Possible good news on energy and renewable energy....
Today's post: Wednesday, 5-26-2010
We need an 80% reduction in fossil fuel use by 2050 to avoid the worst global warming effects. And, practically speaking, we need to also double our electricity generation and double the useful work done per unit of electricity & other energy sources as well during that same time to have a decent economy.
At some point, the oil that we’ve been using to power much of our economy will begin to run low enough that our world economy will shrink due to lack of supply or excessive costs or both.
And, once the demand for oil picks up again with the apparent economic recovery or supply begins to plateau or drop, the prices will again go back up. That will cause more hard times economically unless we have enough alternative sources of energy to turn to.
Further, it’s extremely clear that the most supported and economically beneficial solution to add energy that does not use oil nor burn fossil fuels to release more CO2 into air that already has too much is to build massive amounts of new renewable energy production, particularly those that generate electricity & to dramatically increase energy efficiency and reduce the amount of energy that is now wasted.
And, of those, the more important long range solution is to build massive amounts of new renewable energy generation.
Today’s post:
Last Sunday, 5-23-2010, the San Francisco Chronicle ran a story with some extremely good news about energy and renewable energy.
It was titled, “Solar can lead us away from environmental catastrophes.”
Tony Seba, an author who wrote a book titled, “Solar Trillions—7 Market and Investment Opportunities in the Emerging Clean-Energy Economy” wrote it.
He points out that accidents like the recent massive oil spill in the Gulf tend to happen from time to time despite supposedly having preventive measures in place. And, he notes this could easily happen with increasing nuclear power as well as with offshore drilling.
He then goes on to say that going to all electric cars and can sharply reduce the need for oil from environmentally risky sources while getting electricity from solar can similarly sharply the need for more nuclear power where accidents could also be catastrophic.
(I’m a bit less bearish on offshore drilling and a lot less bearish about nuclear power. The good news is that they CAN be done safely. The bad news is that paying up for that safety and paying for the safety measures to be reliably maintained makes them much less affordable; & ONLY IF that’s done, should they be allowed at all.)
He points out that electric cars cost five times less to maintain than cars that burn oil. So, if their batteries can hold enough electricity and the car and the batteries cost the same or less as cars burning gasoline, electrics will take over the market. He says they will cost the same by 2020 and enough less to make gasoline powered cars obsolete by 2030.
Since advances in battery technology already in the works and economies of scale as more electric cars are sold are occurring , he may be correct.
He then says that he expects the cost of solar generated electricity to drop “80 to 90 percent in the next decade. This means that by 2020, unsubsidized solar power will be cheaper than subsidized coal, oil and nuclear.”
He gives some evidence in each of these two areas, electric cars and solar, that suggest these events are actually happening.
And, he notes that a large solar thermal plant being built by BrightSource Energy here in California “will generate more solar power than all the photovoltaic panels installed in North America last year.”
In reading his article, I found it very nice indeed to read good news for once.
There is some evidence he could be correct. He lists some of it in his article and may list a good bit more in his book.
Here are some other reasons he might be correct that were not in his article.
Between the rest of Southern California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, and part of West Texas, we could easily build another 20 or 30 large solar thermal plants.
And, though it’s not often in the press yet, we could easily build another 100 to 150 large solar thermal plants in Mexico. It turns out that Mexico has about five times the potential for solar thermal that the Southwestern United States does. (Doing that could create so many jobs in Mexico, it would solve 90% of the immigration problem from just this one thing.)
The solar thermal company with the best technology that is most modular and easy to deploy quickly was called Ausra. Now the French energy company, AREVA has bought Ausra and renamed it AREVA Solar. They plan to use their deep pockets to sharply increase the number of solar thermal plants around the world. And, I think they will.
Last year, California, there was a banner year for installing solar photovoltaic power. Because of its relatively low cost incentive system, Germany with far less incoming solar than California installed over NINE times as much solar last year. Soon, California may have a comparable incentive system.
So, as all these trends go forward at the same time, electric cars and both kinds of solar energy will begin to cost less than gasoline cars and more polluting forms of energy do today.
When that much money is to be made, the transition after that will happen MUCH faster.
Nor is that all. The Kuwaiti’s recently predicted peak oil for 2014 – just 4 years from now. So oil will soon cost far more than it does now and supplies may drop. In addition to that, at some point there will be some tax or financial penalty attached to releasing CO2 and more effort made to ask coal and oil producers to pay the full costs of their fuels by requiring their work to be safer, less polluting, and have less environmental impact.
So, not only will electric cars cost less to buy and operate and solar electricity will cost far less, gasoline and electricity from fossil fuels and nuclear will cost more than they do now.
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
EPA regulation of carbon emissions IS needed but so is some offshore oil....
Today's post: Wednesday, 5-19-2010
We need an 80% reduction in fossil fuel use by 2050 to avoid the worst global warming effects. And, practically speaking, we need to also double our electricity generation and double the useful work done per unit of electricity & other energy sources as well during that same time to have a decent economy.
At some point, the oil that we’ve been using to power much of our economy will begin to run low enough that our world economy will shrink due to lack of supply or excessive costs or both.
And, once the demand for oil picks up again with the apparent economic recovery or supply begins to plateau or drop, the prices will again go back up. That will cause more hard times economically unless we have enough alternative sources of energy to turn to.
Further, it’s extremely clear that the most supported and economically beneficial solution to add energy that does not use oil nor burn fossil fuels to release more CO2 into air that already has too much is to build massive amounts of new renewable energy production, particularly those that generate electricity & to dramatically increase energy efficiency and reduce the amount of energy that is now wasted.
And, of those, the more important long range solution is to build massive amounts of new renewable energy generation.
Today’s post:
Two current energy issues concern me.
1. I just sent this to both of the Senators for my state, California.:
Please Vote Against S.J. Res 26 and Any Similar Proposals.
Big Oil allies in Congress, led by Senator Murkowski from Alaska, are trying to block EPA from enforcing the Clean Air Act to reduce pollution from the Oil and Coal industries.
