The European Environmental Bureau has asked us to clarify that in fact it was founded in 1974 at the initiative of the by the Gents Aktiekomitee Leefmilieu, and merely received particularly generous European support in 1999. (Approximately half its funding is from the European Commission.) Its aim is to help environmental groups influence EU policy.
Skip to [ Story Content and jump story attachments ]
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
Main Page Content:
Profits of doom
29 July 2010
Climate change is serious business - in more ways than one. Martin Cohen describes how capitalist 'bootleggers' have co-opted the environmental 'Baptists' to fulfil their raison d'etre - making money. Thanks to the 'greenwash', the solutions could be worse than the problems
"Earth is at a critical crossroads," announced the aptly named Earth Institute at Columbia University last year. The august research body warned the world solemnly that human activity was "threatening the health of the environment and potentially posing risks of unprecedented magnitude to our shared future".
Fast forward to 2010, and with the dirty stain of oil spreading inexorably over the clear blue waters of the Gulf of Mexico, threatening to choke the delicate wetlands of Louisiana and Florida, you can't help but make a link between the warning and the business model of BP. But there is an even better reason to "Think BP" when you hear the Earth Institute's warnings: a key member of its advisory board is none other than Carl-Henric Svanberg, chairman of BP and now perhaps persona non grata.
In June 2009, when the beleaguered oil multinational chose Svanberg for the top job, it explained that this was because, in addition to his dynamic business track record, he was personally committed to and an advocate of many corporate-responsibility issues, including human rights and climate change. Naturally, he is at home at the Earth Institute, where, as its website informs us, everyone is deeply worried that "today, approximately one in six people on the planet subsist on less than $1 a day. The world's population is expected to increase to 9 billion people by 2050, further straining Earth's resources and humanity's ability to thrive."
But what could the head of an oil company offer to researchers dedicated to helping "the world pave a path toward sustainability", apart from sanctimonious concern and hypocritical humbug, of which (doubtless) they already had plenty? Yet there are possible areas. Among the institute's oh-so-green initiatives "to help ensure a sustainable energy future for all" are big-money projects concerning nuclear power and the conversion of solid waste into usable energy: here, green values and business opportunities mesh perfectly.
"We are developing the next generation of carbon-capture and storage technologies, as well as working on questions related to renewable energy," continues the institute's website. And these are areas where there is a lot of money to be made.
Meanwhile, sitting on the board of another virtuous-sounding group - the Alliance for Climate Protection (ACP) - is one of the world's most famous green champions, Al Gore, the former Democratic vice-president, who founded the organisation in 2006. Alongside him sits Theodore Roosevelt IV. An "active conservationist", Theodore the Fourth is a member of the Wilderness Society's governing council, chair of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, a trustee for the World Resources Institute - and a managing director of Barclays Capital.
Consider another environmental-economics powerhouse, Generation Investment Management (GIM). Yes, Gore founded it, too, but this time with the aid of David Blood - chief executive of Goldman Sachs Asset Management from 1999 to 2003. Blood's personal mission is to make businesses more "ethical and sustainable", and to this end he has dedicated the company to "long-term investing and sustainability research". GIM focuses on "environmental degradation, poverty and development". Oh yes, one other thing: it is now valued at $2.2 billion* (£1.5 billion).
As Paul Collier, professor of economics at the University of Oxford, says, there is a "new ethics of nature" and "economists are indeed the new guardians of nature". (The author of books such as The Plundered Planet: Why We Must - and How We Can - Manage Nature for Global Prosperity; he approves of this trend.) Economists use mathematical models in which ethics is coded as an austere utilitarianism where future generations, however remote, count for just as much as we do. As energy policy in general is highly utilitarian and focused on simple cost calculations, it makes the ideal tool with which they can reshape the world.
That's why, while he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown turned to a former World Bank chief economist for insight into the implications of a changing environment. The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change was published in October 2006. Lord Stern is the epitome of a wise mandarin, equally comfortable advising on business or morality. He says, for example, that if transferring a pound from your pocket to someone in the 23rd century helps them more than it hurts you, there is an obligation to do so. Indeed, his report recommends the transfer of large amounts of money from today's energy users to, well, future governments.
