Garbage in Power Out

One of the more interesting technologies to emerge from the last few decades of interest in alternative energy is plasma gasification, or more properly plasma arc gasification. The plasma is produced from an arc of electricity. You can think of it as a controlled and continuous bolt of lightning. It was originally developed by NASA as a means of simulating reentry temperatures for spacecraft. The Army adopted it in the early nineties as a way of destroying hazardous chemicals, especially old chemical munitions. It works because it produces temperatures hotter than the surface of the sun. Any substance on earth exposed to that kind of heat is reduced to its elemental atomic components. The technology can be used to dispose of all sorts of toxic chemicals. It isn’t much help with nuclear waste because radioactive materials are already in elemental form but for things like PCBs it is just the trick.

The plot thickens when we begin to think about what other materials we can break down, and what we can use the byproducts for. As for the latter, extremely hot gasses can be used to drive turbines and produce electricity. Depending on the gasses they may also be used to produce hydrocarbons. Resulting gasoline, diesel, and jet fuels can be readily cleansed of most of the pollutants we usually associate with them. Inorganic residue can be used to produce industrial chemicals or even construction materials. As for what feed stocks might be used, the most obvious choice is municipal waste. You might think the immense heat required would demand more energy than the process would produce but that turns out not to be the case. Once the process begins it produces more than enough energy to sustain itself. The excess has the potential to provide as much as 5% of our electricity needs from the nation’s garbage alone. It could eliminate the need for landfills and there are no smokestacks. The input materials aren’t burned. They are turned into gas in a closed system. There need be no release to the outside air.

The technology seems to be picking up steam. A company called InEnTec demonstrated a system at Port Arthur in June that produces ultra clean synthesis gas from chemical residuals normally treated as hazardous waste and incinerated. InEnTec is planning a commercial facility to produce hydrogen. Dow Chemical has adopted the technology for a plant in Michigan. St. Lucie County in Florida is building a garbage processing plant to replace its landfill and produce 60 MW of electricity at a cost competitive with natural gas. Environmentalists tend not to like it because they say it hasn’t been proven in the US but if these projects turn out to be as clean and economically sound as their backers expect we should see a wave of new construction over the next few years. It has some pretty significant advantages. It doesn’t have the long lead times or waste issues nuclear power has. And the knock on coal gasification is it burns coal to create the temperatures to produce the gas, and generates lots of extra carbon dioxide in the process. The plasma arc doesn’t burn anything. And a solution to the land fill problem should be attractive to every municipality in the country. No more methane emissions, no ground water contamination, no worries about non-biodegradable trash, a built in substitute for expensive re-cycling programs, and no more smelly eyesores in the landscape. What’s not to like?

Of course we’ve heard these promises before and not just from clean coal. This may not work out either for one reason or another. Environmentalists are right that it hasn’t been proved commercially. But sooner or later one of these ideas is bound to work.

Bad Air

One of the more disingenuous arguments in the litany of calamities predicted by global warming enthusiasts is that malaria will advance into regions where winters are now too harsh for the parasite to survive. It is a frightening prospect because today the disease kills more than a million people every year, most of them children under five. It is also a false alarm. The truth is malaria isn’t a disease of the tropics. It is a disease of poverty. It is prevalent today in Equatorial Africa not because it is warm there. It is prevalent because so many people there are too poor to protect themselves.

That was true of the United States as late as the 1940s, though it was as much from ignorance as poverty. It wasn’t until 1890 that we even knew what caused malaria or how it spread. It got its name from Romans who thought it was brought on by swampy fumes. English colonists brought it to Jamestown in 1607 at the height of the Little Ice Age. It quickly spread across the continent. By the 19th century it could be found from Florida to Massachusetts and west through the Dakotas. Malaria doesn’t need warm winters. It needs mosquitoes and unprotected people. As Americans grew more prosperous they installed screens in their windows and doors and the disease began to abate. It persisted in many areas though, particularly in the lower Mississippi Valley where the ground was swampy, mosquitoes everywhere, houses too loosely constructed to provide tight seals, and people often couldn’t afford the screens.

