… We have become so concerned about humanity’s slow response to this challenge that we have decided we must clearly set out what we see as the only viable path forward. As scientists we do not take advocacy positions lightly, but we believe the magnitude of climate change now presents an unprecedented moral challenge that compels us to speak out.
… The voluntary measures put on the table at Paris by over 100 nations are a welcome step, but unless there are strong measures to reduce emissions beyond 2030, global emissions would remain at a high level, practically guaranteeing that young people inherit a climate running out of their control. A new and intensified approach is clearly needed.
Everyone agrees that the most urgent component of decarbonisation is a move towards clean energy, and clean electricity in particular. We need affordable, abundant clean energy, but there is no particular reason why we should favour renewable energy over other forms of abundant energy. Indeed, cutting down forests for bioenergy and damming rivers for hydropower – both commonly counted as renewable energy sources – can have terrible environmental consequences.
Nuclear power, particularly next-generation nuclear power with a closed fuel cycle (where spent fuel is reprocessed), is uniquely scalable, and environmentally advantageous. Over the past 50 years, nuclear power stations – by offsetting fossil fuel combustion – have avoided the emission of an estimated 60bn tonnes of carbon dioxide. Nuclear energy can power whole civilisations, and produce waste streams that are trivial compared to the waste produced by fossil fuel combustion. There are technical means to dispose of this small amount of waste safely. However, nuclear does pose unique safety and proliferation concerns that must be addressed with strong and binding international standards and safeguards. Most importantly for climate, nuclear produces no CO2 during power generation.
To solve the climate problem, policy must be based on facts and not on prejudice. The climate system cares about greenhouse gas emissions – not about whether energy comes from renewable power or abundant nuclear power. Some have argued that it is feasible to meet all of our energy needs with renewables. The 100% renewable scenarios downplay or ignore the intermittency issue by making unrealistic technical assumptions, and can contain high levels of biomass and hydroelectric power at the expense of true sustainability. Large amounts of nuclear power would make it much easier for solar and wind to close the energy gap.
The climate issue is too important for us to delude ourselves with wishful thinking. Throwing tools such as nuclear out of the box constrains humanity’s options and makes climate mitigation more likely to fail. We urge an all-of-the-above approach that includes increased investment in renewables combined with an accelerated deployment of new nuclear reactors.
For example, a build rate of 61 new reactors per year could entirely replace current fossil fuel electricity generation by 2050. Accounting for increased global electricity demand driven by population growth and development in poorer countries, which would add another 54 reactors per year, this makes a total requirement of 115 reactors per year to 2050 to entirely decarbonise the global electricity system in this illustrative scenario. … Full article
George Monbiot – columnist with The Guardian newspaper in the UK, and author of Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning. “Atomic energy has just been subjected to one of the harshest of possible tests, and the impact on people and the planet has been small. The crisis at Fukushima has converted me to the cause of nuclear power.”
Tom Wigley – of Climate-Gate infamy, he’s a senior scientist in the Climate and Global Dynamics Division of the University Corporation of Atmospheric Research. “We need nuclear power to solve this problem … people don’t realise just how bad climate change is.”
James Hansen – author of Storms of My Grandchildren.
Barry W Brook – is the Director of Climate Science at Adelaide University, and Sir Hubert Wilkins Chair of Climate Change, is on the board of the Science Council for Global Initiatives and the International Awards Committee of the Global Energy Prize.
Gwyneth Cravens – novelist and journalist, author of Power to Save the World: The Truth About Nuclear Energy.
Ted Nordhaus – Chairman of the Breakthrough Institute, political strategist and author of Break Through, Why We Can’t Leave Saving The Planet To Environmentalists.
Mark Lynas – author of The God Species: How the Planet Can Survive the Age of Humans, also a frequent speaker around the world on climate change science and policy. “Let me be very clear. Without nuclear, the battle against global warming is as good as lost.”
Tom Blees – author of Prescription for the Planet (the seemingly “intractable” problem of nuclear waste is “nothing of the kind”) has “probably done more than anybody to move people to the cause of nuclear power.” Tom also heads the Science Council for Global Initiatives.
Professor Gerry Thomas – of the Imperial College, London, “I am very pro-nuclear as I realise that we have an unwarranted fear of radiation.”