Now that Kuwaiti scientists have predicted peak oil by 2014 & evidence accumulates that we may have already burned more fossil fuels and added more CO2 to Earth’s atmosphere than is safe, gradually beginning to take action to price our use of oil and coal accordingly makes sense. So does gradually increasing the standards for mileage for vehicles powered by gasoline or diesel fuel.
These things also begin to increase the energy independence of the United States by decreasing our dependence on oil from outside the United States.
Please vote against Senator Murkowski's resolution to challenge the EPA's authority to reduce global warming pollution.
2. Unfortunately, we do not yet have 50 to 100 times as much electricity being generated from clean sources such as solar photovoltaic, solar thermal, wind, geothermal, and some more nuclear power.
We also do not yet have a third of the cars on the road powered by electicity only. We also do not yet have another third or more of the cars on the road powered by plug-in hybrids.
And, we do not yet have wide distribution of cost effective sources of biofuels that supply more energy in use than it takes to make and transport them.
I’ve posted almost every week saying we badly need to put all these things in place as fast as is humanly possible. But it has not happened yet.
Lastly, the United States now uses more oil than we get from sources inside the United States.
This state of affairs decreases the energy independence of the United States because of our dependence on oil from outside the United States.
This has a severe and growing economic penalty as the dollars to pay for this outside oil leave the United States. And, it funds political regimes that often do not like the United States. So it sharply lowers our national security to allow this to continue.
Since the methods to deal with this I prefer and think we absolutely must have to survive economically have not yet been put in place, I believe we need to think about making some effort to keep any solutions we already have operating until these better solutions are put in place.
Clearly the technology, reliability engineering, needed routine maintenance, and governmental oversight of each of those were all severely lacking when the recent offshore drilling disaster happened.
Adding more offshore drilling has already been cancelled in many places in reaction to this.
This is certainly understandable due to the damage already seen and the damage likely to occur in the next year from this super massive oil spill.
But the real problem is that we will be in real hurt economically and in terms of our national security if we shut down the offshore drilling we already have. And, particularly if we can trade more offshore drilling for effective support for the better solutions we so desperately need, it may even make sense to support more.
But, it’s also extremely clear that it is unsafe to do these things without all the things being in place that were NOT in place recently before this disaster happened because they were not in place.
So, I think it’s imperative that each of these things must be put in place quickly and aggressively. And, each of them must be well done.
The size and capacity of blowout preventers for offshore rigs over high capacity oil fields that far underneath the sea must be about triple that of the one that failed recently.
The reliability engineering to ensure that they work when needed must be a good bit better and more thorough and have more parts than happened in this case.
And, the maintenance and checking protocols to be sure all the parts of the fail safe systems are still working must be carried out on schedule and done right 100 % of the time.
The oil companies, their suppliers of this equipment, and other oil industry stake-holders must begin voluntarily to show they can do these things AND to begin putting them in place in every offshore drilling rig they operate anywhere.
I’ve not seen evidence for that yet.
The good news is that there does seem to be some progress on increasing the government oversight and how good it is to help ensure these things are done.
But the fact is, for now, we need that oil for our economy and national security. Doing those effective and preventive things is the right choice.
Turning off existing offshore oil and turning off any increase in offshore drilling at all are the wrong choices it seems to me.
We need offshore oil now. But we also need to start doing it safely! Clearly we have not been doing so.
Today's post: Wednesday, 5-19-2010
We need an 80% reduction in fossil fuel use by 2050 to avoid the worst global warming effects. And, practically speaking, we need to also double our electricity generation and double the useful work done per unit of electricity & other energy sources as well during that same time to have a decent economy.
At some point, the oil that we’ve been using to power much of our economy will begin to run low enough that our world economy will shrink due to lack of supply or excessive costs or both.
And, once the demand for oil picks up again with the apparent economic recovery or supply begins to plateau or drop, the prices will again go back up. That will cause more hard times economically unless we have enough alternative sources of energy to turn to.
Further, it’s extremely clear that the most supported and economically beneficial solution to add energy that does not use oil nor burn fossil fuels to release more CO2 into air that already has too much is to build massive amounts of new renewable energy production, particularly those that generate electricity & to dramatically increase energy efficiency and reduce the amount of energy that is now wasted.
And, of those, the more important long range solution is to build massive amounts of new renewable energy generation.
Today’s post:
Two current energy issues concern me.
1. I just sent this to both of the Senators for my state, California.:
Please Vote Against S.J. Res 26 and Any Similar Proposals.
Big Oil allies in Congress, led by Senator Murkowski from Alaska, are trying to block EPA from enforcing the Clean Air Act to reduce pollution from the Oil and Coal industries.
Now that Kuwaiti scientists have predicted peak oil by 2014 & evidence accumulates that we may have already burned more fossil fuels and added more CO2 to Earth’s atmosphere than is safe, gradually beginning to take action to price our use of oil and coal accordingly makes sense. So does gradually increasing the standards for mileage for vehicles powered by gasoline or diesel fuel.
These things also begin to increase the energy independence of the United States by decreasing our dependence on oil from outside the United States.
Please vote against Senator Murkowski's resolution to challenge the EPA's authority to reduce global warming pollution.
2. Unfortunately, we do not yet have 50 to 100 times as much electricity being generated from clean sources such as solar photovoltaic, solar thermal, wind, geothermal, and some more nuclear power.
We also do not yet have a third of the cars on the road powered by electicity only. We also do not yet have another third or more of the cars on the road powered by plug-in hybrids.
And, we do not yet have wide distribution of cost effective sources of biofuels that supply more energy in use than it takes to make and transport them.
I’ve posted almost every week saying we badly need to put all these things in place as fast as is humanly possible. But it has not happened yet.
Lastly, the United States now uses more oil than we get from sources inside the United States.
This state of affairs decreases the energy independence of the United States because of our dependence on oil from outside the United States.