Stern's report is, however, a mere firecracker compared with the ICBM of energy policy launched by free-market economists that tore through the social structures of Western democracy in the 1980s and destroyed the power of the unions along the way. The key battle was Margaret Thatcher's duel to the death with the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) in 1984-85, the union that toppled Ted Heath's Conservative government in 1974. One of the rewards for her victory was a switch from energy produced as part of long-term national policy to supply by privatised companies with short-term objectives.
Mind you, one forward-looking feature was established with the government's support for new "climate-research" centres, such as the Hadley Centre at the Met Office and the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. Research turned "decarbonisation" into a virtue - and a profitable one at that. Between 1990 and 2010, the Department of Energy provided a snug £180,293,252 for climate science research at the Hadley Centre.
And so it continues. It is economics, not environmentalism, that has driven the search for ethically superior energy from "clean" sources derived from previously sacrosanct areas of wilderness, the exploitation of which has suddenly been legitimised, perhaps as new "energy farms" or for "biofuels". Likewise, previously off-limits coastal areas have been designated as not only suitable but also positively benign sites on which to drill for oil and gas (or so Barack Obama thought until April).
After all, the long-term interest - one might say the fuel - propelling countries is money. We don't have an ethical foreign policy and we certainly don't have an ethical energy policy. With their pretensions to such, nations have found a way to infuse economic priorities with a virtuous, ecological, green tinge. It is greenwashing on a global scale.
Greenwash" is the term environmentalists use to describe businesses that present themselves as green although their practices are not. It comes in a variety of shades.
The European Commission has paid environmental campaigners directly to carry out its political agenda. In 1999, at a cost of about €500,000, it set up a new group, the European Environmental Bureau, while also paying both the Friends of the Earth and the WWF €250,000 each to set up offices in Brussels. On another occasion, the Climate Action Network was given €140,000 for "capacity building". In fact, the Commission funnels about EUR3 million (£2.48 million) a year to environmental groups that it favours.
But that's a drop of oil in the Gulf of Mexico compared with the amounts that private foundations in the US are estimated to provide each year to environmental causes. The sums involved run into the hundreds of millions of dollars. One green organisation - the Tides Foundation - had net assets of $142,007,356 in 2006. Local green groups may rely on "flapjack and organic-soap fundraising mornings" - but real campaigns are funded by a very different and largely invisible mix.
Green idealism and ethics have been co-opted for some very hard-nosed practical purposes, as detailed by Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen, reader emeritus in geography at the University of Hull and editor of Energy and the Environment (one of the few journals to encourage debate about climate change), and Aynsley Kellow, professor of government at the University of Tasmania. And that is why, although UK energy policy has been guided for decades by strategic and financial interests aiming to reduce domestic coal use, promote nuclear power and create new financial markets, public debate has focused variously on the rights of Nottingham miners not to strike during the NUM's showdown with Thatcher and the need to save the Pacific atolls from disappearing under the waves. A similar mix, in which the gears of energy businesses are oiled with ethical grease, also characterises other advanced Western economies.
Everywhere, an important part of promoting and implementing pre-existing economic and national agendas is the use of non-governmental organisations, from Greenpeace to the United Nations Environment Programme, bodies that can more plausibly claim to base their recommendations on ethics.
Consider the European Union's commitment to encouraging the use of biofuels: is it a virtuous political initiative or a pro-business programme?
In March 2007, EU leaders, citing growing concerns over energy security and, of course, climate change, decided to raise the share of biofuels used in transport from today's level of 2 per cent to 10 per cent by 2020. Although green groups may have revised their views on biofuels and may not like the policy now, they certainly helped to put it in place. As did Neste Oil, which just two years later, in May 2009, was able to lay the foundation stone for a renewable diesel plant in the port of Rotterdam. Neste's biodiesel is a blend of palm oil, rapeseed oil and waste animal fat. Its Rotterdam factory, at an estimated cost of €670 million, will be the largest renewable-diesel plant in Europe, with an annual production capacity not far short of 1 million metric tonnes. You need either an EU lake or an EU target to get rid of all that.
But still, it is a good thing, isn't it? It is to save the planet, right? Not exactly. Biofuels make no sense economically or ecologically. As Alex Kaat, a spokesman for Wetlands International, an advocacy group based (like the Neste plant) in the Netherlands, puts it: "Deforestation and palm oil go hand in hand. It is definitely a very, very dirty fuel."
