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Thomas Friedman: "Green is the New Red, White, and Blue"
Posted by Prof. Goose on January 7, 2006 - 7:38pm
As Jamais Cascio over at WorldChanging (oops!) says: "Thomas Friedman in the New York Times [has been] calling for a "geo-green" agenda, making a move away from fossil fuels a national security issue. It's not because we think he's a brilliant writer so much as he's about as mainstream influential as they come; if Friedman is pushing this, it's going to be debated in the halls of power in Washington." I hope you're right, Jamais.
Anyway, Jamais points us to a blog that was nice enough to pull some of the quotes from a Friedman article from today's NYT (since it is behind the NYT pay fence), so I will point you there to get a taste. (link)
“So one may almost say that the theory of universal suffrage assumes that the Average Citizen is an active, instructed, intelligent ruler of his country. The facts contradict this assumption.”
—James Bryce (1909, 35)
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It is great to see a mainstream writer like Friedman calling for a sustainable energy agenda, even if the piece could be considered a bit partisan (I personally don't mind but then again I agree with Friedman - it may put others off however).
Damn NYT and its pay fence though.
But Friedman, despite his flat world flaws (hey no one's perfect), does have a good following in the corridors of power and he has long talked about energy independence being at the core of our national security.
I think we are starting to see a real national energy debate start to take shape and as usual Republicans and Democrats are using the issue to score political points. Here in NY State, Gov. Pataki made incentivizing renewables the heart of an economic development message in his state of the state. Regretably it relies heavily on ethanol
I think our job as Oil Drummers is to add that pragmatic and analytical edge to keep both sides honest and focused on making real improvements toward more sustainable energy policy instead of just pandering to interest groups and demagoguery.
My current thinking is that the guy is a bit hit-and-miss, but that the hits are enough to make him worth reading ... even if you don't trust him all the way.
Waking up to energy scarcity (a mild way to say peak oil?) is a hit, and worthwhile as such.
...and..
But seriously, if we all agreed, this wouldn't be a very good experience. I like having my ideas challenged, tested by fire...you know? As long as we keep doing that in a respectful and academic tone, I think this community can keep evolving and doing a lot of good things.
my hope is that since the MSM seem to give him a lot of airtime that we may be at the tipping point of true public awareness of peak[yesss!]
A - Thomas Friedman is hardly a liberal. NY Times has two regular liberal columnists: Paul Krugman and Bob Herbert. It has three centrists: Friedman, Kristof, and Dowd. And two right-wingers: Tierney and Brooks. All part of that mainstream "balance" you know. Plus it has the excellent Frank Rich (liberal), but only on weekends.
B - plenty of "liberals" talk a lot about nuclear power. I've written about it in the "Physics and Society" newsletter referred to here in another recent article. You ask "do the math" - have you "done the math" yourself on nuclear power? I certainly have. 20,000 1 GW-scale nuclear plants are likely needed to meet all world energy needs by 2050 (especially if we go with hydrogen for transportation!) That's 50 times what the world has now. Are you sure that's such a good idea? Do you realize that means we have to find a lot of new sources of uranium, or go to more complex fuel cycles with reprocessing, which nobody has any commercially cost-effective experience with?
On cost - nobody has provable numbers on nuclear power costs that are actually cost effective; the nuclear industry extrapolates, but their extrapolations tend to be 2 or 3 times less expensive than past experience has shown. Meanwhile wind power is already cheaper than nuclear has been in the recent past (comparing apples to apples, i.e. capital costs per annual kWh delivered, and O&M + fuel per kWh). That's why the industry is rushing to install wind all over the world, while almost nobody is actually building nuclear power plants right now.
Even solar, still much more expensive, installed over 1 GW of capacity worldwide last year, and the growth rate for grid-connected solar electric is doubling in less than 2 years; prices are likely headed down soon with new thin-film materials, meanwhile it's alreay a very hot multi-billion dollar business. Have you invested in a nuclear power company recently? Put your money where your mouth is, if you really think nuclear's the future. I know where my money is (literally!)