This has a severe and growing economic penalty as the dollars to pay for this outside oil leave the United States. And, it funds political regimes that often do not like the United States. So it sharply lowers our national security to allow this to continue.
Since the methods to deal with this I prefer and think we absolutely must have to survive economically have not yet been put in place, I believe we need to think about making some effort to keep any solutions we already have operating until these better solutions are put in place.
Clearly the technology, reliability engineering, needed routine maintenance, and governmental oversight of each of those were all severely lacking when the recent offshore drilling disaster happened.
Adding more offshore drilling has already been cancelled in many places in reaction to this.
This is certainly understandable due to the damage already seen and the damage likely to occur in the next year from this super massive oil spill.
But the real problem is that we will be in real hurt economically and in terms of our national security if we shut down the offshore drilling we already have. And, particularly if we can trade more offshore drilling for effective support for the better solutions we so desperately need, it may even make sense to support more.
But, it’s also extremely clear that it is unsafe to do these things without all the things being in place that were NOT in place recently before this disaster happened because they were not in place.
So, I think it’s imperative that each of these things must be put in place quickly and aggressively. And, each of them must be well done.
The size and capacity of blowout preventers for offshore rigs over high capacity oil fields that far underneath the sea must be about triple that of the one that failed recently.
The reliability engineering to ensure that they work when needed must be a good bit better and more thorough and have more parts than happened in this case.
And, the maintenance and checking protocols to be sure all the parts of the fail safe systems are still working must be carried out on schedule and done right 100 % of the time.
The oil companies, their suppliers of this equipment, and other oil industry stake-holders must begin voluntarily to show they can do these things AND to begin putting them in place in every offshore drilling rig they operate anywhere.
I’ve not seen evidence for that yet.
The good news is that there does seem to be some progress on increasing the government oversight and how good it is to help ensure these things are done.
But the fact is, for now, we need that oil for our economy and national security. Doing those effective and preventive things is the right choice.
Turning off existing offshore oil and turning off any increase in offshore drilling at all are the wrong choices it seems to me.
We need offshore oil now. But we also need to start doing it safely! Clearly we have not been doing so.
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Why vote NO on the Texas oil company proposition to delay renewable energy....
Today's post: Wednesday, 5-12-2010
We need an 80% reduction in fossil fuel use by 2050 to avoid the worst global warming effects. And, practically speaking, we need to also double our electricity generation and double the useful work done per unit of electricity & other energy sources as well during that same time to have a decent economy.
At some point, the oil that we’ve been using to power much of our economy will begin to run low enough that our world economy will shrink due to lack of supply or excessive costs or both.
And, once the demand for oil picks up again with the apparent economic recovery or supply begins to plateau or drop, the prices will again go back up. That will cause more hard times economically unless we have enough alternative sources of energy to turn to.
Further, it’s extremely clear that the most supported and economically beneficial solution to add energy that does not use oil nor burn fossil fuels to release more CO2 into air that already has too much is to build massive amounts of new renewable energy production, particularly those that generate electricity & to dramatically increase energy efficiency and reduce the amount of energy that is now wasted.
And, of those, the more important long range solution is to build massive amounts of new renewable energy generation.
Today’s post:
In last week’s post of my effort to add to possible future California Senator Tom Campbell’s energy policy I included that he should come out against the Texas oil company’s proposition to the California policy that is now set to create sharp but still modest increases in how much renewable energy is built in California.
Since this policy will also increase THEIR costs, their clear purpose in sponsoring this is to save their own short term profits by telling California voters to delay both the increase in their costs AND the planned increase in renewable energy here.
This past Monday, 5-10-2010, the San Francisco Chronicle had an article on this issue titled, “Business leaders split on bid to delay AB32.”
The article makes it quite clear that there are two issues involved.
The first issue is the most critical one though the second is a sufficient reason to vote no.
1. One of the business people they interviewed summarized the key issue very well. “….Andy Ball, president of Webcor Builders in San Mateo,” said this: “ “ Our days of Cheap hydrocarbon fuel are ending whether we like it or not. It may be painful now, but every year we wait is going to create more pain downstream.” “
This is the key issue but is NOT put strongly enough! The more pain is a LOT more pain!
The three points this comment leaves out are that:
The amount of pain the current renewable energy plan will cause Californians is modest. (It’s somewhat greater for the oil companies. But it likely will only cut their profits some & will not cause them an actual loss.)
The delay before even more pain sets in if this delay proposition is passed will likely be less than two years in my judgment.
And, the really scary part is that the more pain if we delay is NOT 15 % more costs, it’s likely to become 400% more costs or more and may even cause our economy to collapse.
In California and the United States, we depend almost entirely on gasoline and diesel fuel to transport people to work and to transport everything we buy and eat.
But the world is about to produce LESS of the petroleum these fuels are made from. Worse, the world-wide demand for this oil is rising and the population of the world is rising.
Due to peak oil predicted by well-informed Kuwaiti scientists recently to occur in 2014 combined with population growth and hopefully a world-wide economic recovery, petroleum will both double and redouble in price and begin becoming less and less available.
Do you remember the sudden run up in gasoline prices just before they helped trigger the current recession?
Unless we build a lot more renewable sources of electricity, use more plug-in hybrid and electric cars and make much more biofuels at reasonable cost, in California we will have $10 a gallon gasoline or more within 10 years.
We can have slightly cheaper gasoline and utility bills in the short run but dramatically higher gasoline and utility bills within about five to 10 years.
Or we can have gasoline and utility bills go up 2 to 6 % now but stop going up nearly so much after that depending on how California votes on this issue.
Then after that, California’s economy will just hold together as the world runs out of oil because we have enough renewable energy developed here OR our economy will collapse because we didn’t keep a policy to have it built when we had the chance.
The only economy the Texas oil companies sponsoring this proposition care about is their own.
2. The second point is that keeping California’s renewable energy standards will create jobs here if we keep these standards in place. If we fail to do so, most of these new jobs will not be created here.