Logging firms, often affiliated with palm oil companies, generally begin by removing valuable hardwood trees, and then drain swamps and burn vegetation, releasing enormous volumes of greenhouse gases. In Indonesia and Malaysia, European firms have accelerated their clearing of rainforest for palm oil plantations. Some of the richest areas of the world for wildlife - home to rare species such as the Sumatran tiger, the orang-utan and the Malaysian elephant - have been sacrificed.
There are other side-effects, too, which environmentalists tend to downplay. Even by 2007, American farmers were already responding to the enticement of biofuel subsidies by planting more corn than at any point since 1944, in the process reducing rice, soybean and cotton crops to make room. In countries such as India, the price of rice jumped 10 per cent.
If nowadays there is a backlash against ostensibly green biofuels, the call seems only to be for them to be grown in less sensitive areas - on existing farms, basically. Yet 93 per cent of rainforest is cleared for food - cattle ranches and farms - not for logging, as we often imagine. Any policy that takes agricultural land out of production has direct consequences for the world's remaining rainforests.
What about "renewables"? This misleading term includes things such as biofuels, waste incinerators and even dams across the Amazon, all hugely environmentally suspect projects. But the sector's poster children are solar panels and wind turbines.
Even these technologies come with environmental problems. The former are made with some of the most hazardous chemicals known to industry - which may explain why workers in developing countries are tasked with the job (see box above). Wind turbines come with access roads and electricity pylons attached, not to mention thousands of tonnes of cement to anchor them. They offer their own peculiar intrusion into what might otherwise have been valued as landscape (see box, right). More to the point, neither source can match conventional power stations in terms of production. They simply cannot provide energy on the scale required to replace fossil fuels - yet public resources are being poured into them.
In the UK, there is a thing called the "renewables obligation" that compels power companies to purchase electricity from "renewable" sources - particularly solar and wind - thereby encouraging such virtuous activities. The UK's renamed Department of Energy and Climate Change has joined with its European partners in setting a target of generating 20 per cent of electricity via renewables by 2020. As renewables are more expensive, there will be a cost, of course, which the department puts at about £6 billion. The money will come from consumers: poor people will suffer disproportionately, but a few people will get very rich.
Naturally, if the money had instead been put into tackling environmental problems directly by, say, protecting wetlands and forest habitats, or even through social projects such as raising the economic prospects of poor people to a point where they do not have to rely on chopping down trees, it would have gone a lot further. But that's politics.
So BP has a representative at the top of the Earth Institute. The European Commission funds offices for Friends of the Earth and the WWF. The UK government supports climate-change research. Have the poachers turned gamekeepers? Yes - although it might be more precise to say that the bootleggers have become Baptists. Everywhere, the bootleggers can be seen walking around in black, spouting biblical prophecies of doom - and growing ever richer in the process (see box, page 37).
Bruce Yandle, an economist at Clemson University in the US, coined the phrase "bootlegger and Baptist coalitions" in an article in Regulation magazine in 1983 that discussed cases where the economic interests of businesses and the moral concerns of campaigners coincide. The idea is that both the Baptists and the bootleggers want the sale of alcohol banned - but for different reasons: Baptists because they consider alcohol to be morally wrong; bootleggers because they want to preserve their illicit enterprise.
Naturally, the Baptists would vehemently deny that they are assisting the bootleggers, just as Greenpeace and its partners in the Climate Action Network would bristle at the suggestion that they are assisting multinationals, the nuclear industry, big oil or even states' expansionist instincts. Yet often this is the effect of their campaigns.
BOOTLEGGERS AND BAPTISTS: A COLLABORATION OF OPPOSITES
The term "bootleggers and Baptists" is used to describe situations where groups with opposite moral aims collaborate.
Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen, emeritus reader in geography at the University of Hull, and Aynsley Kellow, professor of government at the University of Tasmania, have discussed in their work many examples of bootleggers donning their black Baptist gowns in the sphere of energy politics.
- Canada has a nuclear industry to promote and happily backed a Kyoto protocol that made nuclear power "clean" again. After Kyoto, an estimated US$50 billion has been made from the replacement of old Soviet reactors in Eastern European countries
- Japan is energy poor, but since it was paying five times the market price to mine its own coal, it (like the UK and Germany) had a multibillion-dollar annual incentive to campaign for laws limiting its own coal industry
- And when the US, in a rare display of internationalism, pushed through laws to ban chlorofluorocarbons globally (the Montreal Protocol, the provisions of which came into force in 1989), its concern about holes in the ozone layer fitted very comfortably with its control of all the key patents for the replacements.