And what about heat? The excess heat produced by a nuclear power plant built within 30 miles of the city could be piped in and used to keep New York City buildings warm. Wind and solar aren't going to do that.
Wind may well not be the ultimate solution - I don't personally believe it is, but throwing around numbers like "1600 square miles" is meaningless without context - are you just trying to scare people, or yourself?
As I mentioned in another reply here (probably was thinking of your post) - electricity can easily provide heating very efficiently through ground-source geothermal (geo-exchange) technology - typically the heating provided is equivalent to 4-5 times the electric energy supplied. Much better than piping hot fluids from neighboring nuclear plants, I would think!
I used to live in Holland so I have plenty of experience of being around wind turbines.
There was a lengthy discussion recently about the merits of nuclear versus other alternatives, here.
I would appreciate any information you could provide about the electricity-to-heat technology you describe.
See additional comments linked to your post below.
There are three long-term solutions: one is to greatly improve electric transmission so inconstancy is averaged over a larger area (ultimately Buckminster Fuller's idea of a world grid). The second is greatly improved (and cheper) energy storage - enabling electric vehicles provides some other incentives for that too, and may actually be part of the solution.
The third long term solution is to go where the sun does shine constantly - off-planet. Space solar power in various forms has been seriously proposed for almost 30 years now, with some minor demonstrations of transmission feasibility etc, but not much real research effort. The Japanese are spending a few million dollars on it right now though - there's a suborbital experiment on zero-g robotic construction coming up in the next few weeks that should be interesting.
So yes we have some real challenges, but so does nuclear power. Let's spend the money on real R&D now, and let them all compete on as fair a basis as we can make it. It's my belief that one of the primary energy technologies (probably not wind, and not once-through nuclear fission) will become the dominant energy source of the future, with a majority of the market thanks to cost effectiveness. But none of them are there yet; we need a lot more R&D.
http://www.geoexchange.org/
The Comparing Systems page gives some useful numbers.
I asked Stoneleigh, a person with some first-hand knowledge about these types of systems, for his perspective with regard to providing heat, especially in colder climates. Our exchange is under the Open Thread News Drop section.
Here's the link to the company up here NRG Systems.Just passing it along in case you haven't seen this particular site.
First, I classed Friedman as a liberal because he did not mention nuclear power. Very substantial expansion of nuclear power is coming soon because we do not have sufficient alternatives to replace hydrocarbons.
Most people who object to nuclear (or any other option) first state that the disliked option can't do it all. Wind and solar might help at the margin, but wind will never do it all, and solar seems likely to remain substantially more expensive than nuclear for at least a long time. The future will no doubt use multiple streams to replace the dwindling oil one. Speaking specifically of wind, the best locations, with the best wind, are being exploited first, just like oilfields. Fairly soon we will be looking at second rate locations, many of which have NIMBY and environmental objections, just like other solutions.
We have two problems, reduced hydrocarbon supply and the need to replace hydrocarbon use, which is poisoning the planet. Nuclear solves both, fission is proved and economically competitive, so this is the near term solution. The US could replace the existing coal and ng plants with 350 nukes, then use the coal to produce liquid fuels. The net is a substantial reduction in co2 emissions while coal consumption remains constant. 1 nuke/month would get us there by 2040, maybe fast enough to replace sufficient oil, and which is less than the peak rate when nukes were being built in the seventies.
Longer term, we will have to go to either solar or breeders because of limits in the scarce U235. Breeders can consume all the actinides in spent nuclear fuel, and either/or consume the plentiful U238 and/or thorium actinides. The former reduces the amount of nuclear waste around 99%, and also reduces the time required for the waste to decay to background from hundreds of thousands to hundreds of years. Total available fuels would be sufficient for at least 1000 years, maybe more.