James Lovelock – celebrated father of the Gaia principle.
Fred Pearce – an environment writer with The Guardian newspaper in the UK, and author of The Last Generation: How nature will take her revenge for climate change.
Stewart Brand – a prominent pro-nuclear “environmentalist” and author of Whole Earth Discipline: Why dense cities, nuclear power, transgenic crops, restored wildlands and geoengineering are necessary.
Ken Caldiera – with the Department of Global Ecology, Carnegie Institution, recently co-authored an open letter to the environmental movement urging them to bring their support behind the development of new nuclear power.
Kerry Emmanuel – with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is known for his work on attribution of climate change to hurricane events.
Rachel Pritzker – is the founder and president of the Pritzker Innovation Fund. Rachel currently chairs the advisory board of the Breakthrough Institute.
Suzanne Hobbs-Baker – the brain behind Pop Atomic Studios, an organisation which uses the power of visual and liberal arts to “enrich” the public discussion on atomic energy.
Ed Davey – UK Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, “When I have listened to the arguments of pro-nuclear Liberal Democrats in recent years, the one argument I found increasingly difficult to answer is the climate-change argument, because climate change poses a real and massive danger to our planet. Not keeping a genuinely low-carbon source of electricity as an option looks reckless when we don’t know the future.”
I was reading an interview with Adrian Bejan (worth taking a look at), and I got to musing about his comments regarding the relationship between energy use and per capita income. So I pulled up GapMinder, the world’s best online visualization software. Here’s a first cut at the relationship between energy and income.
Figure 1. Energy use per person (tons of oil equivalent, TOE) versus average income, by country. Colors show geographical regions. Size of the circle indicates population. The US is the large yellow circle at the top right. Canada is the overlapping yellow circle. China is the large red circle, India the large light blue circle. Here’s a link to the live Gapminder graph so you can experiment with it yourself.
Clearly, other than a few outliers, the relationship between energy use and income is quite straightforward. You can’t have one without the other. Well, that’s not quite true, you can have energy without income. You can have (relatively) high energy use without having the corresponding income, plenty of Africa is in that boat. But the reverse is not true—you can’t have high income without high energy use. You need the energy to make the income.
Now, James Hansen is the NASA guy who is leading the charge to stop all forms of cheap energy. Coal is bad, terrible stuff in his world. He calls trains of coal “death trains”. He wants to deny cheap energy to all of those folks in the bottom half of the graph above. Well, actually, he wants to deny access to cheap energy to everyone, but where it hurts is the bottom half of the graph. For example, the World Bank and other international funding agencies, at the urging of folks like Hansen, have been turning down loans for coal plants in developing countries.
But as you can see, if you deny energy to those folks, that is the same as denying them development. Because when there’s less energy, there’s less income. The two go hand in hand. So what James Hansen is advising is that we should take money from the poor … actually he wants to deny them cheap energy, but that means denying them income and the development that accompanies it.
A look at the history of some of the countries is instructive in that regard, to see how the income and the energy use have changed over time. Figure 2 shows the history of some selected countries.
Figure 2. A history of selected countries. Colors now show crude birth rate (births per thousand)
Now, this is showing something very interesting. It may reveal why Hansen thinks he’s doing good. Notice that for countries where people make below say $20,000 of annual income, the only way up is up and to the right … which means that the only way to increase income is to increase energy use. Look at India and China and Brazil and Spain and the Netherlands as examples. (Note also that crude birth rate is tied to increasing income, and that the crude birth rate in the US has dropped by about half since 1960.)
Above that annual income level of ~ $20,000, however something different happens. The countries start to substitute increased energy efficiency for increased energy use. This is reflected in the vertical movement of say the US, where the 2011 per capita energy use is exactly the same as the 1968 per capita energy use. And Canada is using the same energy per person as in 1977 … so let’s take a closer look at the upper right section of the chart. Figure 3 shows an enlargement of just the top right of the chart, displaying more countries.
Figure 3. A closeup of Figure 2, showing more countries. Start date is 1968 for clarity.
Now, this is interesting. Many, perhaps most of these countries show vertical or near vertical movement during the last twenty years or so. And the recent economic crash has caused people to be more conservative about energy use, squeezing more dollars out per ton of oil equivalent.