LET THE SUNSHINE IN? SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES
The main problem with solar energy arises from the use of large quantities of arsine and phosphine in the manufacture of solar panels.
It is estimated that each 10MW/year production of flat-panel III-V modules requires about 23 tonnes of arsine a year.
The quantities required in flat-panel designs could present great risks to the environment. Arsine is almost as toxic as methyl isocyanate: in 1984, the accidental release of 40 tonnes of methyl isocyanate at the Union Carbide factory in Bhopal killed 3,000 people and injured 200,000 more.
Solar panels are a toxic time-bomb. They may provide clean, green energy, but manufacturing them involves a witch's brew of toxic chemicals, the consequences of which may be dire once they end up in landfills - or slightly earlier if any eco-houses burn down.
DENMARK'S WIND TURBINES: A DANGEROUS AMOUNT OF HOT AIR
Denmark is the wind capital of the world - that's one of the reasons why Copenhagen was chosen to host the great climate change conference last year. Between 1985 and 2005, more than 3GW of wind-turbine capacity was installed, of which about 15 per cent was sited offshore.
There are few areas on western Denmark's coast and in its flat or gently rolling countryside that are unaffected. Fortunately, the nation's agricultural community has learned to love the modern intruders - or at least the subsidies.
As the sector expanded, so did the size of the wind turbines. The latest idea is to build 20MW versions as tall as the Eiffel Tower. Each turbine requires an access road, massive concrete foundations and, of course, electricity pylons.
Wind turbines, despite being so very green themselves, are antipathetic to nature. On forested hillsides, they require the clear felling of woodland; on low-lying coastal sites, they necessitate the draining of wetland to facilitate the construction of access roads and enormous concrete foundations.
As independent energy consultant Vic Mason has pointed out, such side-effects could stimulate the oxidation of peat (releasing carbon dioxide) and damage many sensitive habitats essential for particular species of wildlife.
Until recently, the most important subsidy supporting the sector was that the Danish National Grid (and hence consumers) was obliged by law to buy all the electricity produced by wind-power projects - and to do so at prices determined by the government, not the market. That's why Danish householders must pay almost double the UK price for electricity. Estimates of the costs of the subsidies differ - the Danish government says it is about DKr4 billion (£443 million) a year - but independent experts put it at about DKr10 billion a year. If the higher estimates are correct, it would mean that Denmark has been spending more on wind turbines each year than on education.
In spite of the cost, wind power generates only about 4 per cent of the electricity used in Denmark: the truth is that almost all of it is wasted.
Specialists believe that it is unrealistic to expect turbines to produce much more than 20 to 25 per cent of their potential annual output, and that has been the experience in Denmark. Sometimes there is too little wind, sometimes there is too much. Sometimes the machines are broken or being serviced and polished.
With wind turbines, a conventional power station must always provide back-up. For the Danes, traditional power stations with capacities equal to 90 per cent of the installed wind-power capacity must be permanently online to guarantee supply at all times.
But worse still, even when the turbines are busily whirring away, the electricity generally cannot be used. For "technical reasons", as they say, to ensure stability in the domestic grid, most of Denmark's wind power has to be exported at prices well below what it costs to produce. During 2003, 84 per cent of the wind electricity generated was surplus to demand at the moment the wind blew.
Energy specialists calculate that Denmark's exports of electricity to its large, hydro-nuclear-powered neighbours to the north cost local consumers about DKr1 billion each year.
All this combines to explain why, in practice, only 4 per cent of the electricity Danish consumers actually use comes from the turbines. For this miserly contribution to "green thinking", people must pay double the bills.
Nowadays - reneging slightly on its commitment to reduce Denmark's 0.0003 per cent contribution to the CO2 released annually into the atmosphere from the Earth - the Danish government is dismantling its obligatory purchase scheme, although owners of existing wind turbines and district heating plants will continue to receive subsidies. In fact, even after years of spending on an array of wind turbines, Denmark's carbon emissions were rising until recently.
What lessons do the Danish experiences offer us? None, it seems. The UK government is attempting to follow suit. It aspires to a European target of 20 per cent renewable energy by 2020. This nominally equates to about 20,000 2MW wind turbines, along with new systems for energy back-up.
