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.