Nobody at All:
(…) The levelized cost of nuclear is low, but the initial capital burdens are enormous.(Excluding, for the moment, the 100-500MW reactors being proposed for licensing.)It is simply difficult to assemble such large chunks of financing.

That’s a well-informed comment by Nobody at All. Here’s a few further thoughts. Absent a carbon price that captures the externalities of coal and gas generation, the capital costs per MWh of baseload generation of new Gen-3 nuclear power plants are larger than dirty coal, and about the same as coal with CCS (we don’t really know because a clean coal CCS plant has never been built at utility scale).The very large 1.2 to 1.5GW nuclear plants currently planned for the US are that large because the new construction has been entirely planned by big utilities – and economies of scale do apply to these types of reactors. Similarly, coal plants have ranged over about 0.5 to 1.0GW size – again economies of scale. A few points to consider:
(1) Absent the current large subsidies, the cost per unit of nameplate capacity of wind/solar is higher than nuclear, but can be erected in smaller investment chunks. But the real challenge of financing new zero-carbon generation is that we need $10.5 trillion additional investment between now and 2030 to put the world’s energy system on a lower-carbon path (source International Energy Agency).
(2) That nuclear is both cheaper to build and cheaper to operate is a plus. But forgetting cost, we need a technology path that can actually be implemented. It is going to be really tough to convert the existing fleet of dirty generation plus build all the new capacity required to reach a zero-carbon 2050. Prof. Barry Brook, has thoroughly persuaded me that new Gen3 + Gen4 nuclear is the only way we are going to get there.

The world in 2050 will demand ~700 EJ of thermal energy, or roughly 300 EJ of electrical energy. This will require ~10,000 GWe (10 TWe) of generating capacity, which is a 5-fold increase in electricity generating capacity, or 680 MWe, every day, for the next 40 years (2010 to 2050).

Given the large uncertainties associated with this forecast, the actual value could easily be as high as 15 TWe, which would up the daily built-out rate to a little over 1 GWe per day. But let’s stick with 680 MWe rate for this post.

(3) All of the above is based upon the old way of doing nuclear – where each plant is semi-custom, involving large amounts of highly-skilled onsite labor. Consider a more rational future, where nuclear power is mass-manufactured in standard modules, shipped to the reactor park using standard intermodal-container sized packages, hooked up and turned on.
(4) Consider how much of the current $4000/kW cost of the big nuclear plants is in the uncertainties over the elapsed time from project start to turn-on. And what certification of mass-manufactured units plus sensible regulation would do that risk.

The scale contemplated will likely necessitate a large amount of state involvement.

Quite possibly. But for liberals, that’s not a problem at all. If I believed that AGW was likely to have catastrophic results, and also that government can and should play a large role in the economy, then a crash program to build hundreds of nuclear plants would be my top priority.

The scale contemplated will likely necessitate a large amount of state involvement.

This may be true but relative to the level of government involved in any other carbon scheme, this is minuscule.

People have all sort of reasons for why going nuclear is too expensive and complicated to do- but they can’t seem to explain how we built all the reactors we still have today between 1950 and 1980. In other words, by the logic proposed 20% of our energy infrastructure can’t possibly exist.

Other than politics, I can think of no reason we can’t vamp up our nuke infrastructure on the same level as we did in the 60s and 70s, and all the better with modern technology.

The evidence suggests absolutely no such thing. This is just fear mongering in an attempt to justify the subjugation of one’s fellow man.

“This either destroy the economy or do nothing is a straw argument.”

Actually, IF that were the argument, it would be a “false alternative” not a straw man. But of course that is NOT the argument. The argument is whether the individual is properly left FREE to decide for himself how best to deal with any changes in climate – or whether he must be SUBJUGATED to the will of others who force him, at the point of a (govt) gun, to abandon his own mind on the matter and act in accord with their dictates instead.

You make very clear your choice – and it is NOT freedom.