Health officials understood all this and in the late 1940s launched an eradication campaign. Local, state and federal agencies drained swamps and wiped out other mosquito breeding grounds. They also sprayed DDT inside every southern home. The DDT killed other insects as well and people loved it. It was one of the great public health successes of the 20th century.

Then we banned DDT, though it is not an environmental hazard when used inside. It is harmless to humans unless they ingest it. But the ban stopped its use in some areas where it could have done a lot of good. Some mosquitoes developed resistance to the insecticide. Also, we sprayed it on the walls. Many of the homes in today’s most vulnerable areas don’t have walls. New eradication efforts will require some ingenuity. They will also require some common sense. Some environmentalists have belatedly dropped their objections to the responsible use of insecticides; some but not all.

The point is malaria will not return to northern climes unless we lower our defenses. It wasn’t cold that drove it out. It was man. We can drive it out of the rest of the world too, if we just will. There is no need for all those children to be dying. We tried once, but when it was no longer a problem in the developed world, rich nations lost interest. In the 1960s WHO gave it up as a lost cause. It’s getting some renewed attention now. A number of research programs into anti-malarial drugs and vaccines have been funded. International organizations are distributing treated bed nets and currently available drugs in some of the world’s most impoverished areas. President Bush pledged over a billion dollars to the effort. The biggest thing we could do though is to adopt economic and trade practices to help eradicate poverty. A lot of 3rd world swamps still need to be drained. Environmental lobbying will likely prevent 1st world money going into very much of that but once they have the wherewithal people will do it themselves. As long as we keep our own swamps drained, and our air conditioners running, we have nothing to fear from malaria.

Fighting Other People’s Battles

As the war in Iraq winds down and attention shifts back to Afghanistan what little news coverage and think tank analysis there is describes a deteriorating situation. Suicide bombings are up. Convoys are hijacked. The opium trade is brisk. Air strikes are causing too many civilian casualties. Whole sections of Southern and Western Afghanistan and the border regions of Pakistan are safe havens for Taliban, Al Qaeda, and hostile war lords. Allied commanders are begging for more troops.

All of this is true, but the sky is hardly falling. American, NATO, and Afghan forces still win every tactical engagement. That’s why insurgents have reverted to more primitive asymmetric tactics aimed at soft targets. Whenever they mass forces for a conventional attack they are annihilated. Critics are right about one thing though. After seven years we have made far too little progress in building internal Afghan forces to the point where they can stand on their own. That was the mistake we made in Vietnam. We learned from that and that’s why we have been able to begin an orderly withdrawal from Iraq. There is less need for us there now. The same thing will be the key to ultimate success in Afghanistan. There is no way American troops can win this war. The best we can possible do is prevent a total collapse long enough for Afghans to become strong enough to maintain order among themselves and defend against foreign incursions.

There is no reason this shouldn’t happen, and fairly soon. The rebels are not numerous. They are poorly organized, equipped, trained, and led. Government troops and police out score them on every count already. (Excepting possibly leadership, I’m not sure about that.) Afghans justifiably complain about collateral casualties from air strikes but the intentional carnage among civilians inflicted by terrorists is far greater. They aren’t exactly winning hearts and minds.

It seems to me it’s important to remember why we are still there. It isn’t to find and kill every terrorist. That would be impossible. It’s to prevent a recurrence of the chaos that brought the Taliban to power in the first place. We can’t afford to be seen as having “lost” in Afghanistan, but victory should be defined as leaving behind a self sustaining government. The longer this is seen as an American war the more difficult that will be. If there is one thing we should have learned about Muslims over the past six decades or so, it is that they resent any interference by non-Muslims in their affairs, no matter how well intentioned, even when justified in self defense. Muslims can slaughter each other to their hearts’ content and elicit no more than a collective tut tut from the community at large. If Jews or Christians are involved they react with outrage.