The clean energy economy has produced jobs over the last year or two in California even as some of their expected bank funding disappeared and the rest of the economy LOST jobs
It seems to me, as I hope it does to you, that during a recession keeping a policy that creates new California jobs soon and protecting our economy from running out of affordable energy later, is dramatically MORE important than holding down short term gasoline or utility rates just slightly.
California is one of the world centers for innovation in clean and renewable energy. Vote in this proposition and many of these kinds of jobs and the money in this field will go to Germany and China that could have gone here to increase California’s stature in this critically important area.
This will NOT help California’s economy. It will HARM California’s economy instead.
The only economy the Texas oil companies sponsoring this proposition care about is their own.
One of the supporters of this proposition, said that California is losing manufacturing jobs and implies that this will worsen if the proposition is not passed. To put it bluntly, he couldn’t be more wrong.
It will not influence the main causes of this loss in manufacturing jobs. (His belief that it would do so is incorrect in my view.) In fact, it will prevent manufacturing jobs in clean energy companies in California from being created. Worse, since it will help ensure HIGHER gasoline and diesel costs within 5 to 10 years, it will cost all kinds of jobs here including manufacturing jobs in other industries.
3. There is also the third issue. Intentional deception by the Texas oil companies who wrote the proposition.
Some of the supporters say that this is “just” an attempt to cut Californians a short break in having slightly higher costs while we are in a recession.
It’s NOT. Not even close. It’s an attempt by the oil companies sponsoring it to delay a hit to their profits indefinitely -- to forever if they can manage it.
If it really was what these people say it was, it would indeed be a short delay.
The bill would read something like when there was general agreement that the recession has ended in the rest of the country and California’s unemployment rate dropped below 10 % for three consecutive months, the delay would stop.
Read the proposition for yourself. It would take several quarters of an unemployment rate of less than 5.5% to turn off the delay.
The oil companies know that the big run up in oil prices coming soon will likely prevent that from happening in the foreseeable future or maybe ever happening unless we remake our energy economy to not rely on oil.
The only economy the Texas oil companies sponsoring this proposition care about is their own.
Why make the big run-up in oil prices worse to save the Texas oil companies a few bucks of profit?
Why turn off creating renewable energy jobs in California?
Why increase the risk California’s economy will collapse as oil begins to run out?
Why indeed!!
Vote NO on this proposition!
Today's post: Wednesday, 5-12-2010
We need an 80% reduction in fossil fuel use by 2050 to avoid the worst global warming effects. And, practically speaking, we need to also double our electricity generation and double the useful work done per unit of electricity & other energy sources as well during that same time to have a decent economy.
At some point, the oil that we’ve been using to power much of our economy will begin to run low enough that our world economy will shrink due to lack of supply or excessive costs or both.
And, once the demand for oil picks up again with the apparent economic recovery or supply begins to plateau or drop, the prices will again go back up. That will cause more hard times economically unless we have enough alternative sources of energy to turn to.
Further, it’s extremely clear that the most supported and economically beneficial solution to add energy that does not use oil nor burn fossil fuels to release more CO2 into air that already has too much is to build massive amounts of new renewable energy production, particularly those that generate electricity & to dramatically increase energy efficiency and reduce the amount of energy that is now wasted.
And, of those, the more important long range solution is to build massive amounts of new renewable energy generation.
Today’s post:
In last week’s post of my effort to add to possible future California Senator Tom Campbell’s energy policy I included that he should come out against the Texas oil company’s proposition to the California policy that is now set to create sharp but still modest increases in how much renewable energy is built in California.
Since this policy will also increase THEIR costs, their clear purpose in sponsoring this is to save their own short term profits by telling California voters to delay both the increase in their costs AND the planned increase in renewable energy here.
This past Monday, 5-10-2010, the San Francisco Chronicle had an article on this issue titled, “Business leaders split on bid to delay AB32.”
The article makes it quite clear that there are two issues involved.
The first issue is the most critical one though the second is a sufficient reason to vote no.
1. One of the business people they interviewed summarized the key issue very well. “….Andy Ball, president of Webcor Builders in San Mateo,” said this: “ “ Our days of Cheap hydrocarbon fuel are ending whether we like it or not. It may be painful now, but every year we wait is going to create more pain downstream.” “
This is the key issue but is NOT put strongly enough! The more pain is a LOT more pain!
The three points this comment leaves out are that:
The amount of pain the current renewable energy plan will cause Californians is modest. (It’s somewhat greater for the oil companies. But it likely will only cut their profits some & will not cause them an actual loss.)
The delay before even more pain sets in if this delay proposition is passed will likely be less than two years in my judgment.
And, the really scary part is that the more pain if we delay is NOT 15 % more costs, it’s likely to become 400% more costs or more and may even cause our economy to collapse.
In California and the United States, we depend almost entirely on gasoline and diesel fuel to transport people to work and to transport everything we buy and eat.
But the world is about to produce LESS of the petroleum these fuels are made from. Worse, the world-wide demand for this oil is rising and the population of the world is rising.
Due to peak oil predicted by well-informed Kuwaiti scientists recently to occur in 2014 combined with population growth and hopefully a world-wide economic recovery, petroleum will both double and redouble in price and begin becoming less and less available.
Do you remember the sudden run up in gasoline prices just before they helped trigger the current recession?
Unless we build a lot more renewable sources of electricity, use more plug-in hybrid and electric cars and make much more biofuels at reasonable cost, in California we will have $10 a gallon gasoline or more within 10 years.
We can have slightly cheaper gasoline and utility bills in the short run but dramatically higher gasoline and utility bills within about five to 10 years.
Or we can have gasoline and utility bills go up 2 to 6 % now but stop going up nearly so much after that depending on how California votes on this issue.
Then after that, California’s economy will just hold together as the world runs out of oil because we have enough renewable energy developed here OR our economy will collapse because we didn’t keep a policy to have it built when we had the chance.
The only economy the Texas oil companies sponsoring this proposition care about is their own.
2. The second point is that keeping California’s renewable energy standards will create jobs here if we keep these standards in place. If we fail to do so, most of these new jobs will not be created here.