But that only happens up at the high end of the income spectrum, where people are making above about twenty or even twenty-five thousand dollars per year. You need to have really good technology to make that one work, to produce more income without using more energy. You need to be in what is called a “developed” nation.
When people think “development”, they often think “bulldozers”. But they should think “energy efficiency”, because that is the hallmark of each technological advance—it squeezes more stuff out of less energy. But you have to be in an industrialized, modern society to take advantage of that opportunity.
So this may be the reason for Hansen’s attitude toward energy use. He may not know that most of the world is not in the situation of the US. This may be the reason the he claims that we should curtail energy use by all means possible. He may not see that while the US and industrialized countries can get away with that, in part because we waste a lot of energy and have a lot of both money and technology, the poor and even the less well off of the world have little energy or money to waste.
For those poorer countries and individuals, which make up the overwhelming bulk of the world’s population, a reduction in energy use means a reduction in the standard of living. And the part Hansen and his adherents don’t seem to get is that for most of the world, the standard of living is “barely” … as in barely making ends meet.
As is usual in this world, the situation of the rich and the poor is different, and in this case the break line is high. Twenty grand of income per year is the line dividing those who can take advantage of technology to get more income with the same energy, and the rest, which is most of the world. Most of the world are still among those who must use more energy to increase their income. They don’t have the option the US and the developed nations have. They must increase energy use to increase income.
And when you start jacking up energy prices and discouraging the use of cheap energy sources around the planet, as Hansen and his adherents are doing, the poorest of the poor get shafted. James Hansen is making lots and lots of money. He’s comfortably in the top 1% of the world’s population by income, and he obviously doesn’t give much thought to the rest. We know this because if he thought about the poor he’d realize that while he is mouthing platitudes about how he’s doing his agitation and advocacy for his grandchildren’s world in fifty years, what he’s doing is shafting the poor today in the name of his grandchildren. Of course Hansen is not the first rich white guy to do that, so I suppose I really shouldn’t be surprised, but still …
Increased energy prices, often in the form of taxes and “cap-and-trade” and “renewable standards”, are THE WORLDS MOST REGRESSIVE TAX. Hansen proposes taxing the living daylights out of the poor, but he won’t feel the pain. He can stand a doubling of the gas prices, no problem. But when electricity and gas prices double around the planet, POOR PEOPLE DIE … and Hansen just keeps rolling, he has quarter-million-dollar awards from his friends and a fat government salary and a princely retirement pension you and I paid for, he could care less about increased energy prices. He’s one of the 1%, why should he pay attention to the poor?
Forgive the shouting, but the damn hypocrisy is infuriating, and I’m sick of being nice about it. James Hansen and Michael Mann and Gavin Schmidt and Phil Jones and Peter Gleick and the rest of the un-indicted co-conspirators are a bunch of rich arrogant 1%er jerkwagons who don’t care in the slightest about the poor. Not only that, but they’ve given the finger to the rest of the climate scientists and to the scientific establishment, most of whom have said nothing in protest, and far too many of whom have approved of their malfeasance.
Their patented combination of insolent arrogance and shabby science would be bad enough if that was all they were doing … but they are hurting poor people right now. Their policies are causing harder times for the poor today, as we speak … and they mouth platitudes about how they are saving the poor from some danger they won’t see for fifty years?
If you ask the poor whether they’d rather get shafted for sure today, or possibly get shafted in fifty years, I know what they’d tell you. To me, hurting the poor today under the rubric of saving them in half a century from an unsubstantiated and fanciful danger is moral dishonesty of the first order.
So let me say to all of you folks who claim the world is using too much energy, you have the stick by the wrong end. The world needs to use MORE energy, not less, because there is no other way to get the poor out of poverty. It can’t be done without cheap energy. We need to use more energy to lift people out of bone-crushing poverty, not use less and condemn them to brutal lives. And to do that, energy needs to be cheaper, not more expensive.
Let me be crystal clear, and speak directly to Hansen and other global warming alarmists. Any one of you who pushes for more expensive energyis hurting and impoverishing and killing the poor today. Whether through taxes or cap-and-trade or renewable subsidies or blocking drilling or any other way, increasing energy costs represent a highly regressive tax of the worst kind. And there is no escape at the bottom end, quite the opposite. The poorer you are, the harder it bites.