And no I wouldn’t apply the 1% doctrine in an environmental context. But it is plain to any thinking person that the risks are much greater than 1%. The evidence suggests that if immediate action is not taken, human life on earth may be doomed. Unlike the threat of a terrorist attack, the harm carbon emissions are causing can be measured. Whatever the risks, it is a dead certainty that if the level of carbon emissions continue to increase or are not abated, disaster will ensue. It is not as if the threat isn’t visibly growing or that it might just pass us by.

Am I suggesting that we create a dictatorship to immediately eliminate all industrial production or at least that which creates carbon emissions. Of course not, but we should start reducing carbon emissions and the government will probably need to create incentives. This either destroy the economy or do nothing is a straw argument.

David Schwartz: An unstable situation can actually be long-term stable for a number of reasons, primarily due to corrective mechanisms that are not well-understood because they are not doing very much.

Students of Control System Engineering learn that an unstable system (“plant”) can be stablized with a properly designed feedback control device. Those devices are themselves often unstable in isolation, but the combination of plant+controller is stable, even robust.

Those unstable controllers are hard to test in manufacturing, though.

Perhaps “two wrongs don’t make a right”, but two unstable systems can combine to make one stable system. Perhaps Mother Gaia knows that trick.

A blivet is ten pounds of manure in a five pound bag.

Bohemond: It’s not analagous at all to a 50% cut in rape, since everyone agrees rape is bad and reducing it an unalloyed good.

Non-sequitur. Whether “everyone” agrees that a certain target is a worthy goal has nothing to do with an objective assessment of the risks associated with any policy that works toward that goal. Otherwise, your argument is that as long as there is someone who doesn’t agree with a certain policy goal on normative grounds, he has a kind of heckler’s veto to raise all kinds of straw-man policies and use those hypothetical policies to argue against doing anything. That would be convenient to some people if it were true but it is not.

ShelbyC, I think of the precautionary principle as a general statement about identifying and trying to minimize long-tail risks. We can make some sense of this when we talk about the physical world of climate, tectonic plate movements or asteroids. Ilya is trying to knock this principle down by extending it to the policy world and saying that if there is a category of policies to achieve a certain objective and at least one of those policies would have extremely bad consequences, we shouldn’t try to work toward achieving the objective (under the precautionary principle) because of the “risk” of a certain straw-man policy. This is not a defensible application of any kind of general philosophy or principle of risk aversion.

Jamie: Wha? Who’s fearmongering? Possibly the side of the debate shrieking, “Remake the global economy NOW or the human race will become EXTINCT!!”? (Which is also why the question is “an 80% cut in emissions or the status quo”: either it’s a giant global environmental emergency, or it ain’t. Which is it, warming-alarmists?)

Jamie, the problem is that you are projecting your own partisan commitments on others. I’m open-minded on the question of policy. Even as stated, an 80% cut is an incomplete target: 80% by when? 2012? 2112? I believe the idea comes from the fact that CO2 levels will eventually revert to around 300 ppm (from a current level of 385 ppm) in a reasonable period of time. Depending on what we think is an acceptable level of risk, there is a whole continuum of choices.

So the precautionary question here resembles the difficulty of valuing basic research. We know funding basic research has been a great good, but sometimes has a negative result – and there is no way of prejudging. However we do know from history that holding social change to a minimum (valuing the evolutionary status quo no matter how backwards it may seem) and sublimating all of our creative efforts into free enterprise with a free people competing for each other’s favor results in the greatest improvement in living conditions, quality of life, health etc., especially for the least of us.

My sense is everyone of these potential and discovered catastrophes should cause us to redouble our efforts to advance our own welfare (as individuals, families, tribes and towns first, states, federal, world government last) just as fast as possible. Where “pre”caution should argue for fewer restraints, less regulation, not more, on intellects, and more intellects (born and invited) to put their able shoulders to the wheel. Where the greatest common denominator of wealth has always been the applied able, willing, rewarded and free intellect.

A pity progressives have lost the essential meaning of progress. This has killed many, and will kill more. And all with the best of intentions. A tragedy in every meaning of the classic term. Aka the human condition. Where the more we try to use force – government to perfect (various forms of so-called “social” (in)justice), the more we kill.

