| | The following is an excerpt from a lecture by Dr. Keith Lockitch presented at U.C. Berkeley on September 25, 2008. Dr. Lockitch holds a PhD in theoretical physics from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee and has conducted postdoctoral research in relativistic astrophysics at the University of Illinois and at Pennsylvania State University. I thought the excerpt worth posting, because it presents information rarely heard or considered in the global-warming debates:
"World energy consumption today is massively dominated by carbon-based fuels. More than 86% of the world’s energy comes from burning oil, coal and natural gas. And releasing carbon dioxide is not incidental to the production of fossil fuel energy. The energy comes from mechanical reactions of oxygen combining with hydrocarbons to form CO2 and water. So, in a sense, more than 86% of the world’s energy comes from the process of creating carbon dioxide. So, there’s a fundamental clash between our use of energy and all the life-and-death benefits that it provides us and this goal of restricting carbon emissions. Now, what the proponents of these policies tell us is that we just have to find new ways or producing energy that don’t emit carbon dioxide. So what new ways do they have in mind?
"Well, if 86% of our energy comes from fossil fuels, what about the rest? Data on world energy consumption can be found from the Energy Information Administration (EIA). That 86% figure comes from the EIA’s assessment of energy production in 2005. The actual number they give is 86.3%. Now according to the same assessments, 6.3% of the world’s energy in 2005 was produced by hydroelectric generation and another 6% by nuclear. Now hydro and nuclear do not produce significant amounts of carbon dioxide, but these are not the energy sources that most carbon reduction advocates have in mind.
"Both of these are vehemently and relentlessly opposed by environmentalists: hydro, because they oppose the fact that it involves enormous reshaping of water ways (the damns and the lakes they create, you know, massively alter nature); nuclear, primarily because of baseless fears about safety and nuclear waste and so on. Greenpeace, for example, calls nuclear energy a false solution to global warming.
"Okay, if you add up the numbers we have so far, 86.3, 6.3 and 6, we find that about 98.6% of the world’s energy comes from sources that environmentalists oppose and that are not regarded as acceptable sources of energy. Now, we’re constantly told that there’s this green energy revolution just around the corner. So where is this green energy revolution supposed to come from? Well, apparently, it’s going to be conjured up magically out of the remaining 1.4% of renewable energy sources – solar, wind, biofuels and so on. Now, the fact is, there’s a reason those renewable sources made up just 1.4% of energy production in 2005, and the reason is that they are not practical sources of energy. Despite decades of research and billions of dollars in government subsidies, these forms of energy are nowhere close to being realistic alternatives.
"For one thing, the energy carried by sunlight and wind is not concentrated enough. It’s too diffuse and spread out. And to see that, just consider some basic numbers here. So, for example, a typical modern wind turbine generates about 1 megawatt of electricity. Now compare that to a typical coal-fired power plant, which generates about 1,000 megawatts of electricity. So to produce the same amount of power as one coal-fired plant, it would take about 1,000 wind turbines. And the land area that 1,000 turbines occupies is about 40,000 acres. So, to collect and concentrate the same amount of energy produced by just one coal-fired power plant, you would have to take 1,000 windmills and spread them out over 40,000 acres. And solar energy has the same problem. Basically, the aerial power density is just too low.
"Now more than 50% of the electricity produced in the U.S. is generated by coal. There are approximately 600 coal-fired power plants in the U.S. So, say you wanted to replace all of these coal-powered plants with wind farms. Well, you’d need roughly 600,000 turbines, and this would occupy a land area larger than the state of Arizona – the sixth largest state in the Union.
Now I think it’s also worth mentioning that currently there’s less than 20,000 megawatts of wind generated capacity currently installed in the U.S. So, all the wind turbines built and installed today with all the subsidies and incentives thrown at the industry is less than 20,000 megawatts. And the largest number of turbines ever installed in one year in the U.S. was just over 3,000. And remember, we’re comparing it to 600,000 turbines.
"Now, the other problem with these forms of energy is that they’re intermittent sources of energy, which means they don’t provide the stable power that our electric infrastructure needs. You know, solar and wind are great until the sun sets or the clouds roll in or the wind dies. And this is not a trivial problem. Germany gets about 7% of its electricity from wind power, and in Christmas 2006, the wind in the North Sea died down completely and the sudden drop in power nearly brought down the entire electric grid for the whole country. It almost blacked out the entire country. So, the notion that we’re somehow going to completely transform our entire global energy infrastructure to be based entirely on diffuse, unstable impractical sources of energy is simply nonsense. This is not a serious proposition. The reality is that what a drastic reduction in our carbon emissions actually means necessarily is a drastic reduction in our use of energy, and a drastic reduction in our use of energy necessarily means a major blow to industrial civilization and to all of our lives.
"Now, to get an idea of what this might be like – what this would mean – let me give you a few more facts and figures. It turns out that you can actually identify a fairly close relationship between economic growth and carbon dioxide emissions. Europe has been keeping emissions data for two decades now following the Kyoto Protocol, and what it suggests is that there is a direct relationship between carbon emissions and economic progress. Between 1990 and 2005, European countries such as Spain, Greece, Ireland and Portugal enjoyed strong economic growth. So, these were sort of less developed countries that spent the ‘90s catching up to their more developed neighbors. Spain, for example, experienced a growth in GDP of more than 50% over that period. And over the same period, the growth in carbon dioxide emissions was around 53% in these countries.
"Now other countries in Europe, such as France and England did not grow nearly as rapidly. These are already highly developed nations, and over this time, their economies grew at a much smaller, sort of normal rate. And over that time frame – from 1990 to 2005 – their carbon emissions grew by around 4%.
"Now, I’m not saying that this is a completely rigorous, tight statistical correlation, but there’s clearly an important connection between economic growth and carbon emissions. And the causal connection between CO2 and GDP is a lot clearer than the supposed connection that exists in the atmosphere between, you know, temperature anomalies and marginal changes in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. I mean, there’s no question that the production of CO2 that releases the energy that’s used to create wealth and expand economic activity is related to economic growth in this way. So rapid economic growth is closely tied to rapid growth in carbon emissions, and moderate economic growth is closely tied to moderate growth in carbon emissions.
"And you see it going the other way as well. From 1991 to 1993, Europe was hit hard by a recession. There was a big economic downturn, and the carbon dioxide data shows that during this two-year period, the carbon emissions dropped by 4%. Now a 4% decline in the economy is bad enough, but think about the fact that when America went through the Great Depression, it experienced a 30% drop in GDP between 1929 and 1933. And this is often referred to as the worst economic disaster of the 20th Century, which was a period of widespread misery and suffering.
"Now consider the fact that we’re contemplating policies aimed at reducing carbon emissions, not by 30% but by 80 to 90%. A corresponding drop in GDP on that scale would be absolutely catastrophic. I mean, it would make the Great Depression look like some kind of party. It’s hard to imagine the utter devastation that this would inflict on people’s lives."
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