Energy alternatives
hrynyshyn | September 7, 2017The Conference Board of Canada, usually described as a business-friendly think tank, has come out with a report that is refreshingly honest, and even a bit subversive — especially if you pay extra attention to some sidebars, consider what the authors deliberately left out, and are at least a little familiar with the science of power consumption and generation.
The full report, which is behind a freewall — it is downloadable for the cost of supplying your contact information — concludes that converting Canada's economy to a carbon-free energy mix won't actually cost all that much. But what I…
hrynyshyn | August 24, 2017The most charitable comment I can come up with for the just-released Department of Energy Staff Report to the Secretary on Electricity Markets and Reliability is the refusal of the authors to use what is surely a candidate for Most Overused Term of the Year: resilience. Not that resilience isn't important, but it's to their credit that the staffers responsible for telling Secretary Rick Perry sort-of what he wanted to hear understand that reliability is really what it's all about.
After all, if there's one thing that defenders of fossil fuels and nuclear power like to remind us more than…
hrynyshyn | March 14, 2013Among those who spend their working lives and/or spare time worrying about climate change, there are many subjects that still provoke heated debates, so to speak. Chief among them is the wisdom or folly of turning to natural gas as a "bridge" between the carbon-intensive oil- and coal-dominated present and the clean renewable future that we all know is coming sooner or later. The opponents just found their case a little bit stronger thanks to another controversial issue: nuclear power.
Natural gas is, as anyone with a basic grasp of the fundamentals of greenhouse gas forcings can tell you,…
hrynyshyn | January 6, 2012Barring a miraculous revival of the fortunes of Jon Huntsman, Republicans this year will, for the first time, elect a presidential nominee who does not believe that humans are responsible for global warming. How did things get this bad?
The Climate Desk team found a few of the last Republicans among the party's leadership who break with this new orthodoxy and spliced their heresies together in this video.
One can also dredge up a few brave souls who are trying to make difference at the GOP's grassroots, groups like Republicans for Environmental Responsibility. This particular collection of…
hrynyshyn | September 19, 2011Fill in the blanks:
It is customary in the popular media and in many journal articles to cite a projected _________ figure as if it were a given, a figure so certain that it could virtually be used for long-range planning purposes. But we must carefully examine the assumptions behind such projections. And forecasts that ________ is going to level off or decline this century have been based on the assumption that the developing world will necessarily follow the path of the industrialized world. That is far from a sure bet.
That comes from an essay at Yale's e360.
Given that you're reading a…
hrynyshyn | September 9, 2011A letter in Climatic Change looking at the life-cycle greenhouse warming potential of natural gas raised a lot of hackles a little while back. If, as the authors posit, replacing coal and oil combustion with gas-fired turbines could actually accelerate global warming rather than slow it down, then we have a serious problem, given the investments being made in gas.
Much the skepticism about that study could be traced to the background of the lead author, Robert Howarth, who happens to have a history of opposing gas fracking. Of course, Howarth's scientific credentials, or his activism, have…
hrynyshyn | July 15, 2011Way back when I was just a novice environmentalist, Greenpeace seemed like a good idea. It published a decent newsletter, was drawing attention to otherwise neglected issues, and, while understandably suspicious of technology, seemed to have more than a grudging respect for science as a tool to preserve those things worse preserving. It was one of the few NGOs that received what little I could afford to donate to charitable causes. I don't regret supporting them in the 80s, and not just because I shared the group's desire to save the whales.
I still want to save the whales. I no longer…
hrynyshyn | June 20, 2011Debating the merits and dangers of fracking shale gas has become a major obession of those who worry about energy and the climate. Yale's e360's latest contribution comes in the form a forum that includes a wide variety of perspectives pro and con.
For me, the wisest observation, and the one that really trumps all others, comes from Kevin Anderson, who directs the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research's energy program:
... the only responsible action with regard to shale gas, or any "new" unconventional fossil fuel, is to keep it in the ground -- at least until there is a meaningful…
hrynyshyn | June 9, 2011The flaws with Wednesday's anti-renewables op-ed in the New York Times begin with the headline and continue through just about every paragraph. On second thought, perhaps the problems begin with the decision of the New York Times to run "The Gas Is Greener" in the first place. But let's start with the headline.
"The Gas is Greener" may seem like a clever double entendre, referring as it does to wishful thinking and the alleged merits of natural gas as a relatively clean source of energy. But it fails on both counts. First, the entire essay is predicated on the notion that environmentalists…
hrynyshyn | May 26, 2011OK. Taking on logical flaws in Wall Street Journal op-ed items is about as difficult as shooting fish in a barrel, but I can't let Matt Ridley's latest affront to common sense pass without firing off a few rounds for practice if nothing else.
Under a staggeringly unimaginative headline of "Inconvenient Truths About 'Renewable' Energy," Ridley argues that renewable energy isn't really renewable, or at least no more renewable that fossil fuels. How does he go about this without shattering his backbone? By pointing out that Haitians are destroying their half of their island home by cutting down…
hrynyshyn | April 28, 2011What if we could avoid hundreds of thousand of deaths, billions of dollars in crop losses and trillions of dollars in healthcare expenditures simply by spreading off-the-shelf technology and industrialized-world regulations to developing nations? Oh, and along the way, we'd mitigate a fair bit of global warming. Sounds like a plan?
