Energy Probe

Another lightbulb moment for One Change

Posted on August 17, 2009 by energyprbe

Don Butler
The Ottawa Citizen
August 17, 2009

Backers of Project Porchlight turn attention to saving gas by keeping tires properly inflated

OTTAWA-Last week was brutal for Stuart Hickox and his team at One Change, the Ottawa non-profit organization behind the wildly successful Project Porchlight campaign.

One Change’s associate executive director, John Mulvihill, died suddenly Aug. 9, devastating the close-knit One Change family.

“It’s like a bomb’s gone off,” a sombre Hickox said. “It’s such a loss for us. John Mulvihill was just such a force.”

The loss of Mulvihill, a retired Canadian Red Cross executive who oversaw One Change’s increasingly ambitious operations, could hardly have come at a worse time.

This week, One Change will launch a pilot project that aims to distribute 13,000 free key-chain digital tire gauges to Ottawa residents by the end of September.

A successor to Project Porchlight, which gave out electricity-saving compact fluorescent lightbulbs, the tire-gauge project is designed to increase fuel efficiency by encouraging motorists to properly inflate their tires.

“Maintain your tire pressure and you’ll save $65 a year on gas,” Hickox says. If everyone in Canada properly inflated their tires — about 40 per cent of us don’t — we’d save $600 million on gas and cut CO2 emissions by 1.4 million tonnes, says Hickox.

The new campaign has a tough act to follow.

Since its start in an Ottawa Giant Tiger parking lot in 2005, Project Porchlight has distributed more than 2.3 million free compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs) in about 500 communities in Canada and the United States.

The inspiration for the project came when Hickox spotted a life-altering statistic on the federal government’s Energy Star website in 2004: if every household in Canada replaced one incandescent bulb with a CFL, it would be like taking 66,000 cars off the road.

At the time, Hickox, like many people, was aware that an environmental crisis was looming, but unsure what he could do about it. “So when I saw that, I thought, ‘I can do that.’ It’s not going to change the world, but it made me feel that I could do something.”

With some friends, he founded Project Porchlight. Within eight weeks of its launch, he says, “a couple of hundred volunteers had delivered 35,000 bulbs door to door, and we knew we were onto something.”

By the time the Ottawa campaign ended, Project Porchlight had distributed 250,000 bulbs in the city.

More campaigns followed: “We just started getting calls from all over the place,” Hickox says.

After an executive from EnCana, the Calgary-based gas company, received a free CFL while visiting Ottawa, the company quickly signed on as a sponsor. Project Porchlight has since delivered 840,000 bulbs in 200 communities in Alberta. It’s now in the midst of a million-bulb campaign in New Jersey.

Supporters credit bulb giveaways for introducing CFLs to skeptical consumers and popularizing their use.

For instance, B.C. Hydro’s Power Smart program handed out 1.7 million free CFL bulbs between 2001 and 2003. At the time, only one in five B.C. homes had at least one CFL bulb. By 2008, that had risen to 77 per cent.

Power Smart has calculated that CFL programs saved 235.5 gigawatt-hours of electricity in B.C. between 2001 and 2005 — enough to light 137,000 households for a year.

CFL programs have also made it politically feasible for governments to bring in legislation phasing out the sale of inefficient incandescent bulbs, says Nancy Olewiler, an environmental economist at Simon Fraser University.

Not everyone is a fan. Lawrence Soloman, executive director of Energy Probe, disparages giveaway campaigns as “feel-good programs” that accomplish little and may even be counter-productive.

By creating the illusion of change, he argues, they divert focus from the harder reforms that are necessary. If the goal is to use energy efficiently on the road, Soloman says, we should charge motorists for the use of roads, as London and Stockholm are doing.

Hickox agrees those changes have to happen. But he rejects the notion that One Change’s giveaway programs impede broader action.

“It’s not a feel-good thing. It’s a do-good thing. It’s about making it possible for people to believe that simple actions matter. We’re tipping people from awareness to action.”

Many of Project Porchlight’s 10,000 volunteers have never been involved in traditional environmental groups, he points out. “We feel that we’re mobilizing a new demographic of people for positive environmental action.”

Many mainstream environmental groups have been resistant to One Change’s programs. Hickox thinks it’s partly because One Change operates on a business model, with a strategic vision and an emphasis on marketing.