A rule of thumb says that to prevent turbulence from adjacent turbines taking power from each other, they should be separated by up to 10 times their rotor diameter. Thus, the installation of 40GW of wind power in the UK would leave a turbine "footprint" (that is, the land directly appropriated), on land and/or at sea, equivalent in size to almost half the total land area of Wales.
As UK policy in energy is in essence English policy, that might seem like good news - half of Wales is left over for other schemes! Yet the situation is less rosy.
As mentioned, the nominal output of wind power is far greater than the actual output. A more realistic target for the Department of Energy and Climate Change would be the construction of 100,000 wind turbines. Unfortunately, Wales is too small for all those. Instead, a 10km-deep dedicated strip right around the coast of the British Isles would be required. Even Brighton, and its new Green MP, would be blown away ...
*Estimates vary regarding the current valuation of GIM. Capital MSL, a corporate financial and communications consultancy, would, however, like to point out that the company is worth $5.5billion.
Clarification
-
Postscript
:
Martin Cohen is a writer and philosopher with a particular interest in environmental ethics. His latest book is Mind Games (Wiley-Blackwell, October 2010), which discusses, among other things, the social creation of reality.
Readers' comments
I live in Denmark. Out of a monthly total of average Kr1000 (£150) on my "electricity" bill, actual electricity costs 20%, distribution costs 20%, VAT costs 20% (charged on everything, including CO2 taxes), CO2 taxes cost 40%.
Thank you for another very well researched and accurate article about this issue. It is frightening to see how much propaganda is generally around, and how it has polarised opinion towards the extremes. Let's hope that the rational middle -- as represented here -- gets the wide and sympathetic reading it deserves.
Excellent. Thank you.
The reality of our turbines in the UK is that they only contribute around 10-15 percent of their stated power capacity. Hence we cannot possibly meet our 2020 targets and wind energy can only play a very peripheral role in our energy future. Unfortunately our politicians have been listening to the wrong scientists about wind energy and seem incapable of planning for our energy future partly because of the trendy but pointless obsession with CO2.
Hot spinning backup.
No thinking person can possibly believe the government line that renewable energy is the solution to our energy problems.
Energy from purely renewable sources is laudable, and in the long term, essential. It is not a solution to our energy needs right now.
Unless urgent action is taken by the government to put into effect a massive nuclear power station building program, the UK faces many years of energy shortages and being held to ransom by other countries having the foresight to adopt a realistic and achievable energy strategy.
Our economy may never recover from the potential for damage which now faces us. We already hear that many business users are being forced to look outside the UK as the true costs of our future energy needs are revealed.
It is no exaggeration to say that this is by far the most important challenge that we face in this country.
Let's hope that our new government has the foresight and intellect to deal with it accordingly.
Just brillinat.
Thank you
Thank you Times Higher Education for printing this excellent article. I have read so much rubbish recently that I was quite convinced that the entire world had gone mad. May the excellent Martin Cohen flourish and please may our new leaders listen to him.
This is not a well-researched article, whatever those posting above me may think.
Referring to the box "Let the sunshine in...", the author focuses on "flat panel III-V technology", without bothering to explain to the non-semiconductor-scientists in the audience what this means. Since I *am* a semiconductor scientist, I *can* explain, and in so doing expose an example of the (deliberately?) narrow and simplistic arguments I feel pervade the entire piece.
A "III-V" semiconductor is a semiconductor made from a compound of elements from groups III and V of the periodic table, something that Cohen seems to feel anyone reading his article should know as a matter of course. It suits him not to dwell on this, however, as anyone acquainted with the solar cell industry will know that such semiconductors make up less than 1% of the global solar cell market. Unlike Cohen, I will use published, peer-reviewed material to back-up the claims I make, and in this case one of many possible references would be Hoffmann and Waldmann (2009). That work states that crystalline silicon dominates the solar cell market, taking 95% of the market share. Of the remaining 5%, 4% of it is amorphous silicon thin-film technology, leaving just 1% for all other technologies, of which those based on III-V semiconductors are just one of many. Actually the thin-film sector is largely based on II-VI semiconductors such as cadmium telluride, of which more later.
We see here quite clearly how Martin Cohen has cherry-picked examples to fit his argument, without taking the trouble to see if they are representative or not.
Another example from the same box would be his claim that "Solar panels are a toxic time-bomb. They may provide clean, green energy, but manufacturing them involves a witch's brew of toxic chemicals, the consequences of which may be dire once they end up in landfills - or slightly earlier if any eco-houses burn down."