The clean energy economy has produced jobs over the last year or two in California even as some of their expected bank funding disappeared and the rest of the economy LOST jobs
It seems to me, as I hope it does to you, that during a recession keeping a policy that creates new California jobs soon and protecting our economy from running out of affordable energy later, is dramatically MORE important than holding down short term gasoline or utility rates just slightly.
California is one of the world centers for innovation in clean and renewable energy. Vote in this proposition and many of these kinds of jobs and the money in this field will go to Germany and China that could have gone here to increase California’s stature in this critically important area.
This will NOT help California’s economy. It will HARM California’s economy instead.
The only economy the Texas oil companies sponsoring this proposition care about is their own.
One of the supporters of this proposition, said that California is losing manufacturing jobs and implies that this will worsen if the proposition is not passed. To put it bluntly, he couldn’t be more wrong.
It will not influence the main causes of this loss in manufacturing jobs. (His belief that it would do so is incorrect in my view.) In fact, it will prevent manufacturing jobs in clean energy companies in California from being created. Worse, since it will help ensure HIGHER gasoline and diesel costs within 5 to 10 years, it will cost all kinds of jobs here including manufacturing jobs in other industries.
3. There is also the third issue. Intentional deception by the Texas oil companies who wrote the proposition.
Some of the supporters say that this is “just” an attempt to cut Californians a short break in having slightly higher costs while we are in a recession.
It’s NOT. Not even close. It’s an attempt by the oil companies sponsoring it to delay a hit to their profits indefinitely -- to forever if they can manage it.
If it really was what these people say it was, it would indeed be a short delay.
The bill would read something like when there was general agreement that the recession has ended in the rest of the country and California’s unemployment rate dropped below 10 % for three consecutive months, the delay would stop.
Read the proposition for yourself. It would take several quarters of an unemployment rate of less than 5.5% to turn off the delay.
The oil companies know that the big run up in oil prices coming soon will likely prevent that from happening in the foreseeable future or maybe ever happening unless we remake our energy economy to not rely on oil.
The only economy the Texas oil companies sponsoring this proposition care about is their own.
Why make the big run-up in oil prices worse to save the Texas oil companies a few bucks of profit?
Why turn off creating renewable energy jobs in California?
Why increase the risk California’s economy will collapse as oil begins to run out?
Why indeed!!
Vote NO on this proposition!
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
My analysis & message for Tom Campbell running to be a senator from California on his energy policy....
Today's post: Wednesday, 5-5-2010
We need an 80% reduction in fossil fuel use by 2050 to avoid the worst global warming effects. And, practically speaking, we need to also double our electricity generation and double the useful work done per unit of electricity & other energy sources as well during that same time to have a decent economy.
At some point, the oil that we’ve been using to power much of our economy will begin to run low enough that our world economy will shrink due to lack of supply or excessive costs or both.
And, once the demand for oil picks up again with the apparent economic recovery or supply begins to plateau or drop, the prices will again go back up. That will cause more hard times economically unless we have enough alternative sources of energy to turn to.
Further, it’s extremely clear that the most supported and economically beneficial solution to add energy that does not use oil nor burn fossil fuels to release more CO2 into air that already has too much is to build massive amounts of new renewable energy production, particularly those that generate electricity & to dramatically increase energy efficiency and reduce the amount of energy that is now wasted.
And, of those, the more important long range solution is to build massive amounts of new renewable energy generation.
Today’s post:
Tom Campbell is running to be the senator from California and hopes to be elected even running against Barbara Boxer who has been strong backer of clean and renewable energy.
Tom has three points in his favor.
He is extremely intelligent and reasonable and well informed.
He favors a strong economy and mostly has policies likely to create one, notably that he favors cutting the capital gains tax which favors the kind of innovative companies we need to have a strong economy and which are plentiful in California.
His stated energy policy is miles and miles better than the kind of uninformed or worse policies of many of our local California conservative Republicans.
However, I’d like it to be much better to help him be the Republican candidate as he is a very, very competent man and would likely do a mostly good job if elected. But even more important, I think his policy needs to be a lot better in case he IS elected.
I supported him for US Congress once and emailed him my comments on his currently stated energy policy.:
Your current stated energy policy:
Energy policy must support job and economic growth.
Energy costs now exceed labor costs in many of the manufacturing plants in America. Automation from the last century is now ubiquitous and requires competitive energy costs.
Technology is changing both the transportation and the generation side of energy. From nothing a decade ago, biofuels are now powering more than 8 percent of our transportation needs; this must grow along with other technologies such as those used in electric vehicles so that our falling demand for foreign oil can continue reducing our reliance on expensive imports.
On the electricity front, our current lowest cost provider - nuclear - must be re-introduced. Wind can also play a competitive role.
Recent large finds of domestic natural gas must be developed as do nascent programs in solar, fuel cells, and fusion technology.
Not bad!
But to raise all the money you could now from the technology executives and venture capitalists who support clean energy, to get enough moderate but well informed voters to have a chance against Barbara Boxer, and to do the job I personally would like to see you do if elected, you need a much stronger and more developed policy.
1. At the University of California at Berkeley my individual major was creating beneficial social change. While studying for that I discovered two things.
a) The technology used in the economy forces changes in the society; and the beliefs in the society change what technology tends to be developed.
b) There is close to a one to one correlation between the amount of energy in productive use and the size of the economy.
That last one has HUGE implications.
In a very real sense, ONLY an energy policy that causes more safe and reliable energy to be available at reasonable cost and one that increases the efficiency with which we use it will grow our economy and create jobs.
If you want to increase jobs and build a strong economy at all well, this must be done well. It is the most critical and important economic policy imaginable.
We do NOT yet have such an energy policy in the United States.
The energy we get now from fossil fuels is not safe.
