Oh for chrissake! That idiot James Hansen is at it again!!!!

[GliderGuider]

Will that man never learn?

Setting the Record Straight on Fracking

Just last week, 18 top scientists, including retired NASA climate scientist James Hansen, wrote a letter to Governor Jerry Brown in California urging a moratorium on fracking in the state. Shale gas and oil extraction through fracking, said the scientists, “is likely to worsen climate disruption, which would harm California’s efforts to be a leader in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.”

Recent studies also confirm that the common practice of shoving fracking waste down underground injection wells causes earthquakes. And we now understand how and why this happens: according to new a study in Science, deep-well injection of slippery fracking waste primes geological faults in ways that make them reactive to distant natural earthquakes. The result is a dangerous echo effect: a larger seismic event thousands of miles away can trigger swarms of smaller earthquakes on these critically stressed faults. This research supports other findings on earthquake swarms in Oklahoma, Texas and Ohio that are linked to oil and gas activities. Indeed, just this month, the Oklahoma Insurance Commissioner recommended that residents buy earthquake insurance—in the formerly unshakable state of Oklahoma.

When the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency discovered evidence of fracking-related water contamination in Pennsylvania, Texas and Wyoming, it could have sounded the alarm about the practice. It could have stood up for citizens’ rights to clean drinking water. It could have, at the very least, continued its line of inquiry. Instead, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has folded under industry pressure, and either buried, cast off or halted all three investigations. And when members of the public sent one million comments to President Obama and the Bureau of Land Management condemning their permissive approach to fracking on federal lands, Secretary Jewell simply ignored them and chose to offer public relations advice to the oil and gas industry, rather than work to protect communities and public lands that belong to all of us.

Secretary Jewell is right about one thing: there is a lot of misinformation out there. Unfortunately, it’s being spread by the oil and gas industry and has penetrated the talking points of President Obama and top administration officials. If President Obama and Secretary Jewell are serious about listening to the science and addressing climate change, they need to stop echoing industry, stand up for public health, make every effort to stop this destructive practice and keep fossil fuels in the ground.

Wait, what?

[GliderGuider]

1. Exploring Hansen's position(s) a little more deeply

Hansen looks at everything according to CO2 emissions. The life cycle CO2 emission profiles of nuclear and gas power plants are very different, due to the CO2 emitted during construction. The overnight cost of a nuclear plant is 5 to 6 times higher than an IGCC plant, so the CO2 emissions of construction can be expected to be higher by a similar factor. So it takes a while for the construction emissions of a nuclear plant to be offset by its lower operating emissions.

I can't imagine that the carbon footprint of nuclear power plant construction has escaped Hansen's notice - he's a fairly astute guy, after all. I suspect what's happened is he's concluded that it's a short term price worth paying for a long-term gain. I noticed a radical shift in my own assessment of nuclear power as I came to accept the high probability of a near-term loss of structural integrity in global civilization (how’s that for a fancy dance to avoid saying the word “collapse”?).

When I still thought things were going to keep on trucking for quite a while I was much less opposed to nuclear power. Then I figured out three things: we are in the grips of climate change, with the threat that poses to social stability; we are losing integrity already because of rising net energy costs (part of which is due to peak oil); and I finally understood that an unattended nuclear plant is a monumental due to the impact of environmental accidents (which brings up the “400-Fukushima” scenario). In the face of all that, nuclear power is an absolute non-starter.

Hansen gets climate change, but he hasn't yet grokked near-term collapse and the risk it poses to reactors. So he’s against fracking because of the climate, but he’s willing to accept the short-term carbon cost of a nuclear build-out. He believes that nuclear is the only scalable, high-density, low-operating-CO2 energy source that will keep civilization’s lights on. His risk assessment of fracking is correct, but his risk assessment of nuclear power is faulty. Such is the nature of belief – it gives rise to all kinds of inner contradictions. His cognitive dissonance in the face of Fukushima must be enormous.

[madokie]

2. Not to mention all the co2

during both the mining of the ore and the refining of that ore to usable fuel. Both very much energy intensive.

I'd like to see a peer reviewed co2 analysis of that whole process, from grave to fuel back to grave, so to speak, for nuclear fuel.

[GliderGuider]

3. According to the IPCC

The life cycle emissions for nuclear power are 16 gCO2/KWh and 470 gCO2/KWh for gas.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-cycle_greenhouse-gas_emissions_of_energy_sources

[madokie]

6. That page is in dispute

so I guess the jury is still out on that.
I'd like to see a peer reviewed assessment of exactly what the difference is, not a one sided opinion irregardless of which sides opinion it is.

[GliderGuider]

7. How much exactness do you need?

Nuclear power has enough strikes against it that CO2 emissions within +/- 50% would be utterly immaterial, to my way of thinking.

[CRH]

4. I know it appears cruel to say this, ...

but I think Hansen and nearly everyone else fall into the same insolvable dilemma.

Everyone is trying to to save the total unsustainable population with a vision that will maintain elevated lifestyles and even add to the middle class.

To me this is unrealistic. If attempts are to made to adapt to a future in crisis, a realism must be envisioned that all can't be saved, and expectations of lifestyles we presume as normal today need to scaled back to needs not wants.

There is not an good answer to who should survive, or what type of infra structure should be planned for the future. It is unrealistic to think an exercise in eugenics will in any way provide a better future. I feel, it should be more determined by Darwin than economists.

