Search: feed

In The Bottomless Well: The twilight of fuel, the virtue of waste, and why we will never run out of energy, Peter Huber and Mark Mills argue that the massive energy “losses” during energy production aren’t bad, as outside critics of the U.S. energy economy want to assert. They are actually the most necessary and beneficial part of America’s energy use—they refine energy sources into usable energy.

The Bottomless Well was published in 2005

To put it as bluntly as it can be put, the “waste” of energy is virtue, not a vice. It is only by throwing most of the energy away that we can put what’s left to productive use. The cold side of the engine—where we discard most of the energy—is as essential as the hot, where we suck it in. More essential, in fact. It is by throwing energy overboard that we maintain and increase the order of our existence.

The electricity at the plug arrives from the enormous generator in some utility’s central power plant. What spins the generator’s shaft is a steam turbine. The steam comes from a boiler, which is heated by furnace, which most probably burns coal. In the very best power plants, half of the raw heat available in the coal is consumed inside the plant itself in converting the other half of the heat into electricity. Less efficient power plants—smaller ones used as stand-by generators, for example—consume two-thirds of their heat to refine the other one-third into electricity. The whole business, in short, reeks of a Ponzi scheme, with each successive tier of the pyramid feeding voraciously off the one beneath—and with new tiers constantly being added at the top. Small wonder that so much of our energy economy is often characterized as wasteful. Casual observers are easily convinced that there must be a better way.

The energy Ponzi scheme is invariably framed—and lamented—as a symptom of grotesque waste. In the standard graphical presentation, the noble pyramid is portrayed, instead, as a squid-like creature, expelling waste through every tentacle. Updated versions of the energy squid are now routinely wheeled out to demonstrate how most of the energy we use goes to “waste” or (more colorfully) disappears down a “rat hole.”

But something far bigger than a wasteful rat hole is at work when you are looking at the 95 percent or more of total demand. That much demand can’t all be blamed on bad engineering. If the main use of energy is to condition energy itself, then “energy” isn’t the right metric at all, and the “energy economy” must in fact center on something quite different. Engines and generators are obviously doing something for us that isn’t captured by any of the conventional metrics of energy and power.

[click to continue…]

In his book, Contract with the Earth, former-Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich writes, “The universality of the recycling phenomenon should be regarded as a turning point in our struggle to revitalize the earth, and one of the most successful mass environmental actions in human history.” Natural resource economist Julian Simon disagrees. In this excerpt from The Ultimate Resource II, Simon argues that recycling and conservation only make sense if they also make economic sense.

Ultimate Resource II was released in 1996

Should you conserve energy by turning off lights that are burning needlessly in your house? Of course you should – just as long as the money that you save by doing so is worth the effort of shutting off the light. That is, you should turn out a light if the money cost of the electrical energy is greater than the felt cost to you of taking a few steps to the light switch and flicking your wrist. But if you are ten miles away from home and you remember that you left a 100-watt light bulb on, should you rush back to turn it off? Obviously not; the cost of the gasoline spent would be far greater than the electricity saved, even if the light is on for many days. Even if you are on foot and not far away, the value to you of your time is surely greater than the cost of the electricity saved.

The appropriate rule in such cases is that you should conserve and not waste just so far as the benefits of conserving are greater than the costs if you do not conserve. That is, it is rational for us to avoid waste if the value to us of the resource saved is more than the cost to us of achieving the saving – a matter of pocketbook economics. And the community does not benefit if you do otherwise.

Ought you save old newspapers rather than throw them away? Sure you ought to – as long as the price that the recycling center pays you is greater than the value to you of your time and energy in saving and hauling them. But if you – or your community – must pay someone more to have paper taken away for recycling than as trash, there is no sound reason to recycle paper.

Recycling does not “save trees”. It may keep some particular trees from being cut down. But those trees never would have lived if there were no demand for new paper – no one would have bothered to plant them. And more new trees will be planted and grown in their place after they are cut. So unless the very act of a saw being applied to a tree makes you unhappy, there is no reason to recycle paper nowadays.

[click to continue…]

Yesterday, CEI’s Chris Horner testified before the Ohio House of Representatives Committee on Public Utilities, on legislation to modify the state’s existing green energy production quota by expanding the number of electricity generators that qualify as clean energy.

Below is his presentation and written testimony.

[click to continue…]

Monday’s excerpt from Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature argued that we shouldn’t fear global warming because even if it causes resource scarcity, people will not resort to violence over scarce resources. Today’s excerpt from Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist gives another reason why we shouldn’t fear global warming—extra warmth will be good for us.

The Rational Optimist was released in 2010

If only hypothetically, it is worth asking whether civilisation could survive climate change at the rate assumed by the consensus of scientists who comprise the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)–that is, that the earth will warm during this century by around 3° C…

Sea level is by far the most worrisome issue, because the current sea level is indeed the best of all possible sea levels: any change–up or down–will leave ports unusable. The IPCC forecasts that average sea level will rise by about 2-6 millimetres a year (or about a foot per century). At such rates, although coastal flooding will increase slightly in places (local rising of the land causes sea level to fall in many areas), some countries will continue to gain more land from siltation than they lose to erosion. The Greenland land-based ice cap will melt a bit around the edge–many Greenland glaciers retreated in the last few decades of the twentieth century–but even the highest estimates of Greenland’s melting are that it is currently losing mass at the rate of less than 1 per cent per century. It will be gone by AD 12,000….

As for fresh water, the evidence suggests, remarkably, that, other things being equal, warming will itself reduce the total population at risk from water shortage… On average rainfall will increase in a warmer world because of greater evaporation from the oceans, as it did in many previous warm episodes such as the Holocene (when the Arctic ocean may have been almost ice-free in summer), the Egyptian, Roman and medieval warm periods. The great droughts that changed history in western Asia happened, as theory predicts, in times of cooling: 8,200 years ago and 4,200 years ago especially. If you take the IPCC’s assumptions and count the people living in zones that will have more water versus zones that will have less water, it is clear that the net population at risk of water shortage by 2100 falls under all their scenarios….

[click to continue…]