“That’s all language that a lot of these organizations either don’t understand or dislike, and often both,” says Hickox, who has little time for the “negative, pessimistic, doom-and-gloom view of the world” that many environmental groups espouse.

As well, One Change — which Hickox describes as a “social entrepreneurship” — is well-funded by sponsors, including corporations such as Canadian Tire, a key backer of the new tire gauge campaign. This year, its gross revenues are about $8 million.

That breeds resentment and suspicion among activists that it’s being co-opted by companies or agencies to “greenwash” their images.

One Change carefully guards against precisely that, Hickox says. “But we feel it’s critical that we engage a broad spectrum to get the job done.

“We’re not here to pump up the problem, to make people scared. We think that’s done enough. We just want to convert that to positive, real, local, measurable action.”

One Change’s tire-gauge program, Hickox says, fits the template.

“Like the bulb is to the house, the tire gauge is to the car — a simple, universal first action that people can take that can convert their own self-perception about the importance of fuel efficiency and lead them to maybe consider doing other things.”

Some of the gauges will be given away to those who attend one of nine clinics at Canadian Tire stores between Aug. 22 and the end

of September. But Hickox hopes about 10,000 will be distributed door to door by volunteers.

He agrees the tire-gauge campaign presents challenges “because it isn’t the simplest action.” That’s why One Change opted for a key-chain gauge, to keep it visible and top-of-mind.

The package includes coupons worth $30 off oil and filter work at Canadian Tire — the next simple thing motorists can do to improve the efficiency of their vehicles, Hickox says.

If the Ottawa pilot project is successful, One Change hopes to extend the campaign to other jurisdictions. “All of our major funders and partners are watching with keen interest,” Hickox says.

One Change has already pitched a proposal for a pilot campaign on water to EnCana and the government of Alberta. “And they love it,” Hickox says. Though he declines to provide details, he’s optimistic it will begin by next spring.

During a week when the One Change family lost a beloved member, that must offer some consolation.

Posted in Conservation, Energy Probe News | Leave a comment

Carbon disaster: Sources

Posted on August 15, 2009 by energyprbe

August 15, 2009

Carbon Capture and Storage — The Environmental and Economic Case and Challenges

Canada’s Fossil Energy Future — The Way Forward on Carbon Capture and Storage

False Hope — Why carbon capture and storage won’t save the climate

INTERGOVERNMENTAL PANEL ON CLIMATE CHANGE — Geological Carbon Storage Technologies

Expanding options for CO2 Storage

Canada’s CO2 capture and storage technology roadmap

Statement of Don Broussard, Lafayette, La. Utilities System before the House Subcommittee on Environment and Hazardous Materials on Geologic Carbon Sequestration

Integrated CO2 Network-Alberta CCS Development Council Got it Right

Dutch town says no to Shell CCS plans

Posted in Costs, Benefits and Risks | Leave a comment

Carbon disaster

Posted on August 15, 2009 by energyprbe

Lawrence Solomon
Financial Post
August 15, 2009

Don’t worry about the risks of earthquakes or suffocation or water contamination. Carbon capture is good, really

If you live in or near a community that manufactures chemicals or cement, or that has a refinery or a coal or natural gas electricity generating station, or that has abandoned mines or other suitable geological formations, you may soon be asked to save the planet from global warming by hosting an underground carbon dioxide storage facility.

You and your neighbours will be told not to worry about carbon dioxide poisoning your water supplies. Yes, ruptures or large leaks of the gas could not only make the water undrinkable for you but also kill vegetation and aquatic life, the authorities will acknowledge, but inventors are working on new, improved technology that will prevent underground pipes and other infrastructure from leaking.

You and your neighbours will also be told not to worry about mass asphyxiation in your sleep in the event of an unexpected release of carbon dioxide, a gas that’s heavier than air — to their knowledge, that only happened to humans once before, in rural Africa when a release of naturally stored carbon dioxide from Lake Nyos in Cameroon enshrouded and suffocated 1,700 people. The authorities in Canada promise to take this risk seriously and double-promise to design state-of-the-art carbon dioxide storage plants that won’t fail fed by pipelines that won’t blow out. Plus, they’ll install monitors in case plants fail or pipelines blow out.

Finally, you and your neighbours will be told not to worry about the possibility that your community will become susceptible to earthquakes. Yes, the authorities will admit when pressed, these carbon-storage facilities are expected to become one of the top five triggers of earthquakes — induced seismicity, it’s called — but hey, somebody’s got to save the planet and the authorities have selected you.