I'd say such a plan would be worth considering. Such a plan is outlined by a team led by NASA's Drew Shindell in Nature Climate Change, which has generously made their paper, "Climate, health, agricultural and economic impacts of tighter vehicle-emission standards…
hrynyshyn | April 15, 2011Proponents of shale gas extraction are not particularly pleased with the attention drawn this week to a new study in Climatic Change that found widespread development of Marcellus natural gas may actually accelerate climate change rather than slow it down. Unfortunately for them, their primary argument rests on a lack of hard data on 1) the actual greenhouse-warming potential of methane; and 2) how much methane finds its way into the atmosphere during drilling and transmission of natural gas. You can find a good summary of the defense's case at something called the Marcellus Shale Coalition.…
hrynyshyn | April 12, 2011It was in Bill McKibben's first, and arguably best, book, The End of Nature, that I first came across the challenge posed by fugitive emissions. Back then -- just 20-some years ago -- natural gas was touted as a cleaner alternative to coal and oil because the combustion of its primary constituent, methane, results in markedly fewer CO2 emissions than other fossil fuels.
That argument is being made even more forcefully now. Everyone and his or her dog is touting the advantage of converting coal mines and car engines to natural gas as a way to mitigate global warming, as well as reduce oil…
hrynyshyn | April 6, 2011We can't seem to stop thinking about nuclear power. Given what's at stake -- the biosphere, the economy, our genetic integrity -- this is understandable. But I think too many are getting distracted from the fundamental problem with splitting atoms and arguing scientific questions we are unlikely to resolve anytime soon.
Much of the recent hand-wringing is a reaction to George Monbiot's quasi-conversion to a nuclear power advocate. His latest column, Evidence Meltdown, practically radiates scorn for the "anti-nuclear movement," which he manages to reduce to a monolithic cult led by Helen…
hrynyshyn | March 21, 2011There's an amusing little video making the rounds, and receiving a largely positive response. Which is unfortunate, because it's little more than government-industry propaganda that glosses over the colossal abrogation of responsibility that led to the Fukushima crisis.
At first glance, the cartoon does an exemplary job explaining the situation to Japanese schoolchildren too young to understand half-lives and the role of water as a coolant and moderator in boiling-water reactors. But there's a gaping omission right at the beginning. Nuclear Boy has a stomach ache. No kidding. Why? This is…
hrynyshyn | March 16, 2011How nuclear power is perceived by the general public will take decades to return to what it was a week ago. (Kind of like radioactive decay.) But the list of immutable and defining characteristics of the technology is long one and nothing that happens in Japan is likely to change them. First up: the daunting economics.
Each gigawatt reactor costs upwards of $14 billion these days. And climbing. As the increasingly useful Climopedia at Climate Central puts it: "the question on many peoples' minds today is not what the last nuclear power plant cost, but rather what the next nuclear plant will…
hrynyshyn | March 14, 2011At one end of the hyperbole scale we have Helen "If you love this planet" Caldicott, who raises the specter of "cancer and genetic diseases" if things get any worse at the growing list of nuclear power reactors crippled or destroyed by last week's earthquake in Japan. At the other we have Republican congressman Mitch McConnell, who argues that we shouldn't abandon nuclear power, especially "right after a major environmental catastrophe."
In between the pundits and genuine experts are pointing out that the mining, processing, and burning of fossil fuels kill hundreds or even thousands of times…
hrynyshyn | February 23, 2011Ray Kurzweil might be right. It could very well be that Moore's law can be applied to all forms of technology, and within a couple of decades clean, renewable forms of power production will be so cheap they will have replaced all fossil fuels. Hey, it could happen. Maybe even it's not just possible, but probable. Kurweil calls it the law of accelerating returns:
Today, solar is still more expensive than fossil fuels, and in most situations it still needs subsidies or special circumstances, but the costs are coming down rapidly -- we are only a few years away from parity. And then it's going…
hrynyshyn | February 21, 2011We all know we need to get off fossil fuels and replace them with carbon-neutral alternatives. The question is not IF we should choose this path, but how best to get where we need to go. There are those who, fairly enough, worry that those clean renewables aren't up to the job. This is a critical question, because if renewables can't fill the void, then we are left with no option but to build more nuclear reactors, with all the myriad problems that accompany them, most notably price, which is forever rising. So much money is at stake that we need to sort out this question, soon.
It all boils…
hrynyshyn | February 16, 2011As a father of a four-year-old, I'm a big fan of Bob the Builder. The basic plot of each episode of the charming stop-motion children's series revolves around one or more pieces of heavy machinery learning self-discipline, which, as a new PNAS study shows, is a key skill associated with success and happiness later in life. I also like the optimism embedded in the catch-phrase that Bob's machine team invariably declares: "Can we build it? Yes we can!"
If only that can-do spirit were as evident in the public debate over how to respond to the threat of climate change. Recently a spate of reports…