are on. As a former Buddhist I was familar with a concept called “simultaneity of cause and effect”. Buddhist philosophy assumes a moral universe, for every action we take we will be paid back, and call this process Karma. A man who attains simultaneity, gets immediate feedback as to the effect he is going to get, and will make only good causes. The problem with a slow cumulative problem like global warming, is the bad karma effect is so delayed in time and space from the action that causes it, that it is hard to be motivated -or even to connect the two. Especially given the potent propaganda forces which are telling us, there is no problem. So if we cut the shortterm drivers -but not the long, we see shortterm releif, and may be even less motivated towards solving the longerterm issue.

Being the “dance” is an adversion to the blindingly obvious and simplest answer / solution, can we just call it “Occam’s rejection”?

SusanC@5: I like your analysis. But were they paranoid fantasies if, in fact, they were right in broad outline, if not in specific detail? Sometimes intuition is more reliable than reason, which is one reason why intuition is still trusted.

mpowell@31: “If we get halfway to an emissions target does that cut the damage in half?”

More likely by a factor of 10. If the half brings us back under a tipping point, it could be thousands.

David J. Littleboy@30: the technology is not currently available for deployment; it would take a major development project to update the designs for nuclear plants, you would get the question of which basic technology to use, and it would all have to be done very quickly. Consider that the people who would deploy and operate the technology would be the ones who are currently wrecking the world. This does not sound like a recipe for a successful deployment; quite the opposite.

I remind everyone that we are talking about taking the steps to prevent a (metaphoric) heart attack while the attack is in progress. Yes, we bloody well ought to be doing what we can, but it is too late to be talking, we need to be acting.

The Ben Tre Shuffle (“It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.”)
The other side of the extreme might include a homeopathic Kantianism of sorts with smaller doses of the thing itself having the greatest curative effect.

@ David J. Littleboy 30 and The Raven, on the potential for nuclear power:

Chin up. There is currently massive new nuclear capacity coming on line, with much more to come. Right now 68 reactors are under construction in 13 countries in Asia, Europe North and South America, with dozens more in planning for 2020 and further hundreds by 2030.

The greater reliability and productivity of nuclear power compared to renewables means these new reactors will have an outsized impact on decarbonization. Just the 68 reactors now under construction, with a capacity of about 70 gigawatts and an average capacity factor of 85 percent, will produce 521 terrawatt-hours of low-carbon electricity per year—as much as the world’s entire fleet of wind turbines did last year. And because they are built to last 60-plus years compared to wind and solar’s 20-30 years, they will have a still greater impact over the long term.

Modest regulatory changes could speed up that deployment. Simply including nuclear plants in the same subsidies and portfolio mandates that renewable generators now receive in much of the world would stimulate a lot of additional construction.

We know that nuclear can quickly and comprehensively decarbonize the grid of an industrial economy at a reasonable price, because France did just that, decarbonizing about 90 percent of its grid over 20 years using mostly nuclear and some hydro. Sweden did as well with a 50-50 mix of nuclear and hydro. Nuclear and hydro are a good complement of reliable low-carbon baseload and peaking power.

You’re right that the real barriers to that kind of decisive nuclear rollout are political and ideological, not costs or logistics. Overcoming those barriers will require a vigorous challenge to prevailing anti-nuclear dogmas. That should include, as you do, discussion of the safety and public health benefits of nuclear, which is orders of magnitude safer than the current dominant coal-burning technology. More and more progressives and environmentalists are speaking out about the need to preserve existing reactors, reopen immediately the shuttered Japanese and German plants and expand the already extensive world-wide program of nuclear construction.

I agree with John Quiggin’s larger point here that resolving the climate crisis can be done quickly, at a reasonable cost, without major disruption to economy and society, and in a way that raises global living standards. But to do that we need to use every tool at our disposal—especially nuclear power.

The FOX Trot.

None of this matters! We’re doomed!
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/sep/26/jellyfish-theyre-taking-over/

1) Global warming is not the only resource/environmental/ecological crisis we’re facing. To the contrary, such crises are running rampant. (The oceans are not over-fished because of global warming, etc.). Nor is global warming somehow the supersession/Aufhebung of all the other crises; it’s simply their intensification, (due to the compressed time-scale that defies any natural adaption).