Coal mining is not now safely run or responsibly mined to avoid harming the communities where it’s mined. Though it’s unfortunate, it now seems that offshore drilling for oil is not safe. Coal, petroleum, and natural gas still tend to create all three kinds of air pollution when burned: particulates, spreading of toxic chemicals such as mercury, and oxides of Nitrogen. The United States economy still depends on petroleum and is now importing it in ways that put our national security at risk.
The energy we get now from fossil fuels about to become extremely unreliable and too unsafe and expensive to use besides.
Due to peak oil predicted by well-informed Kuwaiti scientists recently to occur in 2014 combined with population growth and hopefully a world wide economic recovery, petroleum will both double and redouble in price and begin becoming less and less available.
Most atmospheric scientists are saying that life and agriculture as we now know them are already at risk from the global warming already caused by the CO2 humans have been releasing from burning fossil fuels. This too will soon create huge and not previously needed costs to just compensate. It also suggests we need to release far less CO2 into the air world wide than we have been to survive. (No effective way to grow food or severely disrupted food supplies have destroyed human civilizations before in history.)
To put it bluntly, we are NOT ready for this. And, we aren’t making progress fast enough. So we are in the most grave danger of economic collapse as these effects worsen.
Many voters really don’t yet know this set of things. But the energy policy of a candidate is the most critical thing to know about him or her because of these things.
As Bill Clinton’s campaign once said, “It’s the economy, stupid.” It is indeed!
And, even uninformed voters dislike having few jobs available and sky high energy prices.
But that’s exactly where we are now headed because of our horribly lacking energy policy.
2. Biofuels tend to be inefficient to produce and some use more energy to create than they release when used.
But making biofuels with organic wastes or agricultural wastes not now used productively or from algae grown on land not usable for solar or food generation or which turn CO2 from burning fossil fuels into biofuels all DO make sense.
(One path to clean coal is to turn it into methane, generate electricity with the methane using efficient fuel cells like those recently developed by Bloom Energy, and then feed the CO2 to algae to make biofuels. The release into the atmosphere that remains is the water used to make the methane from the coal. Virtually no air pollution need be released if this is done well.)
And the more of such biofuels we make and use in the United States, the less dependent we will be on the oil that’s dangerous to use now and about to be too expensive or even scarce to use.
So more biofuels can be useful but only if it’s these kinds of biofuels.
3. Clean electricity generation.
a) We should build more nuclear plants; and we may be forced to do so by these realities.
But, be aware that this is one of the MOST EXPENSIVE ways to make clean energy.
True, in energy returned for the energy input into mining the uranium and building the plant it returns so much more energy than this costs, it SHOULD be cheaper.
But the other costs are dramatically higher if nuclear is even close to safe to use.
The political difficulty in locating a nuclear plant and the massive upfront costs to build one make nuclear plants close to un-financeable. If they are to be built, the U.S. government will need to provide a strong downpayment on their start up costs and guarantee the loan on the remainder. That’s NOT cheap.
But that’s the little problem! The big problem is that there is no safe place to put the waste which takes longer to become safe than human civilization has lasted.
The solution to that is to use breeder reactors where the waste becomes more fuel and never needs to leave the nuclear plant.
But the cost goes UP to do that safely! You need triple fail safe security provided 24-7 by the most capable and best trained and equipped people in the U.S. military to ensure the resulting nuclear weapons grade fuel in the reactor never gets used by terrorists who would otherwise be sure to do so.
So, yes it’s a legitimate clean energy source we should use more of. But it’s so frightfully expensive to do safely, we’d best bet most of our money and time on much faster and less expensive kinds of clean energy.
b) Wind generated electricity in some forms is already cost competitive. We need to develop much more than we have from such forms and in areas already well served by transmission lines or which are near distribution networks.
But we also need to build far better transmission lines from the areas in the country that have more wind than electricity users to the areas where the reverse is true. This will take time. But we build the Interstate Highway System. So building an Interstate Transmission Grid to move electricity generated by wind and solar to market IS doable and extremely desirable.
Texas has done a great job with these first two things. California and the rest of the country need to do them also.
Third, smaller scale wind generators are not yet cost competitive. But they can double output in areas that already have the more cost effective big windmills. And, they can be deployed in as many as a few hundred more locations. Since we must have more clean energy before we crash the economy from lack of cost-effective petroleum, a case can be made for making up the difference in current costs to have such small scale wind generators installed NOW until fossil fuels begin to cost MORE and that subsidy is no longer needed.
c) Natural gas IS cleaner to burn than coal or petroleum to generate electricity. And the fuel cell technology developed by Bloom Energy can make generating electricity take less land and generate even less air pollution than burning natural gas. Even better, burning natural gas releases less CO2 per kilowatt than coal or petroleum since the molecules burned have relatively less carbon and more hydrogen.
So, yes, we will certainly develop the new natural gas sources. But the environmental costs and the dangers to nearby residents will make this a very, very expensive source of energy.
d) The most important and glaring lack in your plan is that massive deployment of thin film photovoltaic solar cells on: most rooftops and on canopies over almost all parking lots; thin film solar generation on vacant land nearby to distribution networks; and massive building of solar thermal plants in the United States AND in Mexico can come close to supplying 100 % of our power needs and is already close to being cost competitive.
(Mexico has three times our solar potential. And if we got some of their solar electricity in exchange for helping them build it -- and locating some jobs there that run off of their electricity would provide enough jobs there to largely solve the immigration problem.)
Did you know that Germany has already perfected a way to cause such solar deployment and now has something like HALF the world’s installed solar because of it?
Last year in California was a banner year for solar. But Germany installed OVER NINE times as much!
Given the need for more clean energy from the solar available here, we absolutely must use their methods. (Craig Lewis of the FIT Coalition is working on getting this method used in California & I think deserves your direct support.)
We have dramatically more solar potential than Germany. When we install at their rate, solar will deliver us enough clean electricity to make a real difference.
Your likely opponent, Barbara Boxer, is informed about solar and will deliver on helping us have more. If you’d like to be our Senator, I think you should also outdo her on supporting such solar developments.