Quite apart from the all-important weasel-words "may be" - unlikely, in fact, given the immense amounts of research effort and state-business co-operation expended on PV lifecycle analyses and recycling-scheme research and implementation - this is simply scare-mongering rhetoric. "Toxic time-bomb" indeed! It may interest Cohen to know that a quite comprehensive study published in 2005 (Jungbluth et al.) "considered the environmental impacts from different PV systems based on a valuation of various eco-indicator parameters including acidification and eutrophication, eco-toxicity, land occupation, carcinogens, climate change, ionizing radiation, ozone-layer depletion, respiratory effects, fossil fuel consumption, and mining and extraction. These results indicated that the greatest contribution to environmental impact is a result of the use of fossil fuel resources [during production/transport of the devices] and respiratory effects resulting from air emissions." (Santillan et al. 2010)
It has also been shown (see for example http://www.nrel.gov/pv/cdte/pdfs/cdte_factsheet.pdf, or the conference proceedings reported there for those with sufficient access rights) that whereas phosphate fertilisers and emissions from burning fossil fuels (mainly coal) account respectively for 41% and 22% of the exposure to cadmium of humans in Europe, the contribution to our exposure from products containing cadmium is just 2.5%. Since CdTe photovoltaics represents such a tiny fraction of the world PV market and an even tinier fraction of the Cd-containing products on the market, the idea that we should be worried about some "toxic time-bomb" to do with solar energy is simply absurd.
As any diligent reader will know, when one can find these straw-men, cherry-picked examples, ideologically-driven approaches to fact and proportionality, and shrill rhetorical distortions in parts of an article where one's own knowledge is capable of revealing these poor arguments for what they are, then it is highly likely that the rest of the piece is similarly disingenous/uninformed/absurd. So whilst I am not an expert on wind power, for example, I am not inclined to trust Martin Cohen to give me a well-thought out, well-informed, and well-argued opinion on the subject, after catching him out so comprehensively in his take on an area where in fact I *do* have some expertise.
Johnny Fill, MPhys (Sussex), AMInstP
Trinity College, Oxford
Department of Materials, University of Oxford, UK
Hoffmann, W., and Waldmann, L., (2009) PV Solar Electricity: From a Niche Market to One of the Most Important Mainstream Markets for Electricity, a book chapter appearing in Petrova-Koch V., Hezel R., and Goetzberger A., (editors) High-Efficient [sic] Low-Cost Photovoltaics: Recent Developments. Berlin/Heidelberg: Springer, pp. 29 – 43.
Jungbluth, N., Bauer, C., Dones, R., & Frischknecht, R. (2005). Life cycle assessment for emerging technologies: Case studies for photovoltaic and wind power. International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment, 10(1), 24–34.
Santillan, Javier., Heaston, Mark S., Woodward, David S., & Joshi, Manish M. (2010) Environmental impacts associated with manufacturing of solar and wind power alternative energy systems. Remediation Journal, 20(2) 107-113
http://www.nrel.gov/pv/cdte/pdfs/cdte_factsheet.pdf
I absolutely love the article. Martin Cohen write other very good articles. Mistakes ought to be there, he grabs large areas and tries to find common denominators, rarely someone does it, the mistakes should be corrected, but I love this article.
Two points that he makes should be expanded. They are: use of public money and going big before accomplishing anything.
Brothers Ford did it in their backyard. They did a huge thing there and did it on their own. Now look at the 17 cent. painting in Low Countries. A watermill and a windmill. Small, private, efficient, makes beautiful landscape and "renewable" energy.
But everything goes wrong with public money and enormous size. The corporations wouldn't even be able to grow monsters if not for public money. There wouldn't be any hype, "initiatives" and there wouldn't be any spectacular failures.
I firmly believe that efficiency drops dramatically with the size of the business. I absolutely do not believe that modern technology can work only upon attaining certain size of the plant, the opposite is true: modern technology allows small business to do great things. It all depends on your choice of technology. Atomic energy is an exception but it is not a cheep energy.
There is only one solution - doing it truly privately and on a small scale. I would welcome an article that will disclose how much public money, directly from the government and indirectly from various tax schemes, some of them perfectly legal and others not so legal, a grand project typically takes.