2) If the benefits of any sort of advanced industrial civilization are to be extended to the 85% of the planet’s human population and not merely confined to the current consumption patterns/”standard of living” of the 15% who reside in the “developed” world, then a major re-design of our infra-structure and productive capital, to render it much more energy-and-resource efficient and consonant with the finite “carrying capacity” of the planet must be in the offing, (including transferring such transformed technology to the RoW, bypassing rather than exporting current systems of production). Extending current wasteful production-and-consumption, such as prevails in the “developed” world, would be a sure recipe for the impending catastrophe.

3) A suitably transformed infra-structure and production system, to remain within the bounds of long-run sustainability would entail a massive destruction of the “value” of current capital, both as physical stocks and as financial asset claims laid over the output and revenues of those stocks. (Oil alone would amount to trillions of $, especially if one includes nationalized assets, not just private capital). Without a doubt, incumbents will fiercely resist any such prospect. Oil corps. will never become “green”, (despite BP’s advertizing which surely came to bite them in the ass), because not just their physical capital, but their technical expertise and the incumbent market power are entirely tied up in oil and gas production, which can’t be recuperated otherwise. It’s doubtful that any thing like the required transformation could be achieved “smoothly”, without major financial disruptions, power struggles, and wealth (or claims and entitlements) re-distributions.

4) There is no reason such transformation can’t be achieved within the current horizon of scientific and technological possibilities, actually existent or readily achievable. Where population densities are sufficient, an electrified mass transit system could be constructed to replace the current automobile industrial complex, which would reduce the total energy consumption, (not to mention other resources), by at least 50%. (And it could be highly personalized and optimized, given today’s computer technology, entailing no “inconvenience” and eliminating “externalities”, such as accidents, congestion, and pollution, without waiting upon exotic battery storage technologies). The barriers are far more institutional and political-economic, (i.e. power relations), that actually scientific/technological. The restoration of the public integrity of scientific institutions, independent of incumbent politico-economic interests, to canvas and develop the relevant possibilities is a key step. A carbon tax-and-rebate scheme would be a key first step, though I don’t think it sufficient. A good deal of public investment (and financing) and an indicative industrial planning policy would also be required. (Whether that is possible within the current bounds of capitalism is a matter for debate, though it doesn’t just reduce to the semantics of the word “capitalism” and what one should call such a novel hybrid).

5) There is no reason to conflate current GDP figures and consumption shares with “the standard of living”, let alone the quality of life. Industrial capitalism has historically been fairly effective at increasing the productivity of output, though based on increasing concentration of capital and the need to correspondingly ever expand “markets”. But efficiency in consumption is anathema to its “ethos”. Over-consumption for the sake of over-production is its core contradiction. But there is no reason why gains in productivity shouldn’t be “cashed out” in terms of increased “leisure”, (as mainstream economists insist on calling it), i.e. reduced work-time dedicated to material output and increased time for “freer” and more pro-social activities. But again, that too would entail a transformation and re-distribution of institutional claims and entitlements, “wealth”, and thus power-relations. And perhaps that social pseudo-science, based on methodological individualism and the maximalization of subjective utility preference functions is one of the technologies that needs to be “abolished” and consigned to the junk heap of history.

6) Ways of life and life-style preferences have been transformed numerous times since the advent of industrial capitalism and full-fledged modernity. There is no reason to believe that current practices are set in stone and not amenable to similar change. The only question is whether it can be a matter of “conscious” social choice and coordination and of human responsibility, or whether we are consigned to “blind fate”, by our inability to coordinate and resolve conflicts through publicly reasoned understandings.

We ARE doomed. Geo’s article had a Michael Ignatieff/Syria article in the right sidebar.

@ Raven 45, nuclear is safe—re the likely frequency of nuclear accidents:

“If we deploy nuclear power widely and continue our current safety practices, there will be dozens more [accidents] in this century.”