4. Helping to save California’s pioneering efforts to switch from fossil fuels to clean ones by supporting a NO vote on the proposition that turns them off.
We can have slightly cheaper gasoline and utility bills in the short run but dramatically higher gasoline and utility bills within about five years.
Or we can have gasoline and utility bills go up 2 to 6 % now but stop going up nearly so much after that depending on how California votes on this issue.
Then after that, California’s economy will just hold together as the world runs out of oil because we have enough renewable energy developed here OR our economy will collapse because we didn’t keep a policy to have it built when we had the chance.
The only economy the Texas oil companies sponsoring this proposition care about is their own.
In addition, keeping California’s renewable energy standards will create jobs here if we keep these standards in place. If we fail to do so, most of these new jobs will not be created here.
It seems to me, as I hope it does to you, that during a recession keeping a policy that creates new California jobs soon and protecting our economy from running out of affordable energy later, is dramatically MORE important than holding down short term gasoline or utility rates just slightly.
Moreover, the independent and informed swing voters that you need I think agree with this.
Many conservative Republicans do not. They don’t have the information on the likely longer run economic consequences to our economy or care more about the campaign funds they get from the oil companies.
With your already existing venture capital supporters, many of which support and make investments in clean technology companies, you don’t need the oil company’s money.
Today's post: Wednesday, 5-5-2010
We need an 80% reduction in fossil fuel use by 2050 to avoid the worst global warming effects. And, practically speaking, we need to also double our electricity generation and double the useful work done per unit of electricity & other energy sources as well during that same time to have a decent economy.
At some point, the oil that we’ve been using to power much of our economy will begin to run low enough that our world economy will shrink due to lack of supply or excessive costs or both.
And, once the demand for oil picks up again with the apparent economic recovery or supply begins to plateau or drop, the prices will again go back up. That will cause more hard times economically unless we have enough alternative sources of energy to turn to.
Further, it’s extremely clear that the most supported and economically beneficial solution to add energy that does not use oil nor burn fossil fuels to release more CO2 into air that already has too much is to build massive amounts of new renewable energy production, particularly those that generate electricity & to dramatically increase energy efficiency and reduce the amount of energy that is now wasted.
And, of those, the more important long range solution is to build massive amounts of new renewable energy generation.
Today’s post:
Tom Campbell is running to be the senator from California and hopes to be elected even running against Barbara Boxer who has been strong backer of clean and renewable energy.
Tom has three points in his favor.
He is extremely intelligent and reasonable and well informed.
He favors a strong economy and mostly has policies likely to create one, notably that he favors cutting the capital gains tax which favors the kind of innovative companies we need to have a strong economy and which are plentiful in California.
His stated energy policy is miles and miles better than the kind of uninformed or worse policies of many of our local California conservative Republicans.
However, I’d like it to be much better to help him be the Republican candidate as he is a very, very competent man and would likely do a mostly good job if elected. But even more important, I think his policy needs to be a lot better in case he IS elected.
I supported him for US Congress once and emailed him my comments on his currently stated energy policy.:
Your current stated energy policy:
Energy policy must support job and economic growth.
Energy costs now exceed labor costs in many of the manufacturing plants in America. Automation from the last century is now ubiquitous and requires competitive energy costs.
Technology is changing both the transportation and the generation side of energy. From nothing a decade ago, biofuels are now powering more than 8 percent of our transportation needs; this must grow along with other technologies such as those used in electric vehicles so that our falling demand for foreign oil can continue reducing our reliance on expensive imports.
On the electricity front, our current lowest cost provider - nuclear - must be re-introduced. Wind can also play a competitive role.
Recent large finds of domestic natural gas must be developed as do nascent programs in solar, fuel cells, and fusion technology.
Not bad!
But to raise all the money you could now from the technology executives and venture capitalists who support clean energy, to get enough moderate but well informed voters to have a chance against Barbara Boxer, and to do the job I personally would like to see you do if elected, you need a much stronger and more developed policy.
1. At the University of California at Berkeley my individual major was creating beneficial social change. While studying for that I discovered two things.
a) The technology used in the economy forces changes in the society; and the beliefs in the society change what technology tends to be developed.
b) There is close to a one to one correlation between the amount of energy in productive use and the size of the economy.
That last one has HUGE implications.
In a very real sense, ONLY an energy policy that causes more safe and reliable energy to be available at reasonable cost and one that increases the efficiency with which we use it will grow our economy and create jobs.
If you want to increase jobs and build a strong economy at all well, this must be done well. It is the most critical and important economic policy imaginable.
We do NOT yet have such an energy policy in the United States.
The energy we get now from fossil fuels is not safe.
Coal mining is not now safely run or responsibly mined to avoid harming the communities where it’s mined. Though it’s unfortunate, it now seems that offshore drilling for oil is not safe. Coal, petroleum, and natural gas still tend to create all three kinds of air pollution when burned: particulates, spreading of toxic chemicals such as mercury, and oxides of Nitrogen. The United States economy still depends on petroleum and is now importing it in ways that put our national security at risk.
The energy we get now from fossil fuels about to become extremely unreliable and too unsafe and expensive to use besides.
Due to peak oil predicted by well-informed Kuwaiti scientists recently to occur in 2014 combined with population growth and hopefully a world wide economic recovery, petroleum will both double and redouble in price and begin becoming less and less available.
Most atmospheric scientists are saying that life and agriculture as we now know them are already at risk from the global warming already caused by the CO2 humans have been releasing from burning fossil fuels. This too will soon create huge and not previously needed costs to just compensate. It also suggests we need to release far less CO2 into the air world wide than we have been to survive. (No effective way to grow food or severely disrupted food supplies have destroyed human civilizations before in history.)
To put it bluntly, we are NOT ready for this. And, we aren’t making progress fast enough. So we are in the most grave danger of economic collapse as these effects worsen.
Many voters really don’t yet know this set of things. But the energy policy of a candidate is the most critical thing to know about him or her because of these things.
As Bill Clinton’s campaign once said, “It’s the economy, stupid.” It is indeed!