In turn, you and your neighbours, having received all these assurances from the authorities — and having confirmed that the government plans to exempt the carbon-storage industry from liability in the event of an accident — will rise up in opposition and try to run the authorities out of town.

I am guessing, of course, at what you and your neighbours will ultimately decide to do — maybe your community can be bribed into acquiescence. But I am not guessing that our federal and provincial governments have a crash program underway to make Canada an early leader in the carbon-storage industry.

Last month, the Alberta government, which has already committed $2-billion to carbon-storage schemes, announced the province’s first host communities as if it had selected lottery winners. “Alberta announces three winning projects for carbon-capture funding,” reported the Calgary Herald. “[They] will each receive a portion of $2-billion in carbon capture and storage funding, if final negotiations between the province and companies are successful.”

The neighbours to the winners — Edmonton-area ventures involving Shell Canada, Chevron Canada and Epcor, among others — may feel more like guinea pigs after the public consultations begin, and concerns get aired. The government expects the storage facilities to be up and running by 2015, meaning that the pressure will soon be on to ram these projects through. Look for environmental groups to be enlisted as government persuaders — the Alberta-based Pembina Institute has already recommended that environmental groups take on this enabling role. And look for the environmental groups to be held in the same regard as the governments and companies they are working with.

Last September, a carbon-storage demonstration scheme in northern Germany — Vattenfall’s Schwarze Pumpe project in Spremberg — opened to wide acclaim. The $110-million facility was touted as the first to trap carbon dioxide at a coal plant before transporting it for burial. Last week it came out that the burial never happened. Because of local opposition, the town had refused to give Vattenfall a permit for burial. Rather than storing the gas underground, Vattenfall revealed during a conference, it has been quietly (and safely) venting the carbon dioxide straight into the atmosphere all along. Similarly, local opposition foiled Shell’s plans to store carbon dioxide in depleted gas fields under the Dutch town of Barendrecht, near Rotterdam, in March. After sitting through a public consultation, and receiving assurances from Shell that the technology is proven to be safe, 1,300 residents lodged their protests.

The Numby phenomenon — Not Under My Back Yard — is not limited to opposition by local residents: industries with a stake in safe water are also alarmed. The American Water Works Association, a trade group representing 4,700 water utilities that produce 80% of America’s drinking water, has added the carbon-storage industry to coal and the other resource industries that threaten its interests and those of its customers.

“Our biggest concern is the prevention of degradation of underground sources of drinking water” by interfering with the complex chemistry of water in underground settings, the association told Congress in detailed testimony last year, citing the numerous ways that carbon dioxide burial threatens aquifers with profound contamination, and noting that many communities don’t have alternative sources of affordable drinking water.

The association also noted that carbon-storage technology is unproven and may not even succeed in its primary goal, of removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Why risk a nation’s water supplies without the evidence being in, it asked Congress. Why indeed.

lawrencesolomon@nextcity.com

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and Urban Renaissance Institute and author of The Deniers: The world-renowned scientists who stood up against global warming hysteria, political persecution, and fraud.

Photo: Carbon-capture plants may worry neighbouring communities. (Canwest News Service)

Read Eric Beynon and Marlo Raynolds’s response to Lawrence Solomon’s article.

Posted in Climate Change, Costs, Benefits and Risks, Energy Probe News | Leave a comment

National president of CUPE responds to Lawrence Solomon's article on privatization

Posted on August 13, 2009 by energyprbe

Paul Moist

August 12, 2009

In these pages and in other media, the issue of contracting out city services — most recently garbage collection — has been bandied about as a way to punish unionized public sector workers for everything from striking to costing too much to "monopolizing" the public sector. Some columnists, such as Lawrence Solomon, even contend that public sector workers weigh too much — or so he alleged in a National Post column last week when he claimed that private sector workers "tend to be fitter" than public sector workers.

What Solomon and other critics tend to forget is that Canadians have already tried a system wherein municipal services were delivered by private entities. It didn’t work then, and it wouldn’t work any better now.

Solid waste collection and disposal, water, hydro and transportation were in private hands until the turn of the last century, when municipal governments assumed control of these services after years of poor quality, low accountability, a lack of universal access and an absence of regulation to protect the health and safety of citizens.

Canadians built our modern public sector in order to collectively invest in services for all residents. In the case of garbage collection, it became a mandated civic responsibility due to public health ordinances and the desire to rid growing urban centres of disease that flows from unattended solid waste.