I would just like to say thank you to all those people who took the trouble to put a POSITIVE comment in above - normally (human nature, isn't it) people only get around to 'correcting' errors they spot, and expressing appreciation takes second place. But with all this area, it is both complex and confusing - and bitterly contested. It seems that anyone departing from the 'green script' is assumed to be a very wicked person, and that is why I particularly appreciate these comments of support.
However, I also do appreciate the criques, and indeed I was a bit puzzled until today why there were'nt any! (Actually, I had a couple of indignant greens email me direct... why not write on the site? But I think thye did not want to read contrarian views in the article.)
Johnny Fill (1st August) accused me of playing a trick on the readers by selecting aparticularly nasty kind of solar panel to write about. Well, slection of facts is what this is all about, but I was not, I must say, aware that this panal variety was the odd one out, as he implies, amongst many other totlally safe ones. I'm not convinced yet either. I do know that Alasdair Cameron, Assistant Editor of Renewable Energy World, and hence pro-such things, has written:
"The most important thing for the solar manufacturing industry is to address the issue [toxic materials] head on, and not to wait until they
are forced to act. In order for the industry to survive and continue to prosper it must continue to be an environmentally
responsible industry.... Substances which are hazardous should be phased out were possible or handled in a responsible, less
harmful way."
If he can say that, why is so dishonest for me to say so too?
Excellent article. Congrats to the THES for providing a forum for rational debate.
I have no argument with wanting to move away from coal and oil where we can, but we need to be realistic. Wind and solar just will not cut it for the foreseeable future. Nuclear fission for now and - hopefully - fusion for later years are the realistic choice if we're serious about this move.
In response to Johnny Fill -
I agree with you that 'may' is indeed a weasel word. Which is why I remain firmly agnostic regarding reports of climate change apocalypse in our future. Lots of things 'may' happen in the future . . .
I thank Martin Cohen for his response. Here is mine, and I hope it does not give offence to the author, as that is not my intent:
Re: the quotation from Alasdair Cameron - people in the PV industry have known about and considered these issues for an extremely long time. In fact it is rare to see any manufacturing industry with such a focus on lifecycle analyses, materials recycling, pollution minimisation and responsible product disposal as the PV industry displays, and this has been the case almost since the inception of the modern industry. I'm sure this Cameron chap is aware of this - that might be why he does not, as far as I know, write unbalanced scare-mongering articles or make ridiculous claims about "toxic time-bombs".
A little bit of research would have revealed that you are not the first person to raise these issues, and that by-and-large they are being dealt with very responsibly. Searching for "environmental impacts of solar cell manufacturing" in Scopus turns up papers from as far back as 1980, for example. With vastly improved/expanded EHS legislation since then, it is not surprising that the mitigation of adverse environmental effects from the industry is the focus of intensive academic and industrial research efforts.
It was less than two years ago that China overtook Germany as the world's largest exporter of solar panel systems - and German EHS legislation is some of the best in Europe. Your rather facetious claim that "workers in developing countries are tasked with the job [of making solar panels]" is another example of what I would term disingenuousness - if you were aware that the industry was born and continues to mature in industrialised Europe and the USA, and that to a large extent the Chinese module factories are simply following/copying the established (Western) production techniques, you could not honestly write such a thing knowing that most readers will take what you say at face value.
Let’s look in some detail at some more of the article:
"It is estimated that each 10MW/year production of flat-panel III-V modules requires about 23 tonnes of arsine a year."
Analysis: let's be generous and give the III-V designs the whole 1% of annual global solar cell production that is not silicon-based. From Hoffmann and Waldmann, the worldwide solar cell production in 2007 (the last year they had data for) amounted to ~2,500 MW. 1% of that is 25 MW, which by "your" estimate (are you basing it on Fthenakis & Bowerman 2003, by the way?) gives 57.5 tonnes of arsine. This is insignificant compared to the quantities that the microelectronics industry uses. So shall we be afraid of our laptops and mobile phones, and call them "toxic time-bombs", is that what you're saying?
"The quantities [of arsine] required in flat-panel designs could present great risks to the environment."
You say this without making any reference to the fact that this was recognised years ago, researched, and brought under control. People don't just walk around in factories swinging flasks of hydrogen fluoride or arsine to and fro! Many of the techniques used in solar cell fabrication are practically identical to those used in the microelectronics industry - again, can we expect an article in which you make snide comments about the IT industry next?