I’m not sure the current plan to send in more combat troops is such a good idea. I would rather see a focus on building up Afghan self defense capabilities. The sooner this is recognized as an internal Afghan problem the better. That won’t happen as long as Americans are doing most of the fighting. I don’t really understand why we haven’t made more progress in this regard. Afghanistan has been far quieter than Iraq. We’ve had years to get this organized. There ought to be a steady pipeline of Afghan troops and police coming on stream. By now we should be pulling troops out, not sending in more.

I hope somebody is asking hard questions. What’s the plan? What exactly is it that more troops are supposed to accomplish? What’s been the hold up with Afghan forces? What’s going to change? Hasn’t that been NATO’s responsibility? They don’t seem to have been much help. Why are we even still part of that alliance?

Wrong Side of the Argument

The Greens are going to lose their fight with coal. For one thing their story is wrong. Coal is a lot cleaner than it used to be and newer technologies are about to make it cleaner still. More importantly, coal is the only available source for the worlds increasing energy needs over the next couple of decades. Oil won’t support the growth from China or India. Wind and solar certainly will not. And only coal can free us from dependence on petroleum imports any time soon. Coal’s only real problem is carbon dioxide and that’s only if you buy the man made global warming argument. People increasingly do not. They are for sure not prepared to wreck the global economy in a futile attempt to avoid it.

The case for coal is compelling. If you insist on low CO2 emissions it can be sequestered and stored underground. People claiming it has never been tested commercially are either poorly informed or not telling the truth. Since 2000 Dakota Gas has been piping CO2 from a coal gasification plant to a Canadian oil field for use in an enhanced recovery project, the largest in the world. In the future CO2 could be used as feed stock for algae farms, maybe even in greenhouses. A better idea is to use nuclear power for heat to gasify the coal. That could take CO2 emissions back to the level of the 1960s, produce hydrocarbons at costs competitive on today’s market, provide an ample supply of electricity, and make the US a net energy exporter all at the same time.

Diesel is the cleanest liquid fuel on the market today. Diesel powered cars get 30% better mileage than gasoline and more than twice that of ethanol. Since 2006 we have phased in low sulfur diesel at a substantial price penalty but South African diesel made from coal is cheaper and has less than a third the sulfur. With congress about to enact ever stricter mileage and emissions standards diesel will make more and more sense, but we need to get the price down. Coal is the way to do it. If we pair coal with nuclear we could power the world for the foreseeable future until better technologies come along, and do it far more cleanly. Dirty coal indeed!

It might even be a way to make all those wind and solar farms useful. The rap on them is the electricity they provide is not only expensive, it’s unreliable. While the wind is blowing and the sun shining they could be used to power coal gasification plants and produce natural gas. The natural gas could be used for standby power. There are even some promising technologies out there for using wind and solar to produce hydrocarbons from CO2 and water. That’s a few years down the road and we’d have to be careful. Plants won’t survive in air depleted of CO2. I’m not in favor of this until it becomes economically viable but if we insist on throwing public money at “renewables” we might as well get something in return.

Greens are an important constituency for Barack Obama and for Democrats in Congress, but a lot of Congressional Democrats are from coal states. They know the economy runs on cheap fuel and despite their rhetoric they recognize the limitations of “alternative” energy. They also like being reelected. They will toss the greens a bone or two with some big time subsidies but they realize the nation has to get its fuel from somewhere and they know coal is the only real place to get it. Obama’s proposed Energy Secretary is a Nobel Prize winning physicist who worries about both anthropogenic climate warming and nuclear waste disposal issues. I suspect he also knows we have got to have real answers for serious short term needs. If we don’t get them Obama will most likely be a one term president. He wouldn’t like that. Neither would the greens.