One hundred years and numerous privatization experiments later, Canadian communities are still finding that contracting out public services doesn’t work. In some Canadian communities, the privatization of waste management is being reversed because it has been shown to cost more and deliver less in terms of quality.

While some contracted out services may seem to cost less initially, their costs can rise much faster than publicly delivered services. For example, private operators often use younger crews who haven’t yet suffered injuries, but when the injuries build up, so do their costs. The same goes with equipment — a private company’s may be more efficient at first, but all equipment wears and requires replacing over time.

After a cost-benefit analysis, the City of Toronto recently chose to end a private contract in the York community, saving taxpayers $4 million annually by bringing waste collection work back in-house. Four months ago, the City of Windsor rejected the garbage privatization option, as did the City of Peterborough earlier this year. In Port Moody, B.C., residents spent ten years reporting repeated missed pickups, spillage, broken garbage bins and other problems caused by low-quality, contracted-out waste collection. Last spring, Port Moody residents took matters into their own hands and successfully petitioned to bring waste collection in-house and dump their private contractor. These situations are not isolated. Across Canada, the list of communities dissatisfied with privatized services continues to grow.

The private sector will always contribute to parts of public infrastructure work, and benefit from public sector procurement. But it is a fatal leap of logic to decide that Toronto or any other city should be pursuing a contracting-out agenda.

If proponents of privatization are really asking for "non-unionization," they are drastically underestimating the tenacity of the Canadian labour movement. About one-third of our Canadian workforce remains unionized, and for good reason — unions enable millions of citizens to enjoy some measure of dignity in retirement and quality social benefits. These benefits extend beyond actual union memberships, since the level of unionization in a society is a direct reflection of the average person’s quality of life. Whether it’s a livable minimum wage or a 40-hour work week, unions raise the bar in terms of wages and working conditions for everyone.

Working people built Canada. They deserve a better shake than they have received in recent weeks.

Paul Moist is national president of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE).

Posted in Energy Probe News, Utility Reform | Leave a comment

The patter of little feet leaves few footprints

Posted on August 11, 2009 by energyprbe

Clifford Orwin
The Globe and Mail
August 11, 2009

You may have heard about the recent study at Oregon State University that examined the effects of reproduction on a parent’s carbon footprint. The researchers reached the obvious conclusion that children, who eat, breathe and otherwise have the effrontery to consume resources, deepen that footprint considerably. Being scientists, the researchers calculated that difference with ludicrous precision. They concluded that the impact of each child is almost 20 times greater than whatever energy the parent could save by all other righteous choices combined: driving a hybrid, using energy-efficient appliances etc.

Although the study’s authors hemmed and hawed, they clearly intended it as a rebuke to parents. People used to have to justify the selfishness of not having children; now we’re told it’s irresponsible to have them. The study is a boon to childless boomers who rev their Hummers and enjoy running their clothes dryers 24/7. When all is said and done, they’ve still done more – much more – to save the planet than any parent has.

But the logic of the researchers leads further still. Why stop at having just one child, or at not having children at all? If it’s meritorious not to bring a life into the world, thereby reducing future emissions, wouldn’t it be still more so to graciously put an end to your own? A grateful posterity would reward you with the most glorious of epitaphs: “She reduced her carbon footprint to zero.”

This take on life reminds me of a segment on CNN a few years back that has become a mainstay of my teaching. Health reporter Elizabeth Cohen profiled an Atlanta couple who belonged to a sect of radical valetudinarians. These wan creatures had become convinced that the secret of a long life lay in reducing oxidation to its barest minimum.

This meant limiting as much as possible the burning of calories. They devoted themselves to eating nothing but watercress and to doing nothing at all. At nightfall, they totted up the energy expended and, if this fell below the line they had set, they rejoiced mightily. If they hadn’t quite achieved suspended animation that day, they had come darned close. And, yes, they were actually hoping for another 140 years of this.

The subjects of Ms. Cohen, the health reporter, were concerned only with prolonging their own wretched lives, and were childless to that end. (Chase children around a playground, and oxidation is bound to occur.) The study’s authors appeal to our sense of cosmic justice: It’s not your skin you’re saving by your childlessness but that of our terrestrial mother. One child is already a stretch; three, five or (God forbid) eight are beyond the pale.

