Holman Jenkins’s latest Wall Street Journal column about environmental policy opens as a political diatribe but, once you get past the fulmination, arrives at a point that approximates my view:
If stated properly, the “scientific consensus†would run as follows: climate models teach us to expect some warming from human-caused atmospheric CO2 increases, but disagree about how much. It’s hard to make cost-benefit judgments on such a basis, but happily the Green New Deal makes it easy—it would cost a lot of money and accomplish nothing since U.S. emissions are just 14% of the total and shrinking. India and China, not the U.S., will determine the fate of climate change.
Cost-benefit analysis also tells us a bunch of things that might be worth doing even in light of the uncertainties. A tax reform based on a revenue-neutral carbon tax could make our tax system more efficient and pro-growth. Government investment in basic research tends to have a high payoff, and battery research is a particularly attractive opportunity. Rethinking nuclear power and regulation is another area of huge potential. Safer and cheaper nuclear technologies continue to advance on the drawing board even in today’s inhospitable political environment.
And guess what? All the above would be easier to sell to other countries than Green New Deal masochism. Voters would readily gobble up new energy technologies and tax models that would make their societies richer and stronger.
Let’s put it another way. You may coherently support measures that reduce carbon emissions or you may oppose an increase in nuclear power generation but, if you do both, you must do so on a cost-benefit basis. I think that more power generated by small modular nuclear reactors, particularly if they’re based on thorium, is something we should be pursuing with all due haste.
I would quibble about one point in Mr. Jenkins’s formulation. If the models are, indeed, correct it doesn’t matter whether or in what proportion human-caused atmospheric CO2 increases. The effects will be felt regardless.
I am a skeptic regarding carbon dioxide’s role in global warming, because the Vostok ice core shows that it has no such role.
And while I am a fan of nuclear power, I am really dubious about small modular plants. The basic reason is the economy of scale. Doubling the size of any power plant or factory only increases the cost by about 60 to 70% percent, so the unit costs (here kwh of electricity) fall. That is the main reason we have 1,000 MW generating plants.
No actual nuclear engineering company seems interested in thorium, and there has to be a reason for that. By the way, a great deal of our thorium is in the granite of NH. Do you really think you can mine them on a large scale?
Finally, Rosatom is the largest nuclear power plant builder and operator in the world, and while we debate nuclear power they have contracts to build dozens of them everywhere.
Since small modular reactors are built in a factory and shipped to the site rather than being built on-site, the theory is that greater economies can be realized. Also they require lower up-front capital investment and have EOL advantages. You just dig them up, put another one in the hole, and ship the old one back to the factory for refurbishing.
Explanation for why CO2 lags temp for those who are interested in Vostok.
https://skepticalscience.com/Why-does-CO2-lag-temperature.html
Steve
A thousand years is a long time. Since it’s already settled by a consensus of scientists that we’re done in ten or twenty years, imagine how hot it will be in a thousand years. We might as well enjoy the time we might have left. If you suffer from depression like me, that’s just icing on the cake.
“Since it’s already settled by a consensus of scientists that we’re done in ten or twenty years”
I still read in that area occasionally, though I depend upon updates from num per one son more often now, and I haven’t seen anyone saying we are done in 10-20 years. Where do you get that idea?
Steve
Elected representatives. Politicians. IPCC Report.
Not what the IPCC says, unless you take a very wide and kind of odd definition of “we’re done.”
Steve
From the Headline Statement document of the IPCC report:
Maybe “we’re done” is a bit of an exaggeration of the findings of the report and it certainly isn’t how I would’ve phrased it but I don’t think it completely misses the mark.