Consider natural catastrophes: Mitochondrial Eve – something almost killed us all off a few hundred thousand years ago.. Yellowstone cooking off every ~500K years, we’re overdue for the eastern half of the U.S. to be covered with a few (10s of) feet of ash..(where’s my earth mover?). Glacial periods that have swept the earth (we can deal with heat with less energy than cold), to say nothing of the stray rock or occasional coast-moving typhoon. And 1000s more. Focusing on climate change as a reason to do anything less than run faster, and, yes, consume more faster, so we get to a better place where we just don’t care about a whole new class of disasters certainly looks foolish (esp. after the next catastrophe).

Note that most U.S. cities are completely rebuilt (for largely personal comfort reasons) every 100 years or less. They won’t be rebuilt in the same place if the sea rises – or falls. Yes, rising temps might actually lead to the sea falling if warmer air brings snow to the currently barren Antarctica mile high plateau that’s never above -15c (but has glacier scaring indicating mile high snowpack ages ago). Beachfront being what it is.. people will move (even if we eliminate the perverse insurance incentives to build in flood plains). If we maximize progress, people will be eventually be rich enough that they won’t care if they have to rebuild every few decades if the result is a beautiful view, better quality of life.

Anil Petra: The failure to embrace nuclear is enough to call “BS” on the global warmongers.

Not really. I actually “embrace” nuclear, but pay attention to market realities.

The levelized cost of nuclear is low, but the initial capital burdens are enormous. (Excluding, for the moment, the 100-500MW reactors being proposed for licensing.) It is simply difficult to assemble such large chunks of financing. Even with a streamlined regulatory structure (which I also support), there are fundamental supply constraints, cost of capital constraints, labor risks, delay risks, etc. As the industry re-emerges, these should decrease. Nonetheless, for the foreseeable future, nuclear power will remain the province of large, regulated utilities with balance sheets supported by the ratepayers within their service monopoly.

It is highly unlikely that the independent power producers will begin constructing nuclear. (See, for example, IPP construction of natural gas vs. coal plants, to get an overall flavor of access to financing influences the choice of plant.)

Moreover, even some of the largest of the utilities will have difficulty financing on the scale called for. Ex/

It may cost FPL Group $17 billion to $20 billion dollars to build the two nuclear units it has proposed in Florida. That’s a big price tag, even for FPL Group, which ranks among the largest power companies with a market cap of $22 billion.

“We’re one of the biggest in the industry, and it’s almost a bet-your-company kind of proposition,” [Lewis Hay III, Chairman & CEO of FPL Group, Inc.] said.

http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20091206-702996.html

The scale contemplated will likely necessitate a large amount of state involvement.

Ricardo: cutting emissions by 80% is not a policy, it is a target.

It’s not analagous at all to a 50% cut in rape, since everyone agrees rape is bad and reducing it an unalloyed good. In this case the target itself will have profound adverse repercussions if achieved no matter what the specific policies: it would require Americans to make do with the same energy usage per person as our ancestors did in 1875. In other words, grinding poverty for all. Not to my mind a good tradeoff for averting the possibly-maybe climate doom the Goracle predicts.

CO2 rapidly captures photons within three distinct but narrow bandwidths. This is well-understood real science. Satellite measurement of atmospheric gases shows that all photons in the relevant ranges are more than 99% absent before they have traveled 100 meters from the earth’s surface. (This also owes to similar action by water vapor, a more broad-acting greenhouse gas that substantially overlaps CO2′s active range.)

This means that CO2 could be doubled or even increased tenfold in the atmosphere without any additional greenhouse effect. Indeed, that is what the chart in Gore’s movie actually showed: CO2 concentration increases as the planet warms, not the other way around. That is because, as any bartender can tell you, as liquids warm, in this case the oceans, they release their fizz.

All the hoohaw so far has been over fudged charts and nudged data. But presented here is the mechanism of heat-trapping by greenhouse gases in its stark simplicity. When someone can explain how increasing carbon dioxide can trap heat that is no longer there to be trapped, I’ll write my congressman to demand more nuclear.