Given the current observed accident frequency of once every 25 years, we’d have to increase the number of reactors 5-fold to get up to dozens per century.

What that linear scaling assumption leaves out, though, is that nuclear power has a learning curve. The odds of another Chernobyl are much smaller now because 1) they are not building volatile RBMK reactors anymore and 2) they know not not to monkey with the controls that way. The odds of another Fukushima are now much smaller because plant managers know not to put all the emergency generators in the basement where they can get flooded. And indeed the number of major accidents per reactor-year has been dropping sharply over the decades.

But let’s talk worst case.

If you believe the conjectures of the anti-nuclear Union of Concerned Scientists, Chernobyl will eventually cause 27,000 fatal cancers all told, world-wide. (Spread over many decades amid hundreds of millions of other cancers, an effect far too small to see empirically.) Coal-fired power plants by comparison kill a couple hundred thousand people from air pollution every year.

So let’s say we switch to an all-nuclear energy system and, as a result, we have a Chernobyl-scale accident every single year. Then 27,000 lives per year will be lost from the fallout, but 200,000 or so lives will be saved every year from abatement of air pollution. I think that scenario is a ludicrous exaggeration. Accident frequencies will never be that high and, as I noted above, the observed health effects from Chernobyl were drastically smaller than the UCS conjecture; the consensus of health authorities is that the Fukushima radiation will have no observable health effects at all. But even if we assume that worst case, the net result of an all-nuclear world is a huge improvement in public health and safety over the current situation.

As I said above radiation is just not very dangerous, and even big and mythically frequent nuclear spews don’t cause enough exposure to do much harm (or even measurable harm, in most cases).

So Raven, you have nothing to fear from a vast expansion of nuclear power: it’s not going to cause an apocalypse. The more we build, the safer we get.

Dear gods. If we go full-on nuclear we will be building more reactors. Why should there be a limit to the number? (And didn’t we hear this song before, about how someone didn’t expect us to burn all the fossil fuel? I’m sure we did. Wasn’t there some Swede?)

The results of the Chernobyl disaster are hard to study as there is much political opposition to that study, and a lack of funding. Generally, though, when these things are finally tallied, matters are worse than first appearing.

“Short of triggering the clathrate gun, the climate change threat is not existential.” Well, if you don’t mind history turning into something out of the Old Testament, I suppose not.

We are going to have to change long-held, cherished beliefs about our relation to the world we live in. Get on with it, guys.

oh come on. One thread hijacked by nuclear power isn’t enough?

Back to the OP request.

How about the God of Flatland Fallacy? Unlimited movement along certain dimensions deemed feasible and necessary, while a modest movement in a different dimension is impossible.

“We are going to have to change long-held, cherished beliefs about our relation to the world we live in.”

Right. Like the idea that we can blithely burn fossil fuels without killing hundreds of thousands of people a year with cancer, COPD, and the like, and somehow nuclear isn’t worlds better, regardless of climate change issues.

“One thread hijacked by nuclear power isn’t enough?”

Sorry. It’s become a pet peeve of late.

A canticle for Bruce Wilder.

I’ve actually been in an aircraft — even worse, in the cockpit of that aircraft — when all three flight officers fell behind it. Looking back on the experience, what I remember most about it was 1) that I knew instinctively that it was a simple problem of cognition, not a failure of the technology embracing us, 2) that there was very little time, probably not enough, to figure out what had happened and set it right, and 3) that a recently acquired German phrase — die Tücke de Objekts — had a much more general meaning than I’d at first understood.

Fortunately, I survived to marvel at what I’d learned, and at what still looks to me like the most compelling object lesson in divine grace I’m ever likely to experience. I’m well aware that not everyone is so lucky, and that only a passel of fools would want to inflict such a lottery on the entire population of the planet.

If overpopulation and overindustrialization are the source of the problem, then, naturally, if resolved, it will likely be resolved by depopulation and deindustrialization. The only question is: in which proportion.

The “falling behind” analogy assumes the pilot, but there is no pilot. consciousness of individuals does not translate into a consciousness of the civilization, that’s a fallacy, IMO. It does not pilot a plane, it’s wandering around in the dark, bumping at the walls and changing direction, like my robotic vacuum cleaner. If there is a hole ahead, it’ll probably fall into it.