Red Got it Right

If you look up Leif Erikson’s father you may well read that the discoverer of Greenland scammed his fellow Vikings with false promises of a hospitable place. He lied to get them follow him as colonists. The name was part of the scam. It’s a persistent libel. The truth is the earth was relatively warm place in 985 AD when Erik the Red founded his settlements. Greenland was as he described it, blessed with inviting fjords and fertile green valleys. Climatologists now call the time the Medieval Warm Period. Some call it the Medieval Climate Optimum because European agriculture fared better with higher rainfall and a longer growing season, and because a lot more people die in cold snaps than in heat waves. Some refer to it as the “so called” MWP because the occurrence suggests the current warming trend may not be all that unusual. There is little question mean and median global temperatures were a degree or so higher than they were a few centuries earlier or later. Whether temperatures in the 20^th century were even warmer is a matter of intense scientific conjecture. In any case the Viking settlements in Greenland survived for 500 years, until about the time the Little Ice Age began.

Being more recent, the LIA is a bit better documented. Spanish Explorers saw snow covered mountains along the California coast. The winter George Washington spent at Valley Forge was famously cold. The Hudson River regularly froze over as far south as New York City. Glaciers around the world were growing. Mountain villages in the Alps were engulfed with ice. Eskimos were spotted paddling kayaks off the coast of England. But precise measurements of temperatures around the world are hard to come by.

Determining global mean and median temperatures from ice cores, tree rings, and ocean sediment is an inexact science at best but a group from the Oregon Institute of Science surveyed the literature on the subject. They concluded most of it supports the .contention that there was indeed a warm climatic anomaly from about 800-1300 AD, a cold climatic anomaly between 1300-1900 AD, and the 20^th Century was probably not the warmest on record. All three conclusions apply to most geographic regions of the world. The historical record contains no reports of global warming catastrophes. None of this is good for today’s alarmists because the medieval period certainly predates the industrial revolution. Any warming could not possible have been caused by man made carbon dioxide. And warmer temperatures don’t seem to have done any harm. They were a good thing. Increased levels of CO2 have quite beneficial effects as well. Trees grow faster over a wider geographic range.

Given all this it’s safe to say the climate for the past 3000 years or so has been punctuated by periods of relative warmth and cold. But the accuracy claimed for the infamous hockey stick graph published by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the graph Al Gore used to dramatic effect to demonstrate the trend in man made global warming, is questionable at best. We are talking about a science that only recently has been able to say with any confidence what global temperatures are today, let alone what they were a millennium ago. Even current measurements are challenged by many as misleadingly high. Recording stations tend to be located in urban areas and affected by “heat islands.” We are also talking about differences of maybe 1 °C, a change most people in a crowded room wouldn’t notice. We are trying to project those differences into parts of the world where there are no reliable records, using a science in its infancy. All we know for sure is that Erik the Red got a bad rap.

How to Spend a Trillion Dollars

The greens have produced a new ad trashing clean coal. It must be well financed because I’ve seen it several times on the evening news in just the last two days. This is shaping up to be a battle royal because DOE estimates US demand for electricity will increase by between 18% and 39% by 2030 depending on how fast the economy grows. That translates to a staggering amount of new generating capacity needed, let alone what it will take to replace retiring plants. We only have about three places to get most of the power we need and if one of them is off the table the other two will have trouble making up the shortfall. Natural gas is cheaper and cleaner than coal using current technology but we have limited supplies. Nuclear is a bit more expensive. DOE also estimates it will take about $2.475 billion and six years to build a 1,350 megawatt nuclear plant. If we went all nuclear we would need somewhere around 750-1500 new facilities at a cost somewhere north of $1.8 trillion, maybe twice that. It gets worse with other alternatives. Even conventional coal costs more than nuclear. Photovoltaic is the least viable. A small 5 megawatt solar cell farm would cost over $5.6 billion. A thousand of them wouldn’t make a dent in our needs. Wind is better than solar but not much. I figure we’re going to do most of this the way we do it today with coal, gas and nuclear. The cost will be staggering. Greens will make it as difficult and expensive as possible. At a minimum they will demand a requirement to sequester carbon dioxide. That will add about a $700 investment per kilowatt of capacity for both coal and gas. It could bankrupt us.