The people most suited to adaption to a chaotic future, might not be dominated by the educated, but rather the healthier most efficient people of the second and third world who still have a connection to 'old' agriculture, subsistence construction, and the knowledge for use of evolving local flora and fauna for food medicine and materials.

Planning of communities after the great migration begins, will be nothing what most people imagine today. Mining a dump will be more dependable for materials than waiting for a factory shipment. A pelican wheel more dependable than a pump, and a solar stove more realistic the GE.

I think in the future technologically moves backward not forward, status quo recedes to personal inventive ingenuity, and life will become more physical than cerebral.

Just my two cents, probably worth less.

[GliderGuider]

5. Not cruel, utterly realistic.

The dreamers will think it's cruel, though.

I'm currently working up a new line of logic that wraps the whole shebang together - economic and population growth, pollution, climate change, the operation of markets and consumerism, greed, denial, hierarchies, developing vs developed nations etc. - without even invoking thermodynamics.

The premise is that one of the most powerful evolutionary motivators in any social species (and arguably the most important for humans) is status:

High status promotes higher fitness than low status, and evidence supports a strong relation between social rank and fitness or well-being (Barkow, 1975; Cowlishaw & Dunbar,1991; Hill, 1984).

Evolutionary account: emotions are fitness-maximizing affective mechanisms that coordinate cognitive, motivational, physiological, behavioral, and subjective responses to recurrent environmental events of evolutionary significance (Cosmides & Tooby, 2000; Nesse & Ellsworth, 2009)

Quotes taken from this presentation:
http://courses.washington.edu/evpsych/pride%20&%20status.pptx

Everything we do can be traced back in one way or another to efforts to improve our social status within our various in-groups. Because it is an evolved mechanism and as such is controlled by neural circuitry that is beyond our ability to control, it is virtually impossible for us to transcend its influence. Even the rejection of status within one in-group is a status enhancement in another (either within a new in-group or a selected sub-group of the original).

It takes a great deal of sophistication and honest self-reflection to even detect its operation within ourselves (but much less to detect it in others, of course ) Because all growth in population, economics (production, consumption and the markets that join the two) and social complexity is driven by status seeking, and that originates down in our wiring, even if we detect it, it's virtually impossible to prevent or derail.

While we can't change our wiring, we can control our individual behavior, with great effort. The problem comes in when groups are involved. Achieving status in a group requires one to adopt the group's norms. If one rejects something that the group uses to judge status (like conspicuous consumption or being very serious) one has to either stay and accept having low status (something that is very hard for people to accept), or leave and find another group.

The bottom line is, our evolved nature as intelligent, cooperative social beings in a high-resource environment has irretrievably screwed us.

My thinking on this is still in the early stages, but stay tuned over the next few weeks...

[CRH]

8. I'll stay tuned, ...

what I basically take from your 'status logic', is that basically all humans are hard wired through emotion and react to the same stimuli, one being status as a hierarchic organizer of groups. We differ as individuals only through personal experience, education, capacity for applied intelligence and the ubiquitous, ego. But, our behavior is basically inescapable from our hardwiring.

I'll have to think about this, and how the herd instinct vs leader, free will vs indoctrination, how the maverick can become either a leader or outcast; how it all can fit into a pattern of logic that resists intelligent planning and action as a core motivation rather than hardwired emotion.

I'll stay tuned.

[NNadir]

9. How many people in the 60 year history of nuclear power were killed by...

reactors.

As many as will die in the next 5 hours from air pollution?

According to the Lancet analysis of risk factors and the burden of related diseases, a systematic overview of 21 world regions authored by a myriad of authors from around the world, outdoor particulate air pollution killed around 3.2 million people and indoor air pollution about 3.5 million people in 2010.

Lancet http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(12)61766-8/abstract

Lancet 2012; 380: 2224–60

Hansen gets it, because he's not a mathematical illiterate paranoid who states his own "beliefs" as if they are facts.

There is not one fucking paranoid on this planet who burns oil and gas to carry on insipidly about Fukushima who can point to as many deaths from the whole fucking affair as air pollution will kill in the next ten minutes.

And I note that there is not one fucking Fukushima paranoid on this planet who gives a shit that buildings, cars, trucks, oil refineries in the same damn quake caused 20,000 deaths. How come we never hear from this set of dumbbells that supporters of buildings have cognitive dissonance because buildings cause deaths in earthquakes and tsunamis?

Is there one paranoid anti-nuke who can demonstrate risk linked body burdens from all the radiation released at Fukushima that are likely to kill twenty people over the next twenty years. 50 people? A number of people who will die in the next hour from air pollution?

And yet...and yet...we have asinine statements about what is and what is not "cognitive dissonance."

Hansen's totally and completely right. His paper is irrefutable. Nuclear power saves lives, and it saves the environment and it follows that anti-nuke ignorance kills people.

[GliderGuider]

10. In the 60-year history of nuclear power

Has it ever displaced enough fossil fuels to cause a drop in global CO2 emissions? Like renewable energy, it's largely additive to fossil fuel consumoption. Nuclear power and hydro probably helped slow the rise of CO2 emissions in the 70's, but low-carbon power has never, in the last 200 years, been able to reverse the rise of atmospheric CO2.

You can wax as contemptuous as you wish, but it won't change the simple fact that we need to leave the rest of the carbon in the ground. We're not doing that so far, and I see nothing in the policy pipeline today that will accomplish it.