@ The Raven 56, on the Chernobyl tally.

“The results of the Chernobyl disaster are hard to study as there is much political opposition to that study, and a lack of funding. Generally, though, when these things are finally tallied, matters are worse than first appearing.”

No, Raven, Chernobyl is not understudied—quite the contrary. Thousands of scientific papers have been published on its effects and vast sums spent to fund studies by the UN, other international bodies, national governments, universities, etc. I can’t think of any natural or man-made disaster whose consequence have been more intensely studied.

It’s much more common that initial doomsday predictions about some disaster scenario seriously overestimate the final tally of damage. That’s especially true with nuclear power, which is associated with febrile apocalyptic fantasies that ignore the scientific evidence that radiation is simply not very harmful. That scientific consensus is borne out by the three major nuclear accidents, in which hysterical forecast of vast body counts proved to be pure moonshine. At Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and now Fukushima, the health effects of major nuclear spews turned out to be modest to nil.

“Chernobyl was as bad as a nuclear catastrophe can get”

When I was a young bird, I was assured that nothing like Chernobyl and Fukushima could happen, unh-unh, no way. Now that they have happened, I am assured that nothing worse can happen, unh-unh, no way.

John, I’m sorry. I snapped at you. You are of course right about population in this century.

@ adam.smith on thread-jacking by commenting on nuclear power and energy policy.

“Both [posts] end up in debates about nuclear power, mainly because of one person’s multiple and relentless posts (and the inability of other commenters—me very much included—to ignore them).”

Adam, the post on the German elections discussed German energy policy, of which nuclear power is an aspect. So comments on energy policy and nuclear power are relevant there. This post is about how we should approach the problem of decarbonizing the energy supply, so extensive comments on nuclear power are deeply relevant.

I presume you are referring to me when you mention “one person’s multiple and relentless posts.” If you check back you’ll find that I was not the first commenter to broach energy policy or nuclear power on either of the posts. I didn’t start it. I also make a point of not issuing isolated comments, but always responding specifically to prior comments from others. So if others don’t take an interest in the topics I’m commenting on, I don’t continue. I think that’s responsible blogging.

The fact that you and others do respond to my comments, as you acknowledge, indicates that there is interest in discussing energy policy and the comparison between nuclear and renewables. That’s good; it’s an important debate to have.

Sadly. hijacking blog comment threads is the only way the dwindling band of nuclear fans can get a hearing,
Only 68 reactors under construction now? That´s not enough to replace the ones likely to be decommissioned. I bet that very few of the paper ones after that will ever get the green light. The economics are terrible and getting worse every day, as renewables get steadily cheaper. Even geothermal, growing in spite of laughable research spending, is competitive with paper nukes in the USA; and its costs are dropping too.

““I agree with John Quiggin’s larger point here that resolving the climate crisis can be done quickly, at a reasonable cost, without major disruption to economy and society,”

I see no reason to believe this at all. At the very least, we are going to have to change long-held, cherished beliefs about our relation to the world we live in. ”

An odd assertion. For we’ve a rather large report looking into all of this for us. Prepared by the IPCC every few years. Based upon a series of economic models in the SRES.

http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/sres/emission/index.php?idp=0

And if you actually go and read the models you find that the A1 model, roughly a straight line continuation of globalised capitalism, does all sorts of desirable things, like abolish absolute poverty once and for all, hugely reduce global inequality and so on. Why, even the currently destitute peasantry of the world enter the bourgeois pleasures of three squares and a roof over their heads. This is the effect of a $550 trillion global GDP on 7 billion people.

And this is pretty much a straight lie forecast. Economic growth in the 21 st century is pretty much as it was in the 20th. Population dynamics are as we saw them, as countries pass through certain thresholds fertility drops markedly as life spans increase.

Then add in the various technological possibilities. The most important one being the carbon intensity of GDP. And a straight line projection (note, this is without any grand plans, this is just again a rerun of what we saw in the 20th century) from the 20 th cent gives us this as decreasing by 1.3% per annum.

