Michigan House District 11 Candidate Nancy Skinner is making climate change a centerpiece of her campaign, going into next month’s primary, and has come out swinging with the piece you see above. She is in the running for Bill Maher’s #FlipADistrict effort.
Last week I posted a bit of distilled climate paranoia, in a video from a Louisiana congressional primary, where Sara Pailin clone Lenar Whitney laid out the complete conspiracist’s looniest fantasy of climate science as a global plot. The piece has appeared in a lot of places, and I think its an example of looney climate denial having jumped the shark in the American mind.
Now, hardly a week later, I can show you another view, above – one that every serious pollster tells us is true. Climate Change is becoming a winning issue.
Anthony Leiserowitz for the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication:
Today, we are releasing a special report on The Politics of Global Warming, based on our spring 2014 nationally representative survey. We find that registered voters are 2.5 times more likely to vote for a congressional or presidential candidate who supports action to reduce global warming. Further, registered voters are 3 times more likely to vote against a candidate who opposes action to reduce global warming.
Many Americans are also willing to act politically:
- 26% are willing to join or are currently participating in a campaign to convince elected officials to take action to reduce global warming;
- 37% are willing to sign a pledge to vote only for political candidates that share their views on global warming;
- 13% are willing to personally engage in non-violent civil disobedience against corporate or government activities that make global warming worse.
The study also finds that while Democrats are more convinced that human-caused global warming is happening and more supportive of climate and energy policies than Republicans, there are deep divisions within the Republican Party. In many respects, liberal/moderate Republicans – about a third of the Republican party – are relatively similar to moderate/conservative Democrats, while conservative Republicans often express views about global warming that are distinctly different than the rest of the American public.
For example, among registered voters:
- 88% of Democrats, 59% of Independents and 61% of liberal/moderate Republicans think global warming is happening, compared to only 28% of conservative Republicans;
- 81% of Democrats and 51% of liberal/moderate Republicans are worried about global warming, compared to only 19% of conservative Republicans;
- 82% of Democrats and 65% of liberal/moderate Republicans support strict carbon dioxide emission limits on existing coal-fired power plants to reduce global warming and improve public health, compared to only 31% of conservative Republicans.
Scientists already are observing climate changes in the United States. They will grow worse. Higher seas mean higher storm surges and more at-risk property along heavily populated coasts — $66 billion to $106 billion worth will likely be below sea level by mid-century. The annual national storm cleanup tab will balloon. As the country warms, the average American will likely see a month’s worth — or more — of days over 95 degrees. The South and Southwest will be much hotter than that. The analysis considered how many cold-related deaths further warming would prevent and concluded that heat-related deaths would outweigh the potential benefit. Similarly, farmers in northern latitudes might see longer growing seasons, but those farther south, in what has been prime farming country, will have to make costly adjustments, changing what they grow and developing crops that can adapt to climate extremes. In the long term, uncontrolled warming could even produce days in the United States in which humans literally could not survive long without air conditioning.
“Hope is not a strategy,” Mr. Paulson said to us. But that is the strategy that Congress, in its perpetual inaction, is taking: Hoping that the scientists are dramatically wrong — or at least that the country can deal with the problem later. If Congress were the board of a large company, ignoring such a serious risk would give shareholders ample reason to fire every head-in-the-sand director. Voters might want to contemplate the analogy this November.
Below, for comparison, the crazed climate denial porn of Lenar Whitney.
Amazing what a bunch of loonies many US citizens have become thanks to vast misinformation by Corporate America. Goebbels could have learnt from those.
I checked Nancy Skinner’s site. Solar panels. Solar roads. Everything that’s favored… by the natural gas lobby, because their product will be the one filling in all the output gaps in the renewables.
I have yet to see a candidate pushing Fermi 3 and 4, Palisades 2 and 3, a new thrust for carbon-free steam for Dow Midland or a revival of generation at Big Rock Point. And when the wind farms are stilled and the sun goes down, it’ll be right back to fossil fuels even if Nancy Skinner makes good on everything she says.