Mark Buehner: See– he’s the only economist on earth. How did his work at Enron showcase his unique insights?

What cracks me up is how the same people who accept his word as gospel then turn around and complain the moment anyone brings up a cite that has Fox News anywhere in it.

Does that not sound INSANE to anybody else?

Except the “precautionary principle” isn’t the issue. In fact, accepting it is accepting the moral principle that the subjugation of humanity is valid.

Even if AGW isn’t occurring, we KNOW there will be climate changes in the future. They have naturally occurred throughout the history of the planet. And they will continue to occur regardless of the activities of man. Thus the question here is: how will we RESPOND to those inevitable changes? Will we enslave mankind to the dictatorial judgments of those who claim they know what is best for everyone in the face of any change? Or will we leave individuals free to exercise their OWN judgment on how they will respond to wetter climates or drier climates or warmer climates or colder climates?

In other words, the question here is the same as has been put forth throughout human history. Will man be subjugated or will he be left free? Is man a slave or is he sovereign? We KNOW the environmentalist answer. They have put forth all the same ancient excuses used to justify every other demand to subjugate humanity. The only thing which has changed – the only thing that EVER changes with such mentalities – is the rationale they offer as justification for their dictatorial urges.

What remains the SAME throughout is the totalitarian mindset which desperately latches on to any rationalization in an attempt to justify their murderous desires.

It is time to stop these would-be dictators. It is time to stand up and present the MORAL defense of liberty and rights against these ancient monsters who now try to cloak themselves behind a facade of science.

Mountains WILL rise and fall. Seas WILL grow and shrink. Ice WILL expand and decline. Climate WILL change. It is INEVITABLE.

It is NOT, however, a justification to subjugate mankind. To accept the “precautionary principle” is to accept that the enslavement of humanity is valid. And to accept that is to give up everyting.

I’m not an economist. But Paul Krugman is.

See- he’s the only economist on earth. How did his work at Enron showcase his unique insights?

His word should carry more weight than the unknown Beacon Hill Institute (right wing think tank?).

Bingo. Anybody that disagrees with Paul Krugman is by definition unknown and bought and paid for. Its wonderful when you can just declare that you can only be an expert if you agree with me, and only agree to listen to other experts.

He says that the 80% reduction will not devastate the economy.

If so, he is a complete and utter idiot (or more likely a liar). Please tell me how double the cost of electricity saves us money? How far in the tank can we possibly be to buy into this crap? It doesn’t even make sense on its face! MAKING THINGS MORE EXPENSIVE DOESN’T MAKE THEM CHEAPER.

“Moreover, I’m not sure why the only two choices we should consider are an 80% cut in emissions or the status quo.”
Shush! Your sober reasoning is getting in the way of juicy fearmongering and irresistible strawmen.

Wha? Who’s fearmongering? Possibly the side of the debate shrieking, “Remake the global economy NOW or the human race will become EXTINCT!!”? (Which is also why the question is “an 80% cut in emissions or the status quo”: either it’s a giant global environmental emergency, or it ain’t. Which is it, warming-alarmists?)

Furthermore, any scientist who doesn’t think the earth is warming or will warm is either utterly uninterested in the subject or not a scientist: if the earth isn’t shattered into a bazillion pieces by a huge asteroid, it’ll warm (or is warming). Question is, how fast?

Buying insurance “creates the potential risk of insurer failure.”

Yes, but so what? We get rid of the risk of the loss event, and take back the far smaller risk of the counterpary.

If we dither about killing the enemy because their offspring might harbor thoughts of revenge, then we lose. Period.

I don’t agree that the precautionary or any “principle” guides any policy. The 1% doctrine seems like an extremely contrived “principle” to rationalize a particular government action.

Yes, it DOES look like that, doesn’t it?

Why debate a empty concept?

Because that empty concept is used as a rhetorical device to avoid debate over what level of “solution” is acceptable.