The idea is to make electricity as expensive as possible so we will use less. That much of the savings will come from reduced economic activity is immaterial. It might seem to make sense if you buy the argument that man made global warming will do catastrophic damage to the planet but it makes no sense at all if that turns out not to be the case. Many scientists have pointed out that the computer models predicting future warming caused by anthropogenic CO2 emissions are not supported by the historical record or by scientific experiment. In any case the economic burden will be heavy. For the developing world a carbon capture requirement would itself be catastrophic. They aren’t going to buy into any such program.

Nor should we. Despite a six fold increase in the use of hydrocarbon fuels since 1940, there has been no increase in climate warming trends. Atmospheric temperatures have risen .5 °C per century since the end of the Little Ice Age in about 1850. Temperatures vary from place to place and from one decade to another but the overall trend has been steady for 150 years. The warming we’ve seen can’t possibly be caused by carbon dioxide. The number and intensity of hurricanes hasn’t increased since 1900. Tornadoes have been on the decline since 1950. Rainfall in the US has been slowly increasing for the past century, but at a steady rate unaffected by increased atmospheric levels of CO2. It all amounts to a pretty good case that the warming models are wrong. We shouldn’t be imposing such an economic penalty on ourselves based on flimsy scientific speculation.

There are just too many better places to spend the money, including worth while environmental projects. There is plenty of real pollution all around us we could clean up. Imagine the improved living standards that could be had if we spent a trillion dollars on research in any number of fields. We could rebuild a lot of crumbling infrastructure with this kind of money. We’ve got only so much. Let’s use it productively.

The Environmental Church

I began as a skeptic and after quite a lot of reading up on global warming I’m still a skeptic but I have reached one conclusion. There is more religion than science in the current environmental movement. It’s a shame. There is so much good we could be doing but aren’t. We have bought into a mindless barrage of propaganda and are focused on saving the planet from dangers it doesn’t face. We are bent on impoverishing ourselves, and on keeping the third world poor, in a futile effort to control a climate that is utterly beyond our control. Rather than prepare and adapt to whatever change might come, we would stand at the shore and try to hold back the tide. We don’t clean up after ourselves, we wallow in our own filth while we endlessly wash sheets that are already clean.

I live in North Texas, down wind from a group of cement plants belching unbelievable amounts of mercury, nitrous oxides, sulfur, and heaven knows what other nasty stuff that makes the air so polluted I can see it. We could clean it up but don’t in part because we insist on restricting carbon dioxide emissions at the same time. That makes it too expensive. CO2! Plant food! We have been told that man made CO2 will destroy the earth and we have believed it. There is no science behind the idea. CO2 is at worst a minor green house gas. Man’s contribution is minuscule. The world is no warmer than it was in the middle ages. The computer models that predict it will warm further in the next century aren’t really science at all. They are an exercise in cooking the books. They represent incomprehensibly complex mathematical calculations based on so many assumptions as to be of no value; garbage in, garbage out. So we propose to tax ourselves. The cement plants will move to China along with the other energy intensive industries. There will be no reduction in CO2, and maybe not in the other stuff either.

It’s an argument based on exaggeration, half truth, and outright fabrication. Al Gore’s famous hockey stick graph was a fraud. It failed to show either the middle age warming period or the little ice age. The spike in twentieth century temperatures was only about one degree. Sea level rose about a foot. Current ocean temperatures appear to be cooling and, with denser water, sea levels falling. The Antarctic ice cap is growing, not shrinking. Warmer water on one edge appears to be caused by volcanic activity. The hurricane season is affected far more by ocean currents than by minor fluctuations in temperature. If polar bears are in danger it is from hunting, not warming. The increase in atmospheric CO2 over the past 150 years has lagged the rise in temperature, not preceded it. It can’t possibly be the cause.