Which of her sites are you talking about? I searched on her Facebook page, her Wikipedia page, her campaign site and her official site as well as the articles linked from her Wikipedia page and I couldn’t find anything specifically mentioning solar panels or solar roads.
Everywhere I found her talking about energy generation she used the term “renewables”. And that’s sensible. Policy that dictates the type of renewable ends up being inefficient because it ignores areas where that type of energy generation isn’t effective. The term “renewables” could be considered to include nuclear in the sense that the fuel will last far, far beyond our reserves of coal, oil and gas. She may not be a supporter of nuclear but I can’t find any evidence that she’s against it.
Gas has one major advantage that nuclear does not: plants can be switched on and off and can scale their output up and down much more easily than nuclear. We have no control over when the sun shines or the wind blows so to produce the required amount of power over the entire system, we need a variable generator that can fill that gap without overrunning and wasting energy that no one wants.
Research suggests that solar and wind (and others such as tidal, hydro, geothermal, etc) can provide baseload power when combined. Concentrated solar stores heat energy in molten salt or steam which is used to generate electricity at night. Excess energy from wind is stored as pumped water and compressed air. Electricity is also transmitted around from where it’s sunny to where it isn’t and from where it’s windy to where it isn’t. If you have a good mix of different types of energy generation across a diverse geographic area, there’s always somewhere that’s generating electricity. As we bring more and more renewables online, the gaps in which gas is required become smaller and smaller.
What I’d like to see is someone campaigning on reducing our energy usage rather than generating more energy cleanly. It’s quicker, it’s cheaper and it pays for itself.
Try the campaign site, such as this background image and the link “Solar Roads” about midway down the main page.
Not as the term is commonly used. Aside from lake-fed hydro, renewables are not very successful at displacing fossil-fired energy (not available on demand) and are not capable of getting us to GHG neutrality.
What we need is GHG-free generation. Whether the energy comes from hydrogen fusing today or hydrogen fused 4.7 billion years ago and made into energy-rich heavy nuclei, we need something other than combustion. The beauty of the heavy nuclei is that they aren’t trickled to us in an intermittent flow, but handed to us as a stockpile that we can extract at need. They fill the same niche as the combustion fuels, and can displace vast amounts of them. Solar, not so much; even the Ivanpah plant had to be sited next to a gas pipeline to fill in for when the sun isn’t shining.
If she’s not elected with it in her platform, her chances of publicly supporting it later are nil.
Isn’t that interesting? I’ve been looking at a completely different Nancy Skinner. The one whose Wikipedia page says she’s a politician rather than the one that says she’s a radio commentator.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Skinner_%28California_politician%29
vs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Skinner_%28commentator%29
I guess I should have clicked the link at the top of the article rather than doing a Google search for “Nancy Skinner”. Or paid attention to some of the other details like the congress/assembly or the Michigan/California discrepancies.
And yes, when searching the correct site, I can indeed find specific endorsements for solar roadways which is somewhat depressing. Those things are ridiculous. Popular, but ridiculous.
In fact, my impression of *this* Nancy Skinner is that she’s doing nothing but media soundbites and has no serious policies (that she’s letting us know about, anyway). She’s treating this like a popularity contest.
She’s trying to get elected. OF COURSE she’s treating it like a popularity contest!
That’s a design issue. There’s nothing that prevents a nuclear plant from dumping steam directly to condensers to modulate its output as fast as the turbine can stand the temperature changes. But that begs the question, why would you want to? It makes far more sense to put “excess” power to use making ice for later A/C, stashing heat for future space heat or DHW, or doing some other energy-intensive but capital-cheap job that can be deferred for days or weeks without holding up anything else.
But nobody’s actually made it work yet, even where all of those things are available nearby. We should have started full-scale construction efforts 20 years ago; we have no time to dilly-dally.
Which begs the question: where do you intend to get the energy to replace all the energy-intensive devices that would need replacing? Or is that merely a euphemism for imposed poverty?