A very interesting type is described in the Dec. 2005 issue of Scientific American. Interestingly, metals are plated out, then cadmium is removed, the non-metallics become the waste, the new metallic fuel consists of a mix of actinides which remain highly radioactive and is therefore no more attractive to terrorists than existing spent fuel. It is true that we don't know the cost to build these plants, but consider - no expensive mining, no expensive U235 enrichment, and a credit to dispose of both nuclear wastes and the nuclear waste problem (the latter will annoy the liberals the most.) Meanwhile, we are moving into a higher cost environment, so wind, solar and breeders will all look more attractive.
A solar breakthrough might come at any time, or never. We should continue this research, and expand solar wherever it is cost effective to do so. We should also be prepared for a future with less and less oil and prohibitively expensive solar.
So I suggest you first check your definition of "liberal"...
The Dec 2005 Scientific American article is indeed interesting; I worked for a time at Argonne National Lab which was closely associated with a major project to create such a "fast breeder", though the project basically shut down (thanks in part to cheap oil) in the 1990s. All these high-tech project ideas are fine - in fact the one I most strongly favor is fusion, which I think should receive a lot more money than it does, given the promise and how close we are now.
But the problem is, high tech is expensive, and it's never clear until we well after we start bringing things to market how competitive they will eventually be. Both "liberals" and "conservatives" these days recognize market realities (and no liberal I know would be annoyed by nuclear waste disposal credits for a reactor that actually physically destroys nuclear waste). The fact is that current nuclear technology is not suitable for large scale expansion, it is already too expensive (nobody's building it anywhere in the world without government subsidies) and the new nuclear solutions are still in early R&D stages, decades away from large-scale deployment.
Wind and solar also rely on government subsidy for the moment, but the total amounts they receive are tiny compared to government investments in fossil and nuclear capacities; economies of scale and the learning curve alone will easily bring them to competitive levels; it's simply false that "the best locations, with the best wind, are being exploited first" - the best locations are offshore, and the US has NO offshore installations yet, though several are being planned.
Wind and solar (or any electric source) can provide heating very efficiently through geothermal/geo-exchange electric heat pump technology; are you seriously proposing piping steam from nuclear power plants to heat cities in winter??
I don't have a problem with government investment in advanced nuclear R&D and particularly fusion technology. I don't have any problem with the power industry investing in new nuclear power plants to meet needs, as they see market conditions warrant. What I do have a problem with is people going around hyping nuclear as the "only" solution and forcing my taxpayer dollars to go to a mature technology that is simply not cost-effective. No "liberal" or "conservative" should like that.
I'm no scientist, so please tell me what's wrong with the idea, and are you proposing that a 1600 square mile windfarm be built out in the ocean, to power just one city? The investment necessary to build all of those turbines and create the infrastructure, which will have to weather the ocean climate and storms, seems preventative to me compared with building more nuclear reactors, using new and improved technology.
One nuke a month! What are you smoking! We are talking the NIMBY USA here. This all says that the USA will wake up in time to see the light and KNOW we are about to hit the WALL which I do NOT think we are seeing yet.
OH SURE WE ARE GOING TO HIT THE WALL, but no one is telling us that we are, so for all intents and purposes we aren't. UNTIL of course we hit the wall!!, then it will be to late to do anything about it.
We can't afford 350 NUKE plants let alone a few dozen, haven't you read anything about the state of the union??
WE are in dept up to our EYEBALLS and still going strong, We are dooming ourselves to failure.
PS. I just spent 9 days in the hospital with something that kills 50% of those that have it, And I know that I have some reason to live today, but 350 nukes is not it.
http://www.thebusinessonline.com/DJStory.aspx?DJStoryID=20060106DN009129
If we hear this phrase often enough over the next few years, the energy future for the USA is a dire one.
Nations with small amounts of oil, like Brazil, don't matter much. To the extent that they throttle output now to save it for later, they're already accelerating and flattening the peak. Didn't we agree this is a good thing?