The United States sits on coal reserves that could provide all our energy needs for centuries yet we dissipate our national wealth on imported petroleum. We could clean up our mining operations but don’t because of efforts to stop mining all together. We could clean up our coal fired power plants but don’t because of the CO2 bug bear. We could burn clean diesel fuel but don’t for the same reason. We would destroy our automobile industry in an effort to promote electric cars when the technology isn’t there to produce them, and without a thought as to where the electricity will come from. We would move our society to a pre-industrial state and forget the misery that comes with that. We could help the world’s poor move to prosperity but fret that they will then want automobiles and air conditioning. CO2 is not a pollutant. It is a beneficial byproduct of the energy that has fueled our emergence from the dark ages. There is no plausible alternative. We can’t go back to burning wood to warm ourselves. Wood smoke really is a pollutant.

Nationalizing GM

This bailout is beginning to smell more and more like the New Deal. FDR tried to nationalize the electric power industry and partly succeeded with the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Bonneville Power Administration. George Bush has begun nationalizing the banking system buying stock in Citibank while other big banks line up for similar treatment. Now the three remaining US auto makers have their hands out and a columnist at the LA times is suggesting the feds simply buy GM. His reason? Only the feds have deep enough pockets to solve the real problem; building the electric cars we need. You see, the batteries are so expensive nobody will buy them without heavy subsidies and private industry can’t be trusted to produce cars the public might not want. I’m sure the idea is a big hit with the chardonnay and organic tofu crowd.

He’s right about one thing. There is no indication large numbers of people want electric cars unless they are affordable, reliable and functional. They aren’t any of those, at least not yet. For the foreseeable future we will continue to rely on fossil fuels for most of our transportation needs unless the government steps in. Of course the electrics don’t get us away from that. Most of the power will have to come from coal and natural gas. It isn’t likely the end result will be greater fuel efficiency any time soon, though it might help reduce our dependence on imported petroleum. But the larger problem is he is trying to address the wrong issue. GM isn’t in trouble because they don’t have electric cars to sell. They are in trouble because they let their costs get out of control and they have a long history of poor quality. They do have hybrids and nobody is buying them. Right now hardly anybody is buying cars at all. Big ticket items are a tough sell.

I’m sure the big three will get some government money, probably a lot of it, but I doubt they are salvageable in the long term without a lot of restructuring. That would include serious reductions in labor costs and in dealerships. Unions are a major democrat constituency and every congressman has several auto dealerships in his district. I don’t see this happening under government sponsorship. I do see a major handout now, another one next year, and subsidies as far as the eye can see. But I don’t see any of it being much help. New Deal programs didn’t get us out of the Depression. More of the same won’t get us out of this. People are worried about their retirement savings, home values and jobs. We are in a deflationary economy, a very difficult problem to solve. Just ask the Japanese. Who would buy a house if it might be worth a lot less a year from now? What’s the five year warranty on a new Ford worth? Making credit easier isn’t the answer. People with good credit can get loans now. Those who don’t have to borrow don’t want to. Making automobiles more expensive isn’t the answer either, subsidies or no subsidies. The money has to come from somewhere.

We aren’t going to get out of this downturn until confidence is restored. We need predictability. What the government has done so far is create a great deal of uncertainty. Buying GM would just add to that. We need to know what we can expect our taxes to be. We need reassurance our energy bills aren’t going back through the roof. We need to know our export markets aren’t going to suddenly shut down. We need to be comfortable our houses aren’t going to lose half their value. We need secure jobs. We need to expect a reasonable return on our investments. We need a growing economy. We need a pro business government. If we learned anything from the communists the last thing we need is for the government to go into the automobile business.