If you try to impose poverty on people, they’ll rebel. They’ll burn coal if it’s the only thing they’ve got ready to hand. They’ll denude their forests. Actually cleaning up the environment requires energy; environmentalism is a luxury of the rich. Keeping people out of poverty while eliminating GHG emissions takes careful planning and good engineering. The ham-fisted RPSes, PTCs and FITs are neither.
=It makes far more sense to put “excess” power to use making ice for later A/C, stashing heat for future space heat or DHW, or doing some other energy-intensive but capital-cheap job that can be deferred for days or weeks without holding up anything else.=
I wonder if it would be feasible to supply the Haber-Bosch process with enough heat from unwanted power? Further they use natural gas as a source of hydrogen presently, but Haber originally supplied the hydrogen by way of electrolysis of water. Perhaps if it was possible this could be done in the norther hemisphere’s winter where demand for fertilizer would not be so pressing…
The Haber process is energetically “downhill”; it needs no energy input beyond the hydrogen.
The Stranded Wind Project (apparently defunct, with their website taken over by opportunists) was about direct elelctrolytic production of ammonia from water and nitrogen. The ammonia-synthesis cells were to be powered by excess wind power. I have no idea how far they got as far as capital cost and energetic efficiency before they gave up, but I suspect that they looked at the economics (cost of capitaland electric input vs. price of product) and decided that it just wasn’t going to fly.
Your question “Why would you want to?” has come about because you assumed that gas plants alter the output by wasting both fuel and energy. No one *would* want to do that. Gas plants can alter their output by altering their input. Less fuel in means less power out. Nuclear plants (and coal plants) take much longer to start up and shut down than gas plants do.
I don’t see any problem with nuclear dumping excess power the way you describe but, of course, it would be much smarter to use that energy to create something useful, such as pumped hydro or molten salt.
Solar and wind have very quick startup and shutdown times but only when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing (I’m sure you’re abundantly aware of this) so having a type of plant that can shut down quickly when the clouds blow away is quite handy.
Making renewables work as baseload is partly about storage and partly about geographic separation. It will always be windy and/or sunny somewhere on your continent. Building excess capacity and transmission are the challenges here.
There have been a few recent articles on The Conversation about storage and baseload, one optimistic, another pessimistic and a third talking about the challenges and solutions:
http://theconversation.com/how-pushing-water-uphill-can-solve-our-renewable-energy-issues-28196
http://theconversation.com/renewables-still-have-a-long-way-to-go-to-compete-with-fossil-fuels-28670
http://theconversation.com/relying-on-renewables-need-not-mean-dealing-with-blackouts-28635
Molten salt in concentrated solar plants already works to provide 24 hour electricity (in some places such as Spain; it won’t work everywhere all the time). Several other technologies work in different ways to the same end, but all at relatively low scales so far. Scaling is the challenge with storage.
I completely agree with you about getting started now. (Or 20 years ago.)
Enforced poverty is a silly idea. What I’m talking about is better efficiency. LED lighting, retrofitted regenerative braking, heat energy recovery (Rankine cycle, like they’re doing in F1 this year), improved housing insulation, etc. If efficiency is framed as an engineering challenge, engineers seem to be able to rise to the occasion.
The government’s role would be to incentivise these changes, probably by offsetting the initial upfront cost of buying and installing these things to a later time when the recipient has already made some savings from the improved efficiency. The Australian government has already been doing some of that with the lighting, although it was CFLs rather than LEDs, and I seem to remember them promoting insulation during my teens. How about reducing the diesel subsidy for mining companies and subsidising kinetic and heat energy recovery systems instead?
The government can also help by investing in research, in exactly the opposite way to what the Australian government has been doing with the CSIRO.
I don’t have a big problem with nuclear (which seems to be your preferred option) and a variety of generation methods is a good idea. I’d much rather see coal plants shut down than nuclear plants shut down.
Just checked her website and she has an article on Thorium-fueled nuclear reactors under the “issues” section.
I searched http://www.skinnerforcongress.com/issues and found nothing that mentioned “nuclear”, “thorium” or even “energy”.
It’s a pull-down option under issues. I guess they haven’t kept up to date on the main issues blog?