I’m sorry, learned researchers, but my calculus is different from yours. Looking at my own two children, now young adults, I find myself completely unrepentant. Even having read about your study, my wife and I wish we could have had more. Yes, there would be less carbon dioxide in the air had we remained childless, but the Earth would be a poorer place for it, and not just for us.

Young as they are, our sons have dared much and accomplished much. They have great plans, and not for practising virtues of omission. They, too, love the Earth and are resolved, in their different ways, to leave it better than they found it – not least by having healthy, ambitious children of their own. Tell you what: For each kid they do have, I’ll pay the carbon offset fee.

So sure, we could live for nothing so much as reducing our carbon footprint. We could define success in life in terms not of what we’ve accomplished but of how few resources we’ve used to accomplish anything. We could live life this way – if we wanted to live a misnomer.

My own prescription for those contemplating parenthood is different. Go ahead, have kids, the more the merrier. God has commanded it, and nature’s cool with it. Just don’t spoil them. Don’t load them with designer clothes, consumer electronics and expensive lessons to which they must be driven: Just send them out to play. They’ll thank you for it, and you can rest assured that the patter of active little feet leaves hardly any footprint. Still worried you haven’t done enough to reduce noxious emissions? Relax: You don’t keep a cow, do you?

By all means, let’s practise responsible stewardship of our battered orb. But let’s do it with an eye to enhancing human life, not reducing it to joylessness. This sensible environmentalism is out there, if not necessarily in learned studies. While walking on Toronto’s Bloor Street the other day, I saw a guy whose tastes pretty clearly didn’t run to watercress. His T-shirt, which read “Save Our Planet,” was embellished with an appropriate image of Earth floating in the celestial ether. And beneath that: “It’s the only one with beer.”

Clifford Orwin is a professor of political science at the University of Toronto and distinguished visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He’s also on the Board of Directors for Energy Probe Research Foundation.

Posted in Climate Change, Costs, Benefits and Risks, Energy Probe News | Leave a comment

Privatize city hall

Posted on August 10, 2009 by energyprbe

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
August 10, 2009

Toronto’s municipal strike is over. Some 30,000 garbage and other workers are back on the job. That’s at least 15,000 too many.

If the strike has taught Torontonians anything, it’s that the city does precious little for its residents. Now that the garbage is finally being picked up, Torontonians want to clean up the mess at City Hall. Most hold the Mayor in low regard, most hold the councillors in low regard, most hold the strikers in low regard, and most want to privatize garbage collection.

But why stop with outsourcing garbage services? Private firms can and should take over the many other functions that city workers have grabbed from private-sector firms who would treat city customers with more respect, and at lower cost. Striking 15,000 to 20,000 workers from the city payroll will not only improve the quality of city services, doing so will also lower taxes and create jobs throughout the wider city economy.

In the case of garbage collection, private-sector workers, who tend to be fitter and better managed, collect two and a half to three times as much garbage per person per hour as city workers. With garbage collection in private hands, not only would strikes disappear but streets will be cleared of garbage more quickly and traffic will be less disrupted. Exit 6,000 workers. Bonus: Toronto will also pocket a small fortune by selling its trucks and other garbage infrastructure.

The case for privatizing Toronto’s bloated water and sewage operations is also a slam dunk — other cities that have done so saw savings as high as 50%. CUPE has not only opposed water privatization in the past, it even objected to the city applying its Works Best Practices Program to its water and sewage operations. Little wonder — this program found that the city’s sewage system would run better without 400 of its 907 workers. By placing the city’s water and sewage works under the management of the most efficient operators, Toronto taxpayers not only stand to save $100-million, according to an estimate from United Water in 2001, but the unjustifiable hikes that we’ve seen in water rates would be staunched, along with many of the 1,500 water-main breaks the city suffers each year. Exit 1,500 workers.

Next, privatize the hugely inefficient Toronto Parking Authority. Although it is the largest in the continent, with 20 parking garages and 140 surface parking lots, it provides a pittance in revenue to the city, partly because it subsidizes parking for neighbourhoods that are politically well connected at the expense of neighbourhoods that aren’t. And partly because of its featherbedding and its wage levels — more than one-third of the monies that Torontonians pay in parking tickets or feed into parking machines feeds the parking authority’s payroll. Privatizing the parking authority would also help public transit compete against the car, because the parking authority subsidizes lots near subway stations. Exit 400 workers. Another bonus: The city would pocket hundreds of millions of dollar through the sale of the parking authority’s real estate and other assets.