So please, don’t give us the holier-than-thou high moral ground stance. Spare us the “we’re noble because we are saving the world” BS. When a poor single mother of three living outside Las Vegas has her gas costs double, she has little choice other than to cut out some other essential item, food or doctor visits or whatever … because her budget doesn’t have any of the non-essential items that James Hansen’s budget contains, and she needs the gas to get to work, that’s not optional.
For her, all her money goes to essentials— so if gas costs go up, her kids get less of what they need. You’re not saving the world, far from it. You’re taking food out of kids’ mouths.
You are causing pain and suffering to the poor and acting like your excrement has no odor … but at least there is some good news. People are no longer buying your story. People are realizing that if someone argues for expensive energy, they are anti-human, anti-development, and most of all, without compassion for the poor. They are willing to put the most damaging, regressive, destructive tax imaginable on the poorest people of the planet.
Now those of you advocating for higher energy prices, after reading this, you might still fool the media about what you are doing to the poor. And it’s possible for you to not mention to your co-workers about the real results of your actions. And you could still deceive your friends about the question of the poor, or even your wife or husband.
But by god, you can no longer fool yourself about it. As of now, you know that agitating for more expensive energy for any reason hurts the poor. What you do with that information is up to you … but you can’t ignore it, it will haunt you at 3 AM, and hopefully, it will make you think about the less fortunate folk of our planet and seriously reconsider your actions. Because here’s the deal. Even if CO2 will damage the poor in 50 years, hurting the poor now only makes it worse. If you think there is a problem, then look for a no-regrets solution.
Because if you truly care about the poor, and you are afraid CO2 will increase the bad weather and harm the poor fifty years from now, you owe it to them to find a different response to your fears of CO2, a response that doesn’t hurt the poor today.
In retrospect it can be seen that the 1967 war, the Six Days War, was the turning point in the relationship between the Zionist state of Israel and the Jews of the world (the majority of Jews who prefer to live not in Israel but as citizens of many other nations). Until the 1967 war, and with the exception of a minority of who were politically active, most non-Israeli Jews did not have – how can I put it? – a great empathy with Zionism’s child. Israel was there and, in the sub-consciousness, a refuge of last resort; but the Jewish nationalism it represented had not generated the overtly enthusiastic support of the Jews of the world. The Jews of Israel were in their chosen place and the Jews of the world were in their chosen places. There was not, so to speak, a great feeling of togetherness. At a point David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding father and first prime minister, was so disillusioned by the indifference of world Jewry that he went public with his criticism – not enough Jews were coming to live in Israel.
So how and why did the 1967 war transform the relationship between the Jews of the world and Israel? … continue
This site is provided as a research and reference tool. Although we make every reasonable effort to ensure that the information and data provided at this site are useful, accurate, and current, we cannot guarantee that the information and data provided here will be error-free. By using this site, you assume all responsibility for and risk arising from your use of and reliance upon the contents of this site.
This site and the information available through it do not, and are not intended to constitute legal advice. Should you require legal advice, you should consult your own attorney.
Nothing within this site or linked to by this site constitutes investment advice or medical advice.
Materials accessible from or added to this site by third parties, such as comments posted, are strictly the responsibility of the third party who added such materials or made them accessible and we neither endorse nor undertake to control, monitor, edit or assume responsibility for any such third-party material.
The posting of stories, commentaries, reports, documents and links (embedded or otherwise) on this site does not in any way, shape or form, implied or otherwise, necessarily express or suggest endorsement or support of any of such posted material or parts therein.
The word “alleged” is deemed to occur before the word “fraud.” Since the rule of law still applies. To peasants, at least.
Fair Use
This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more info go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
DMCA Contact
This is information for anyone that wishes to challenge our “fair use” of copyrighted material.
If you are a legal copyright holder or a designated agent for such and you believe that content residing on or accessible through our website infringes a copyright and falls outside the boundaries of “Fair Use”, please send a notice of infringement by contacting atheonews@gmail.com.
We will respond and take necessary action immediately.
If notice is given of an alleged copyright violation we will act expeditiously to remove or disable access to the material(s) in question.
All 3rd party material posted on this website is copyright the respective owners / authors. Aletho News makes no claim of copyright on such material.
Aletho News 