And, even uninformed voters dislike having few jobs available and sky high energy prices.
But that’s exactly where we are now headed because of our horribly lacking energy policy.
2. Biofuels tend to be inefficient to produce and some use more energy to create than they release when used.
But making biofuels with organic wastes or agricultural wastes not now used productively or from algae grown on land not usable for solar or food generation or which turn CO2 from burning fossil fuels into biofuels all DO make sense.
(One path to clean coal is to turn it into methane, generate electricity with the methane using efficient fuel cells like those recently developed by Bloom Energy, and then feed the CO2 to algae to make biofuels. The release into the atmosphere that remains is the water used to make the methane from the coal. Virtually no air pollution need be released if this is done well.)
And the more of such biofuels we make and use in the United States, the less dependent we will be on the oil that’s dangerous to use now and about to be too expensive or even scarce to use.
So more biofuels can be useful but only if it’s these kinds of biofuels.
3. Clean electricity generation.
a) We should build more nuclear plants; and we may be forced to do so by these realities.
But, be aware that this is one of the MOST EXPENSIVE ways to make clean energy.
True, in energy returned for the energy input into mining the uranium and building the plant it returns so much more energy than this costs, it SHOULD be cheaper.
But the other costs are dramatically higher if nuclear is even close to safe to use.
The political difficulty in locating a nuclear plant and the massive upfront costs to build one make nuclear plants close to un-financeable. If they are to be built, the U.S. government will need to provide a strong downpayment on their start up costs and guarantee the loan on the remainder. That’s NOT cheap.
But that’s the little problem! The big problem is that there is no safe place to put the waste which takes longer to become safe than human civilization has lasted.
The solution to that is to use breeder reactors where the waste becomes more fuel and never needs to leave the nuclear plant.
But the cost goes UP to do that safely! You need triple fail safe security provided 24-7 by the most capable and best trained and equipped people in the U.S. military to ensure the resulting nuclear weapons grade fuel in the reactor never gets used by terrorists who would otherwise be sure to do so.
So, yes it’s a legitimate clean energy source we should use more of. But it’s so frightfully expensive to do safely, we’d best bet most of our money and time on much faster and less expensive kinds of clean energy.
b) Wind generated electricity in some forms is already cost competitive. We need to develop much more than we have from such forms and in areas already well served by transmission lines or which are near distribution networks.
But we also need to build far better transmission lines from the areas in the country that have more wind than electricity users to the areas where the reverse is true. This will take time. But we build the Interstate Highway System. So building an Interstate Transmission Grid to move electricity generated by wind and solar to market IS doable and extremely desirable.
Texas has done a great job with these first two things. California and the rest of the country need to do them also.
Third, smaller scale wind generators are not yet cost competitive. But they can double output in areas that already have the more cost effective big windmills. And, they can be deployed in as many as a few hundred more locations. Since we must have more clean energy before we crash the economy from lack of cost-effective petroleum, a case can be made for making up the difference in current costs to have such small scale wind generators installed NOW until fossil fuels begin to cost MORE and that subsidy is no longer needed.
c) Natural gas IS cleaner to burn than coal or petroleum to generate electricity. And the fuel cell technology developed by Bloom Energy can make generating electricity take less land and generate even less air pollution than burning natural gas. Even better, burning natural gas releases less CO2 per kilowatt than coal or petroleum since the molecules burned have relatively less carbon and more hydrogen.
So, yes, we will certainly develop the new natural gas sources. But the environmental costs and the dangers to nearby residents will make this a very, very expensive source of energy.
d) The most important and glaring lack in your plan is that massive deployment of thin film photovoltaic solar cells on: most rooftops and on canopies over almost all parking lots; thin film solar generation on vacant land nearby to distribution networks; and massive building of solar thermal plants in the United States AND in Mexico can come close to supplying 100 % of our power needs and is already close to being cost competitive.
(Mexico has three times our solar potential. And if we got some of their solar electricity in exchange for helping them build it -- and locating some jobs there that run off of their electricity would provide enough jobs there to largely solve the immigration problem.)
Did you know that Germany has already perfected a way to cause such solar deployment and now has something like HALF the world’s installed solar because of it?
Last year in California was a banner year for solar. But Germany installed OVER NINE times as much!
Given the need for more clean energy from the solar available here, we absolutely must use their methods. (Craig Lewis of the FIT Coalition is working on getting this method used in California & I think deserves your direct support.)
We have dramatically more solar potential than Germany. When we install at their rate, solar will deliver us enough clean electricity to make a real difference.
Your likely opponent, Barbara Boxer, is informed about solar and will deliver on helping us have more. If you’d like to be our Senator, I think you should also outdo her on supporting such solar developments.
4. Helping to save California’s pioneering efforts to switch from fossil fuels to clean ones by supporting a NO vote on the proposition that turns them off.
We can have slightly cheaper gasoline and utility bills in the short run but dramatically higher gasoline and utility bills within about five years.
Or we can have gasoline and utility bills go up 2 to 6 % now but stop going up nearly so much after that depending on how California votes on this issue.
Then after that, California’s economy will just hold together as the world runs out of oil because we have enough renewable energy developed here OR our economy will collapse because we didn’t keep a policy to have it built when we had the chance.
The only economy the Texas oil companies sponsoring this proposition care about is their own.
In addition, keeping California’s renewable energy standards will create jobs here if we keep these standards in place. If we fail to do so, most of these new jobs will not be created here.
It seems to me, as I hope it does to you, that during a recession keeping a policy that creates new California jobs soon and protecting our economy from running out of affordable energy later, is dramatically MORE important than holding down short term gasoline or utility rates just slightly.
Moreover, the independent and informed swing voters that you need I think agree with this.
Many conservative Republicans do not. They don’t have the information on the likely longer run economic consequences to our economy or care more about the campaign funds they get from the oil companies.
With your already existing venture capital supporters, many of which support and make investments in clean technology companies, you don’t need the oil company’s money.
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