Add in a move away from coal towards solar and nuclear and you get A1T. Which is the second lowest emission scenario of the 40 of them and one in which climate change really isn’t a problem.

JQ’s obviously correct that we can handle climate change without major disruption to society. Because the very report that tells us there is a possibility of a problem also tells us that we can handle it without major disruption.

@ James Wemberly 80, on nuclear constructions rates and economics, and geothermal:

–“68 reactors under construction…not enough to replace the lones likely to be decommissioned.”

James your link here is broken. I do know that most light water reactors could have their 40-year licenses extended for another 20 years—that’s common in the States—and perhaps longer, if political pressures for decommissioning were resisted.

There is of course a much larger, indeed perpetual, “decommissioning crisis” looming for wind and solar, which last just 20-30 years as opposed to new nuclear’s 60-plus years rated service life. All the wind turbines and solar panels built by 2020 will have to be replaced by 2050. If we want a lasting, cumulative contribution to decarbonization, it seems better to build nukes lasting 60 years than wind and solar generators lasting 20-30 years.

–“The economics [of new nuclear] are terrible and getting worse every day, as renewables get steadily cheaper.”

James, when you factor in the 3-4 times greater productivity and 2-3 times greater longevity of the average nuclear kilowatt compared to the average wind and solar kilowatt, nuclear is substantially cheaper. With economies of scale and experience from mass deployment, nuclear construction costs could drop dramatically. In China, for example, where nuclear, wind and solar are all being built at huge scale, nuclear’s cost advantage is clear. New nuclear has a feed-in tariff of 0.43 yuan, while wind gets 0.51-0.61 yuan and solar 0.75-1.15 yuan. That’s for brand-new nuclear; if you count the average costs of nuclear over the many decades of ultra-cheap generation after it pays off its mortgage, the cost advantage over short-lived wind and solar widens much further.

–“Even geothermal…is competitive with paper nukes in the USA; and its costs are dropping too.”

Another broken link. Anyway, I think geothermal is a fantastic low-carbon electricity technology, because it’s reliable and dispatchible. We should build as much of it as we can. Unfortunately, it’s limited to areas with near-surface magma plumes and other geological rarities, so it won’t scale to the degree we need. We need to build massive nuclear capacity in addition to renewables if we want to comprehensively decarbonize the energy supply.

There is little reason to think that 20-30 years is the upper bound for lifetime of new renewable systems, particularly solar PV. There are solar modules manufactured in the late 1970s and early 1980s that are still working fine today.

The unavoidable degradation of the PV junction is a very slow process for monocrystalline silicon cells, on the order of 0.5% relative efficiency loss per year. After 70 years the cell will still perform at 70% of factory rated output (0.995 ** 70). Most solar modules do not retire because of this degradation process, though it can be faster with other materials. Most retire due to gross mechanical damage (accidents, vandalism) or the environmental breakdown of encapsulant and backsheet materials. This can be an autocatalytic process with some materials: ethylene vinyl acetate starts to hydrolyze in hot damp conditions, water permeability increases, released acetate ions raise the conductivity of water, increased ohmic heating and electrolysis cause further damage, and pretty soon there’s deep corrosion to a cell connection or a short circuit that cripples the module.

The good news is that EVA is not the only material available for encapsulation, though it has been one of the most used. Olefins and fluoropolymers are becoming more popular as durable alternatives, and they have much better resistance to water, ultraviolet exposure, and heat. There is every reason to think that modules as well as cells with a practical 70 year working life are possible, have in fact already been installed today (though we can’t identify them certainly for another 70 years). The bad news is that the PV price wars of the last few years have caused some manufacturers to cut corners erratically and without disclosure on encapsulation materials and processes, so that some modules are failing in just a few years.

I would also bet that a fair number of wind turbines remain usable after more than 30 years, particularly ones without gearboxes, though it would surprise me if any made it to 70. Manufacturers are trying to be fairly conservative with their projections, just like the reactor manufacturers were when they estimated 40 year lives.