The list of city-run enterprises that have no business being in municipal hands — and whose privatization has been urged by urban advocates such as Toronto’s own Jane Jacobs — goes on and on. They include the inefficient city-owned power company that gouges city customers with unjustifiably high fees, the city-owned transit company that has failed to provide the citizenry with affordable service, the city-owned houses and apartment blocks that so often become centres of despair, and the city-owned district heating operation that for decades has failed to use energy efficiently.

Privatizing these operations would lead to a more humane city, a more prosperous city, and a more environmentally friendly city. But why stop there?

The city’s own Prosperity Agenda and the Blueprint for Fiscal Stability and Economic Prosperity laments its under-utilized real estate holdings, which it conservatively values at $18-billion. It knows these holdings must be properly employed, in order to create employment and “regenerate Toronto.” Sell these off, too, and use the proceeds to cut taxes and provide the services that more suit cities, such as providing libraries, parks, policing and fire protection.

During Toronto’s 39-day strike, and garbage services aside, many remarked on how surprisingly well the city seemed to run, given that it lost so much of its vast workforce. The city didn’t much need its Mayor and councillors either — and Torontonians didn’t get many services from these “leaders” –because of these politicians’ reluctance to cross picket lines to attend municipal meetings. The city, in truth, is its citizenry. And the citizenry generally does best when it doesn’t need to carry the dead weight of the bureaucracy.

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe, divisions of Energy Probe Research Foundation, and author of Toronto Sprawls (University of Toronto Press). Continue reading →

Posted in Energy Probe News, Utility Reform | 1 Comment

Himalyan glaciers melting due to global warming is "hype," state Indian geologists

Posted on August 10, 2009 by energyprbe

Global warming is not causing Himalaya’s famous Siachen glacier to melt, state geologists R K Ganjoo and M N Koul of Jammu University’s Regional Centre for Field Operations and Research of Himalayan Glaciology. The geologists, who call claims that global warming is rapidly melting Siachen "hype," reported their finding in "Current Science" after visiting the Siachen glacier to record changes in its snout last summer.

The Siachen Glacier, immediately south of a watershed separating China from the Indian subcontinent, lies in the glaciated portion of the Himalaya’s Karakoram range. Siachen is the longest glacier in the Karakoram and second-longest in the world’s non-polar areas.

Contrary to the claims of global warming doomsayers, Ganjoo and Koul found no abnormal melting; neither did they find the melting that was occuring to be attributable to man-made causes. The geologists also dismiss claims by global warming doomsayers that the glacier, in the current Holocene period that followed the last Ice Age, was covered in 600-metre thick ice.

"To our surprise, the Siachen glacier valley does not preserve evidences of glaciation older than mid-Holocene, suggesting that the glacier must have advanced and retreated simultaneously several times in the geological past, resulting in complete obliteration and modification of older evidences," they stated.

There is sufficient field and meteorological evidence from the other side of Karakoram mountains that corroborate the fact that glaciers in this part of the world are not affected by global warming, they said.

As reported in Current Science: Overwhelming field geomorphological vidences suggest poor response of the Siachen glacier to global warming. The snout of the Siachen glacier of 2008 has retreated by about 8–10 m since 1995 dences. There are sufficient field and meteorological evidences from the other side of the Karakoram mountains that corroborate the fact that glaciers in this part of the world are not affected by global warming. The field studies
from other glaciers in India also corroborate the fact that inter- and intra-annual variations in weather parameters have more impact on the change in glaciers of NW Himalayas, rather than any impact due to global warming.

Ganjoo added that the east part of the Siachen glacier showed faster withdrawal of the snout that is essentially due to ice-calving, a phenomenon that holds true for almost all major glaciers in the Himalayas and occurs irrespective of global warming.

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Sources: James Hansen’s 1988 hearing on global warming before the committee on energy and natural resources

Posted on August 7, 2009 by energyprbe

August 7, 2009

James Hansen’s 1988 hearing on global warming before the committee on energy and natural resources

Posted in Climate Change, Costs, Benefits and Risks | Leave a comment

The two blows that killed the industry: Sources

Posted on August 1, 2009 by energyprbe

Lawrence Solomon

August 1, 2009

http://www.parl.gc.ca/36/1/parlbus/commbus/senate/Com-e/enrg-e/18eva-e.htm?Language=E&Parl=36&Ses=1&comm_id=5

http://www.probeinternational.org/files/3%20mile%20island.pdf

http://www.probeinternational.org/files/Linkages%20between%20local%20governments%20and%20financial%20markets.pdf

Posted in Nuclear Economics, Nuclear Power | Tagged nuclear costs | 1 Comment

The two blows that killed the industry

Posted on August 1, 2009 by energyprbe

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
August 1, 2009

No industry in history has held more promise, been more welcomed, received more favours and failed more spectacularly than the commercial nuclear power industry.