Much like the remote chance of burning forever in hell may convince some to worship a deity “just in case”, throwing away rational discussion of the chances of such a thing in the face of “wouldn’t it suck to be wrong?”, so too does the precautionary principle serve to sacrifice discussion of the probabilities of a thing in the face of the terrible consequences should the most dire predictions become true.

Discrediting such a worthless mode of argument is a good in and of itself.

Let’s take the risk of being killed in an automobile accident. This is certainly a catastrophic outcome. Wearing a seat harness to reduce this risk is certainly justified.

But nothing, other than never riding in a car, can reduce that risk to zero. And even reckless driving without a seat belt does not pose a 1% chance of being killed each time.

What can be taken from this? Some “catastrophic risks” are inherent in ordinary life. All we can do is minimize them at reasonable cost.

The sort of risk Cheney was talking about was things like a terrorist atomic bomb attack. This is something that would be of extraordinary origin. It would also be something that we can foresee, in the sense that we can describe what would actually occur in physical detail. Furthermore, it is something for which the physical mechanism is well understood, and the operational mechanism not exactly vague.

“Global warming” is very different. The event, the effects, and the supposed causative mechanisms are all very diffuse. The costs of the proposed remedies are enormous. These remedies are often justified on the grounds that they would be good ideas anyway. (You all know those reasons.)

I’ll make an analogy here. To insure that there will be no terrorist atomic-bomb attack, the United States should, on the “precautionary principle”, conquer and govern the entire Middle East – from Pakistan to Libya to Somalia. It would be expensive, but far less expensive than a 100 kiloton bomb going off in a U.S. city.

And, as with “global remedies”, there are all sorts of other “good reasons” to do it. It would end the enormous waste of money on military expenditures in this region. It would end the brutal oppression of many populations in the region by criminal governments. It would end the looting of the people of the region by corrupt rulers. It would allow the oil wealth of the region to be distributed to all its people, rather than a handful of rulers and their cronies. It would eliminate the lavish financial support now enjoyed by extremist forms of Islam. It would end the exploitation of “guest workers” in the Gulf States, where many are treated as no better than slaves. It would end outright slavery in some areas. It would end the appalling mistreatment of women in this region (no more honor murders or clitoridectomies). It would stop the flood of toxic propaganda from malignant regimes and factions there: the incitements to terrorism, the conspiracy fantasies, the venomous anti-semitism.

What’s not to like? Surely, under the Precautionary Principle, we should do this, and, like the proposed “anti-carbon” regime, there are so many other good reasons.

Does anyone agree with this? Anyone? Bueller…?

Ultimately I think the real challenge here is to give a precisce enough statement of the precautionary principle that the reader has a grip on how he would go about implementing it in his deciscions but doesn’t require the user to accept contradictory or false beliefs.

I mean stated informally the precautionary principle seems obvious enough. It’s saying that your reasoning might very well have an error in it so moderate your actions according. In other words even if you mathematically prove that you can step off the cliff and float precaution is the better strategy. The problem is if the precautionary principle is nothing but a reminder that we should never fully trust even the most solid seeming argument then it’s about as controversial as saying ‘drive safely’ and makes the same amount of difference. Indeed, every single one of us applies it implicitly every day and it’s no harder to model using formal methods tha anything else.

On the other hand if you want the precautionary principle to go beyond this it threatens to no longer make sense. I mean it’s perfectly fine to remind ourselves not to forget to take into account some effect when judging our probabilities of future events but this principple now says that you apply the precautionary principle to your conclusions even after you’ve accounted for all the concerns raised by the precautionary principle. You can’t both believe that your current overall deciscion making process is a good way to reach deciscions and also believe you would be better off taking on some precautionary principle to the end of that.

In other words you can either explain the precautionary rule as a very boring and universally accepted heuristic for helping us avoid stupid errors in our probability estimations (the proof could be wrong). Or it’s a meta-rule that tells you to take whatever you believe to be the best way of reaching a deciscion and do something else.

