Gore’s Mistake
Al Gore makes quite some mistakes when he tries to explain to people what they (we) should do about global warming, but Vincent Carroll explains one of those mistakes quite well: Gore’s impossible ‘plan’ for the US to “commit to producing 100 percent of our electricity from renewable energy and truly clean carbon-free sources within 10 years.”
Why is this ’solution’ a mistake, you ask? Well, for starters because it is impossible. Whatever the US does, no matter how much the US invests in renewable energy, “100 percent” is impossible.
Furthermore, if one would try it, one would have to invest bigtime and would have to be willing to destroy many businesses currently operating. ‘This would of course require utilities to mothball hundreds of existing power plants as they launched a crash construction program of solar plants, wind farms and transmission lines costing hundreds of billions and perhaps trillions of dollars,’ Carroll writes.
This means that ‘Gore would subject 300 million people to an experiment [my emphasis] in which baseload power that is needed 24 hours a day to keep the economy - and our livelihoods - humming is replaced willy nilly by power sources still susceptible to natural disruption (such as lack of wind or lingering cloud cover), that cost more (at least in the case of solar) and are far less plentiful in some regions than others (Colorado is lucky at least in that regard).’
As a result he would ‘inflict monumental utility price hikes on consumers who’d pay for both the shutdown of old plants and construction of the new - with who knows what economic fallout.’
‘The idea reflects a shocking indifference to the possible fragility of an economy subjected to a force-fed “transformative” (Gore’s word) experience. History rarely is kind to such ambitions, with the most catastrophic example occurring 50 years ago in China. That’s when Mao Zedong launched his Great Leap Forward - the hare-brained effort to transform that nation into an industrial power within a few years by, among other things, dotting the landscape with backyard furnaces to make steel,’ the author goes on to explain.
Gore often says that ‘we’ should be bold and courageous. ‘We’ should. But ‘we’ should not be stupid. There is a difference between acting wisely and acting silly. Gore’s plans are all too often silly. He seems to be willing to destroy Western economies even though he cannot possibly be sure - not even confident - about the outcome of his proposed experiment. ‘We’ know that the goals he proposes can never be achieved. It is literally impossible. But still, Gore and his supporters are more than willing to take big risks, which could very well result in the destruction of the economy, and big financial problems for individual citizens.
The reality is that at this moment extremists like Gore dominate the debate about global warming / climate change. On the conservative side in the US we have people who simply ignore the fact that climate change is real, and that humans contribute to it (at least to some degree), while the progressive side is dominated by those who consider it perfectly alright to cause tremendous economic chaos, as long as ‘the environment’ thrives.
It is time for the pragmatists to step in.
"It is time for the pragmatists to step in."
You mean the people who have ruled everything for quite some time? Don’t be silly.
No Gore’s plan is unneccesary - as long as we protect people who want to live together with nature and were there first, as long as we protect the third-world, as long as we protect the diversity of life on earth and do not cause irreperable damage to the interlocking systems of wind, coral reefs, ocean streams, fish, forests etc. we can actually burn quite a lot. So us in Sweden will see some more ticks, slugs, boars, palm trees and whatnot. I guess we can adapt to that seeing as we can’t stop our consumerism.
We don’t 100 % renewable energy. We just have to be willing to take responsibility for our pollution so that people who don’t deserve to suffer (third-world people who don’t pollute, rainforest tribes, our children) are safe and can live as they want.
But Gore is right in one aspect - the people who bend principles, are willing to let things seep through the cracks, just can’t bother with really imposing the golden rule on humanity, the pragmatists and realpolitikers all help to dilute everything, to blunt and slow the simple message that an incredible number of things need doing. So in order to get a "good enough" world tomorrow, we need to demand a perfect world today. Otherwise "good enough" will also be denied us.
What is "silly" and what is "pragmatic" can, at times like these, be other than what they seem. Wasn’t it "silly" to so disrupt the ecosystem so that the tipping point to catastrophic climate change has been passed? (BTW, Gore is too late in making this challenge. Even if he had done so when testifying before Congress a year ago March he would have been too late.) What is "pragmatic" about labeling anything "impossible?" When systems collapse doesn’t little but the "impossible" keep happening? In the US, and since 1971–when our currency became a Federal Reserve note (and the final usurping of the power given Congress in Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution was effected)–ours has been an economy where to grow personal wealth, debt must increase in society. Is it pragmatic or silly to think that the resulting proliferation of debt that has been resulted from this unconstitutional activity can ever result in secure wealth? When Nixon, in 1973, brokered the deal with the Saudi’s to support their dictatorship in exchange for the US dollar being used to denominate OPEC oil sales, was that silly or pragmatic? Short term it allowed for the inflation of the money supply without any negative consequences of such behavior. Wealth seemed to grow and the government avoided some, otherwise, tough choices and times. As the global petro-dollar the value of the US dollar has been "golden" even if the debt backing our currency is dross–and now is being reveled to not even be . . . well, is it time to review what the French went through when the Mississippi Bubble burst and John Law’s theory of paper currency–as it came to be abused–was discredited?
Most new coal plants or existing coal plants are capable of producing 450-650 Megawatts of electricity.
New Nuke plants are capable of producing 3400 megawatts. That is essentially 1 nuke plant to replace 5 coal plants.
As it stands now there are 600 coal plants in America. We would need 133 new Nuke plants to replace those. At about 8 billion per plant that is 1 trillion dollars of investment.
Aint gonna happen.
1250 Kilowatt hours per year to recharge the electric car that only goes 50 miles per day…….thats the average mileage driven per year by Americans. Hence we get 1250 KWH times 250 million cars or we need 312,500,000,000 Kilowatt hours of electricity to charge all those new cars on the road each year. That translates to 312 GigawattHours of power production which is currently 10 times what we produce now and in addition that is ADDITIONAL to our current usage. So we would need 444 gigawathours of future electricity to generate the power used to fuel electric cars.Currently we produce about 30 gigawatthours per year. Extrapolating out we would need 133 nuke plants to replace 600 dirty coal plants.In addition if we got rid of all gasoline and simply went with diesel only to haul freight then we would need 22 million Wind Turbines at the cost of………3.96 trillion dollars.So to reach Al Gores number we would need to build 133 nuke plants and 22 million wind turnbines at a cost of 5 trillion dollars and lay off about 600 coal plants x 1200 workers or about 720,000 people.To replace just the coal plants and not the gas fired plants, and to build all electric cars for transportation and continue to use diesel for hauling freight.Al GORE is a NITWIT.
"At about 8 billion per plant that is 1 trillion dollars of investment. Aint gonna happen."
What is that in Operation Iraqi Freedoms?
"Al GORE is a NITWIT."
I perfectly agree. So how many third-world climate refugees are you ready to house in the future?
utsu there is no way in the world that we could build 133 nuke plants in 10 years. I guess facts overwhelm you.
There is no way we can install 22 million wind plants in 10 years or build 250 million non greenhouse producing gas cars.
Facts are facts.
Opps my bad. I just noticed I said 22 million. I should have said 2.2 million wind plants.
Rignot and Kanagaratnam say their calculations indicate that the Greenland melt currently contributes about two-hundredths of an inch (0.5 millimeters) to the annual 0.12-inch (3-millimeter) rise in global sea levels. The glacier speed-up is responsible for more than two-thirds of that contribution, they say.
So lets see the oceans are rising at 1/10th of an inch per year…in 100 years the oceans will rise 10 inches…….I can see why the global warming people are so desperate to figure out where were going to put all those displaced people.