Tim, the SRES report says, “The SRES scenarios are intended to exclude catastrophic futures.” (sec 4.2.1, box 4-2.) “No disasters” is part of the assumptions of those scenarios, not a conclusion that can be drawn from them.

Now, the second part of the problem here is that we are on track for a 3.5°C to 7.4°C average warming and, as Hansen foresaw, the ice is melting and the seas are rising faster than the the IPCC models predicted. (Scientific American, Dec 2012, “How the IPCC Underestimated Climate Change.”) That level of warming is “incompatible with an organized global community, is likely to be beyond ‘adaptation’, is devastating to the majority of ecosystems, and has a high probability of not being stable.” (Kevin Anderson, Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. There was a whole conference in 2009 in Oxford, 4 Degrees and Beyond. Some of the papers were collected in The Transactions of the Royal Society. The abstracts alone make sobering reading.)

Now, maybe modest mitigation efforts will still be enough. Maybe. But we are not undertaking even those. And the reason, apparently, is that we are not changing our thinking fast enough.

@ John C. Halasz, 85:

“Hot rocks” geothermal doesn’t last very long. When you pump water through the rock to extract the heat, the rock cools down. Heat flow through rock from deep geological heat reservoirs is very slow, so the rock takes decades to “recharge”; you have to keep drilling new holes and building new plants. Maybe it will be feasible someday, but in the meantime we can build nukes.

Umm…http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_geothermal_system

Worstall @82
“a straight lie forecast”

Must be a candidate for the Freudian slip of the year award.

“Now, the second part of the problem here is that we are on track for a 3.5°C to 7.4°C average warming”

That’s a fairly extreme prediction given that climate sensitivity seems to be being massaged, gently, down to 2 oC or a little under.

JQ @96
Yes – as ajay pointed out, the “success” of the US is more by accident than design.

P.S. I think the (cumulated) output gap from the recession is much bigger than 5%.

John Quiggin – what I meant is that growth is slower than normal now, and so the gap compared to the original path has increased.

@ The Raven 89,–is the scientific consensus on the safety of nuclear power credible?:

–Raven, the scientific consensus that Fukushima will have no measurable impact on public health does not come from TEPCO, but from independent research and assessments by the Japanese government, the World Health Organization, the UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Airborne Radiation and many academic experts in radiation epidemiology from around the world. Whether we “trust” TEPCO or not is immaterial.

–“I regard a lot of the research in this area as comparable in credibility to much neo-liberal economics research. So long articles with cites don’t help; the literature has to be cleaned up.”

The scientific consensus that nuclear power is safe, Chernobyls and Fukushimas included, is extremely strong. That’s why NASA climate scientist James Hansen not only thinks it “might work,” as you put it, but that nuclear definitely does work and we should rapidly expand it. He does so not only from global warming concerns but from considerations of public health and safety due to its abatement of lethal air pollution from fossil-fueled power plants. He recently published a peer-reviewed study estimating that nuclear power plants have saved 1.8 million lives net over the last few decades by abating air pollution, and could save 400,000 to 7 million more by 2050. In his view nukes are an immense benefit to public health and safety—a view that is confirmed by a mountain of scientific research.

Raven, you dismiss the scientific consensus that nuclear power is safe on the basis of your intuition that the research is not credible and somehow dirty, so that it must be “cleaned up.” That’s your right, but in doing so, you are taking the same dubious ideological tack as the global warming deniers. They also reject out of hand the scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming on the grounds that it is founded on corrupt “groupthink.” Tragically, the rejection of the scientific consensus by anti-nuclear ideologues has precisely the same real-world effect as the rejectionism of the global warming deniers—it greatly impedes efforts to address the crisis of climate change in a timely fashion.

#110 sounds like someone typing (or more likely copying & pasting) from a script. Why?

Because Raven’s #89 already mentioned James Hansen. He cites Hansen’s support as a reason for him to waver (along with desperation). Yet Will Boisvert churns out his post citing “NASA Scientist James Hansen.” It sounds like something you’d see in an advertisement. Or a talking points memo…

I’m mildly pro-nuke, myself, fwiw. I’d like to see an aggressive pilot program backed by the DoE focusing on the latest designs and, depending on the results, I’d be up for subsidies to help bring them to market, ala what we’re doing with renewables.