When U. S. president Dwight D. Eisenhower launched a civilian nuclear program in the early 1950s, it was to universal acclaim. Not only would nuclear reactors be safe and provide electricity that was too cheap to meter, it would help redeem a technology that had unleashed horrors at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Governments wholeheartedly backed nuclear power, as did the corporate world and the general public.

When anti-nuclear protesters in the 1950s and 1960s marched in favour of nuclear disarmament, they often coupled their desire to “Ban the Bomb” by advocacy for commercial nuclear power, in the hope of turning swords into ploughshares.

When the modern environmental movement began in the late 1960s and early 1970s, environmental groups, too, supported commercial nuclear power, Energy Probe among them. They saw nuclear power as a hopeful alternative to coal, the dominant polluting fuel.

There was no shortage of goodwill for commercial reactors; the failure of this technology to succeed was internal to itself.

Eisenhower was first to face facts on nuclear power’s limitations after the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) commissioned a study into the safety of nuclear power reactors. This study determined that a credible industrial accident at a modest-sized reactor near a modest-sized city could kill 3,400 people, injure 43,000 and cause $7-billion in property damage.

Although the risk of such an accident was low, the potential damage rendered nuclear plants uninsurable. Governments needed to step in to exempt electric utilities and manufacturers such as General Electric from liability — otherwise, these companies told governments, they could not risk being wiped out in the event of a serious accident.

But even after governments provided exemptions from liability, nuclear reactors were proving to be uncompetitive.

Energy Probe first opposed nuclear power on economic grounds, when its 1974 report found Ontario Hydro’s expansion plans to be uneconomic.

Only later would environmental groups add health and safety concerns to their critiques of nuclear power, and for good reason: In an attempt to gain economies of scale, reactor manufacturers tried building ever-larger reactors, leading not only to often-colossal cost overruns as the technology’s complexity stumped designers, but also to the larger health and safety risks that accompanied the up-sized reactors.

Because all nuclear plants were operated by utilities that were either government-owned or government-regulated, and without the financial discipline or disclosure required of private sector firms, the nuclear industry was able to expand well into the 1970s.

Then two blows hit the nuclear industry; it would never recover.

The first, a partial meltdown at Three Mile Island in 1979, led to more stringent safety regulation that further raised the industry’s costs while casting doubt on many of the safety and reliability claims that the industry had made.

The 1980s saw the cancellation of expansion plans and waves of defaults, such as the multi-billion default facing bondholders in the Washington Power Supply System.

The second blow — the United Kingdom’s privatization of the power industry in 1989 — utterly destroyed what was left of the industry’s credibility.

An editorial in the Observer, entitled “Nuclear Fantasy,” summed it up.

“It has taken the cold stare of the City [London’s financial district] to penetrate the veils of secrecy and deceit that have long enveloped the nuclear industry,” it wrote.

“Privatization has proved that nuclear power is hopelessly uneconomic and saddled with decommissioning costs that no private company could accept without huge guarantees from the government.

“Yet from the 1950s to a few months ago, anyone who breathed the slightest doubt about its viability was met with a blizzard of faulty figures and downright lies.”

The industry was now dead in the West, even if it took a while for Western governments to accept it.

Ontario became one of the very last Western jurisdictions to learn, although the lesson never seemed to completely sink in.

Successive Ontario governments came to power in the 1980s and 1990s promising (but failing) to stop the Darlington nuclear power station.

Darlington became one of the last plants to be completed in North America, coming in 10 years late, six times over-budget and bankrupting Ontario Hydro.

Nuclear power’s chief failing, then as now, remains economic.

Have governments now learned that nuclear power cannot compete? The facts on the ground say yes. History says no.

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and Urban Renaissance Institute and author of The Deniers: The World-Renowned Scientists Who Stood Up Against Global Warming Hysteria, Political Persecution, and Fraud.

Sources for this column