And if you are using NoScript, you never see the pull-downs.
Web designers are not too bright sometimes. Make that most times.
Hahaha, good comment! I’ll have to pass that info along to Skinner’s webmaster. I like her message and I don’t want anyone to miss out on it!
Digging through her site, her thorium page does not offer any hint of support for any reactor technology currently available for construction (AP1000, EPR) or even offered (S-PRISM). This looks like a signal that she is safely on the anti-nuclear side for at least several terms—not one of those dangerous people who says we should start building carbon-free base load right now, because the climate won’t wait!
— A Dangerous Person
Lets hope no more serious damage to the nukes is unleashed in Japan by the oncoming Typhoon:
http://www.ibtimes.com/super-typhoon-threatens-three-japans-nuclear-power-plants-1620626
At least they have been shut down and evacuated:
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/japan-typhoon-neoguri-500000-evacuated-3826036
I’m chuffed that they used my ice cube animation, even without attribution!
I am so sorry about that. I am a volunteer for her campaign, and we just updated the description so you get the credit you deserve. We apologize greatly
Thanks very much Kaitlin and William, would be good if you could include the urls too in case people would like to learn more…
Ice cube video url is: http://youtu.be/9OBCXWAHo5I
Cheers!
another comment from a volunteer is awaiting moderation.
We added a reference section to the video description which we produced before we released the video), and are looking into adding annotations.
I apologize for overlooking the fact that the reference section hadn’t been added when the video was first released.
It is very disappointing that Skinner’s website now includes a page promoting thorium reactors. This is now the first page linked on the “Issues” drop-down menu. I previously did some browsing around on her website and did not see this, so it appears that it was recently added.
Rather than listening to the propaganda and hype by the thorium promoters, I highly recommend that you listen to this discussion of thorium by the very knowledgeable and highly-credible Dr. Arjun Makhijani:
Dr. Arjun Makhijani on the downsides of the proposed thorium reactors and why solar power will save money and save lives
http://ifyoulovethisplanet.org/?p=6100
Interviewed by Helen Caldicott, and presumably no more honest than she is (which is to say, if she says the sky is blue, check it yourself).
I don’t think it is valid to assume that Makhijani is not honest simply because he was interviewed by Helen Caldicott.
Note that Makhijani’s book Carbon-Free and Nuclear-Free: A Roadmap for U.S. Energy Policy is available free here:
http://ieer.org/resource/reports/carbon-free-and-nuclear-free/
This includes several summary documents.
Here is more on thorium that has nothing to do with Helen Caldicott:
Thorium: the wonder fuel that wasn’t
http://thebulletin.org/thorium-wonder-fuel-wasnt7156
This is published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and is written by Robert Alvarez, who is a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies. Alvarez served as senior policy adviser to the Energy Department’s secretary and deputy assistant secretary for national security and the environment from 1993 to 1999.
National Renewable Energy Lab has a model for carbon free generation. See the very end of the video:
http://youtu.be/rF9H7aIYAzE
Actually 80 to 90% renewables….
A video is not a scientific paper, and a paper is a long, long way from even a proof of concept.
One of the things that jumped out at me in that video is the geographic dispersion of energy sources. The electric grid and pipeline networks are simply not set up to deal with long-distance transport of huge amounts of energy between arbitrary points. Every right-of-way would be another Keystone XL battle. You can guess what the chances are of doing this quickly even if you can afford all the construction: zero.
Yes it is. Caldicott is a hard-line ideologue who would never spread the views of an honest broker. If she interviews someone, they are a birds of a feather.
But is it technically correct? I’ve got a pile of other stuff I got for free that’s actually worth reading; I deal with enough propaganda already.
Yes, under Hazel O’Leary, who was instrumental in killing the Integral Fast Reactor project (despite having to refund Japan’s contribution, which was greater than the cost of running the program to completion) and the entire US advanced nuclear reactor development program with it. For all intents and purposes, O’Leary and Alvarez made the world safe for coal for another 20 years.
agree Caldicott is not a reliable source.