The US effort to forcibly establish a long-term 'contract' between itself and Iraq has turned into an enormously costly disaster. Tragically, the US is in so deep, and has already committed so much, that The Powers That Be dare not pull out, lest it bring upon their own demise. So, it appears that we are going to continue to try to maintain a large 'Fort Apache' in the extremely hostile environment of Iraq in the hope that we will eventually gain control of some more Middle Eastern oil. A military expert I've corresponded with believes that in the long run it is virtually impossible to maintain a large military base in a country that is actively hostile to such a presence. It just becomes a never-ending and highly expensive attrition of resources, both human and materiel.
Also note that some of these oil-rich Central Asian countries are getting chummy with everybody else but the US.
I believe the US has really screwed up big time on this one!
We'll be pulling out. Or driven out.
http://www.itp.net/business/news/details.php?id=19231&category=
Outlining what he called the "drawdown", one American official said: "US reconstruction is basically aiming for completion [this] year. No one ever intended for outside assistance to continue indefinitely, but rather to create conditions where the Iraqi economy can use reconstruction of essential services to get going on its own."
From what I've read, the US currently has most of the world's capacity for refining sour crudes. Until there is more refinery capacity than pumping capacity, producers will have no choice but to sell to us if they want money. This can change, but slowly.
Last, Brazil throttling back will cause a rise in prices and a gentler downslope of the production curve. This may be the one thing which gets the US serious about alternatives, and we've got a pile of them ready to hand starting with PHEV's. The gentler downslope means that we'll have time to get efficiency measures in place instead of having to cut back on the consumption of product (vehicle-miles).
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10772884/
Is it really plausible that in a world of diminishing supply, that it can be in the US Imperial interest -- as Friedman professes -- to promote democracy in the oil rich ME, Nigeria, Algeria or Venezuela?
Surely there are many in leadership positions in Russia and the Middle East who share Pereira's view, even if they have the sense to be cautious about voicing such opinions in earshot of western reporters. The Saudi royals are a very precarious situation - they have a burgeoning population to appease and have almost no income source beyond oil revenues; if they were to curtail production in favor of preserving resources for future generations they could loose internal and western support and find their heads in a basket. But Russia is in a different position. Not only are they one of the largest exporters, they also have a significant industrial base that uses a significant amount of oil and a strong desire to climb back up to superpower status. Is Russia's flattening output in the last two years due to geology, or Putin's desire make sure his government controls the commanding heights of oil production and that Russia will still have plenty of juice left for internal use after the peak?
Over the holidays I had the opportunity to talk to an acquaintance who is an economist and business owner who splits his time between the US, Sweden and Russia. He told me that in Russia the press routinely reports that Putin's goal is to make sure most of Russia's energy production is firmly under the control of the Kremlin and that Russian energy needs come first; this plays very well to his nationalist supporters. However, his stance is much more diplomatic in front of the international press - in most of what I've read in the NYTimes, Washington Times, CNN, MSNBC etc Putin reassures that rights of international oil companies will be respected and that Russia is a reliable exporter. After the global oil production peak becomes apparent I am certain that we get a better idea about Putin's true intentions.
Europe has had a minor wake up call concerning the risks of being at the end of the gas pipeline. When will the US wake up about the fragility of our position at the end of the oil bucket brigade and get serious about domestic renewables?
It's not a good thing for the USA!
In fact, I think he's STILL doing that.
Friedman is a man with an agenda, and it's basically an imperialistic view of the world.
Seems to me that one of the real diseases of US society is stereotyping everyone as "Liberal"," Conservative" or some permutation like "Progressive" or "Neocon". I understand why the MSM does it, they like 30 second sound bites with enough emotional charging to hook people to watch their commercials. Surely most of TOD readers/contributers are smart enough and objective enough to realise that most solutions proposed have some benefits and some consequences and that examining all points of view might help come to some plan that will work.
This is a B.S. part of this thread and I would like to see it drop. All it can do is alienate people and waste precious time.
I personally believe that we all have two main duties, to reduce our energy consumption as much as possible and to restrain our instinct to breed more humans. And beyond that to get others educated on the issue and solutions.