Editorial: Greens’ Approach To Carbon Is All Wrong

The late James V. Swift, a Waterways Journal columnist, et al, for 60 years, called the environmental movement a religion whose followers cast doubts on scientific findings that challenge their beliefs.

We’ve learned from experience—mostly as a result of environmental legislation passed in the 1970s—that common sense is too often ignored. We see the results of pseudo environmental solutions. We witness little success at high cost. (We shouldn’t confuse sound conservation with solutions that ignore scientific findings.)

Today we are privy to more environmental preachments than ever. Unfortunately, the broad dissemination of good solid science findings is lacking. It is difficult for laymen to know which information is correct if reporting is lopsided.

Obviously, we cannot dictate what readers believe. But we can open the door to scientific findings that show why the present approach to managing carbon emissions is costly and wrong. We provide below choice statements from a presentation written by Peter W. Huber, a Manhattan Institute senior fellow and the coauthor, most recently, of The Bottomless Well. It contains his arguments during the Intelligence Squared U.S. debate in January. Maybe we can convince readers to examine the entire eight-page presentation, which can be found at www.city-journal.org/2009/19_2_carbon.html.

A key issue is carbon-sinking, a phenomenon that involves capturing the carbon emissions from the atmosphere.

Huber tells us, “Green plants currently pump 15 to 20 times as much carbon out of the atmosphere as humanity releases into it…North America, however, is currently sinking almost two-thirds of its carbon emissions back into prairies and forests that were originally leveled in the 1800s but are now recovering…Beyond that, weather and the oceans naturally sink about one-fifth of total fossil-fuel emissions.” Oceans also sequester carbons.

Huber said carbon emissions are an inescapable fact of the 21st century, and if we are serious about doing something about them, we should work to sequester carbon after it is burned. One approach, he says is to improve land use, “which can lead directly and quickly to greater prosperity. If…we persist in building green bridges to nowhere, we will make things worse, not better.” The wrong approach, he said, can cost the earth and accelerate its ruin at the same time.

Some information Huber presents is startling. China is adding 100 gigawatts of coal-fired electrical capacity a year. “That’s another whole United State’ worth of coal consumption added every three years.” He said the rest of the developing world is on a similar path.

Eighty percent of humanity desperately needs cheap energy. “We rich people can’t stop the world’s 5 billion poor from burning the couple trillion tons of cheap carbon that they have within easy reach. We can’t even make any durable dent in global emissions—because emissions from the developing world are growing too fast, because the other 80 percent of humanity desperately needs cheap energy, and because we and they are now part of the same global economy.”

Huber says 10 countries ruled by nasty people have control of 80 percent of the world’s oil reserves. Poor countries are sitting on the next biggest carbon source—nearly a trillion tons of cheap, easily accessible coal. They will keep using it unless they find something cheaper, and they won’t in the foreseeable future.

The price of coal used to generate electricity is under 3 cents per kilowatt hour. No carbon-free fuel or technology is even close, Huber says. A 50-story-high windmill produces “a piddling 2 to 3 megawatts. A jumbo jet needs 100 megawatts to get off the ground.”

To produce the amount of energy required by New York City would require 50,000 of these windmills scattered across the state to be sure you always hit a windy spot. Huber said engineers have pursued for decades technologies to reduce the cost of wind and solar power. While the price of components have fallen, “…there is no serious prospect of costs plummeting and performance soaring…Even if solar cells themselves were free, solar power would remain very expensive because of the huge structures and support systems required to extract large amounts of electricity from a source so weak that it takes hours to deliver a tan.”

The answer, Huber says, is nuclear power, which years of experience have shown to be safe. One danger is that delayed construction will raise the upfront costs of new plants so high that they will be unaffordable.

A disturbing conclusion is that if we try to control carbon (with the carbon tax?) we will eventually drive industry to nations where cheap energy is available, because industry needs cheap energy. It will have accomplished nothing more than making our own country poorer while increasing the quality of life in others that will gain the industry and jobs.

We have all read arguments from those who are pushing for carbon controls. But reading Huber’s article is enlightening and can lead us to further investigation of the carbon issue.

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