Mark Buehner :

By 2045…this would add $1.73/gallon to the cost of gasoline…

Without accepting that this is true, think about what it says. If car fuel efficiency doubles between now and 2045, this would not increase the cost of driving. The present Prius has twice the fuel efficiency of the fleet average. Better public transportation infrastructure may reduce driving to the point that even with the same fuel efficiency, average transportation costs will stay what they are now. Then there are “externalities”. In this case, the cost to the world in global warming of burning that gallon of gas.

I’m not an economist. But Paul Krugman is. His word should carry more weight than the unknown Beacon Hill Institute (right wing think tank?). He says that the 80% reduction will not devastate the economy. He’s read reports by experts and studied numbers in detail. In general, right wing think tank reports rarely survive the give and take of the actual marketplace of ideas.

And the Soviet Regime beyond a doubt slowed Russia’s industrial transformation. Russia’s economy in the first decade and a half of the 20th century was growing at a far greater pace than the U.S. economy. After Communism, it slowed down. Without Communism, Russia might well be the world’s leading industrial power now.

In sum, the best historical examples of the value of concentrated state power seem to be in the destructive acts of war.

As for concentrated state power, I’ll play devil’s advocate here and argue that concentrated state power has done some good. Take, Lenin’s Law against Anti-Semitism, for an example, or the Civil Rights Act, for that matter. Or consider how the Soviet Regime transformed Russia from a feudal society to an industrial one. Yes, I am aware of the crimes committed by the Soviet Union but that doesn’t mean it didn’t do some good as well. Moreover, I don’t think the use of state power equates to the abuse of state power.

And consider when state power was used to promote free market policies in Chile even ol’ Milton Friedman was in support. So I think the more useful debate is over the use of state power.

Our experience to date means proper application of the precautionary principle to AGW would be to do nothing. The risk of making things worse is too great.

This risk is increased by the proven fact that policy selection is going to be driven by rent seeking entities and their policy preferences are driven by profit potential.

There is a serious need to be very, very, careful with government policies designed to reduce carbon emissions.

Governments have a massive amounts of resources available to them and when these resources are applied to well meaning but ultimately destructive policies the results can and will be devastating to the environment.

Palm oil: the biofuel of the future driving an ecological disaster now

Until now palm oil — of which 83% is produced in Indonesia and Malaysia — was produced for food.

But the European Union’s aim of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 20% by 2020, partly by demanding that 10% of vehicles be fuelled by biofuels, will see a fresh surge in palm oil demand that could doom the rainforests.

That is likely to kill off the “flagship species” of wildlife such as the Asian elephant, the Sumatran tiger and the orang-utan of Borneo which are already under enormous pressure from habitat loss. Plantation owners regard the orang-utan as pests because it eats the young palm oil plants and hunt them down ruthlessly.

Much of this destruction was a direct result of environmental policies enacted to reduce carbon emissions.

Yet palm oil, mixed with diesel to produce biofuel, was hailed as a potential saviour for the environment. Put simply, the argument runs that the palm oil plants produce organic compounds that when burned in engines do not add to overall carbon dioxide levels. The CO2 absorbed by the plant in its life-cycle should balance the amount it gives out when burned.

However, the more the ecological fairytale is scrutinised the more it begins to look like a bad dream.

Researchers from the Dutch pressure group Wetlands International found that as much as half the space created for new palm oil plantations was cleared by draining and burning peat-land, sending huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

For example, if India had abandoned its flawed economic policies just a few years earlier than it did in the 1980s and 90s, millions of children who died young might have survived to adulthood.

That paper has been doing the rounds recently, and is one of the worst pieces of tripe I’ve read. It is amateur analysis isht that should not pass muster in a first year econ course, forget as a “paper” by a Cato “scholar”.

There are many good arguments for opening up the Indian economy, and the “cost of socialism” is probably worth a study. However, simply moving things forward by a decade is truly ridiculous given that there were huge changes in world dynamics, as well as technology underpinnings, and that infrastructure did improve in the mysteriously vanished decade, which helped to support the growth in future decades.

Mark Buehner: This is about equivalent to the idea that burning a virgin will make it rain.

Well, maybe the particulates in the smoke will seed rain clouds?