Re: Solar panels – well, the ones on my roof will hopefully still work n 20 years, it’s just that they will be producing less than their original output. The warranty is for no more than 1% degredation in capacity per year over 20 years, and as discussed above that’s the cautious estimate – .5%/yr is probably more accurate. The inverter is more of a worry, in that it has a 10-yr warrantee and the contractor warned me that it’s the potential weak link.

Incalculable tail risk.

The modest step of simply including nuclear in the subsidies and portfolio mandates that renewables get could stimulate even more nuclear construction in the US and elsewhere. As the current massive rollout of 70 GW worldwide indicates, new nuclear is one of the most successful decarbonization initiatives around–those reactors now under construction will generate 5 times as much low-carbon electricity every year as all the solar panels now in existence.

Would it? Ohio‘s Alternative Energy Portfolio Standard obliges utilities to provide 25% of electricity from new low-carbon sources by 2025. Half of that must be renewable, the other half can be non-renewable but low carbon technologies like coal power with CCS or nuclear. Let’s modify the rule so that nuclear is eligible for all 25%, and for good measure add the same federal Production Tax Credit that wind gets ($23 per megawatt hour for the first 10 years of production). Ohio is an excellent state to decarbonize because as of 2010 it gets 82% of electricity from coal.

If electric consumption remains flat, Ohio would need another 5 gigawatts of nuclear capacity by 2025 to meet the standard. That’s about 4 AP1000 units. If the costs are the same at Vogtle that’s $28 billion in 4 big chunks or fewer, even bigger chunks. Even with the portfolio standards and the production tax credit, are utilities going to finance reactors? There’s an additional wrinkle: the portfolio standard creeps up every year until 2025, first by half-percentage-point steps and then full percentage point steps. If the reactor build scheduling is the same as at Vogtle then you’re looking at least 5 years where those big chunks of capital are tied up but not actually contributing to your energy portfolio, so in the mean time you pay for each megawatt-hour you miss the portfolio target by; it starts at $45 and can be adjusted upward for inflation but never downward. At 150 terawatt hours per year in Ohio, if suppliers lag the target by one percentage point that’s at least $67,500,000 in penalties annually.

It looks to me like you’re going to have to build a bunch of renewables anyway just to hit the portfolio targets during the years the reactors are under construction. Wind projects come in smaller chunks and with shorter, more predictable schedules. Solar projects are available in even smaller chunks and on shorter notice, though at considerably higher cost per unit of production. If you’re bullish on nuclear it looks like you could start building 2 or 3 reactors immediately, plus renewables in parallel for short term compliance, and stop building renewables as soon as the reactors are operational. Reactors-only is impractical because of those penalties you’ll accrue during the years of falling behind the portfolio standard. Is it wise to commit to 2 or 3 reactors? It depends on how certain you are that the projects will remain on schedule.

Even if you have good project management and deep financial backing, is nuclear the most cost effective way to decarbonize Ohio’s electricity? Large scale wind power in Ohio costs about $55 per megawatt hour, and add another $23 from the PTC for the first 10 years to make it $78 per megawatt hour. The subsidy-included cost of wind is already within the error bars of estimated AP1000 generation costs in the US. The last big argument in favor of nuclear power is that it isn’t unpredictably intermittent like wind, but I’m not sure that is crucial when the portfolio is only expected to provide 25% of electricity.

Finally, let me make it clear that I definitely support nuclear power over coal; I’m looking at various options for weaning off coal rather than considering sticking with the status quo.

@101 “You’ve been reading Planet Gore again.”

James Annan…..

“Some non-accidental factors that are relevant include

* Energy efficiency requirements (notably on lightbulbs)”

From my worm’s eye view of the lighting industry (I supply a vital ingredient for a certain type of bulb) these changes would have happened anyway. Maybe a tad slower but incandescents were on the way out, CFLs were/are a useful interim technology and LEDs are going to take over. Much of the various bans on incandescents strikes me as taking the plaudits for something that was going to happen anyway.