"Arsine is almost as toxic as methyl isocyanate: in 1984, the accidental release of 40 tonnes of methyl isocyanate at the Union Carbide factory in Bhopal killed 3,000 people and injured 200,000 more."
You're a philosophy professor, so I'll leave it to you to tell me the technical term for the rhetorical shimmy you did there. There are lots of chemicals "almost as toxic" as each other - why did you pick methyl isocyanate? Is it because you couldn't find any incident in which an arsine leak killed or injured someone?
"I was not, I must say, aware that this panal [sic] variety was the odd one out, as he implies, amongst many other totlally [sic] safe ones."
I didn’t say or intend to imply that anything in any sphere of life is ever “totally safe” or “totally” anything, because that would be a *generalisation* that is *never true*. However, if you were unaware that III-V cells make up less than 1% of the market for solar cells, then *you don't know what you're talking about when you talk about the solar cell industry.* You wrote the article, however, in such a style and with such an all-knowing tone, that it is clear that you want your readers to believe you have some expertise on the subject - and not just on solar cells, but on everything discussed therein. Although I am fairly ignorant of the wind industry, for example, I am quite confident that you are also; and just as I cannot agree with your "analysis" of issues relating to solar cells, so I will not believe what you have to say about wind - a "precautionary principle".
As far as I can tell, your thesis is simply that businessmen, seeing opportunities arising due to new legislation, are attempting to exploit those opportunities for capital gain. Excuse me while I check to see which religion the Pope practices! We don’t live in a Socialist utopia – nobody is going to develop and bring to market alternative energy technologies for the “good of the proletariat”. So, either you can deny reality, or you can accept that “conventional” energy sources are unsafe, incapable of meeting predicted demand, and unsustainable; accept that there is a need to develop new, better, energy technologies; and accept the existence of a globalised market economy and the need to work within this economic structure when developing new energy technologies.
If you accept these fairly obvious things, and feel that there are issues that need to be addressed (such as e.g. recycling of old solar panels), then the best thing you could do is to write a *constructively critical* article explaining things in a *balanced* way, and doing some research so that what you write is sensible and *useful* to the reader who wishes to understand the situation, rather than have it further obscured by clouds of rhetoric.
You *could* have written a balanced article, but you have written one presented in such a way that it seems that you want the reader to believe that you know what you are talking about and you are saying something new when actually you don’t and you’re not; and you have included no information at all about the measures being taken by the industries concerned, and nothing about the efforts being made in laboratories and offices around the world, to address the issues that you have written about. It is neither a well-balanced nor a properly researched article, in my opinion.
Johnny
Has the THES commissioned an article yet from Johnny Fill?
I'm sure other readers would appreciate a balanced assessment of the potential scope, limitations, dangers and developments of solar technology in the next decade by an author who really does know the subject and who can express himself clearly.
Interesting how discussions always go off at tangents? Johnny Fill would like me to have added a lot more on Solar power - but the article is not about solar power I believe it is about the use of 'green rhetoric' to make favourable otherwise unattractive and unwise practices and decisions.
Solar panels have two problems. One is that they can serve no conceivable purpose in replacing oil and gas - they are an irrelevance. (If they were ever to become significant, then technologies like the one 'disowned' here might well be massively expanded - it is considered a very 'efficient' kind of panel)
Two is that they are very expensive - the Spanish government has lost billions on their support for solar. (I read recently, after writing the article) that the 'green' entrepreneurs there are getting paid ten times the going rate for their electricity - or was it more? And the third is that there are environmental costs associated with the technologies too. I have not evaluated them myself, I have read papers about it, and the article, which was allowed (and recall that this article originally has a physical presence in a printed magazine, with physical restrictions - unlike the web!) has the grand total of 132 words to bring all these 'issues' to the reader's attention.
I do not pretend or seek to resolve all these matters. The aim in this sort of piece is to identify the issues, and offer a different way of looking at them. If people then come back with a contrary response - that's the dialectic.
***I'll need to post in sections, I think, as I may have exceeded some word-limit:
Sorry Martin but I'm going to have to do this point-by-point, I know this appears aggressive, but it is the only way to do it clearly:
"Interesting how discussions always go off at tangents?"
I think I have quite thoroughly indicated my opinion of the general quality of your writing and research - as evidenced in this article (I haven't read anything else by you, I must admit). You may consider the fact that I have used one particular area where I know what I'm talking about to highlight these general concerns as "tangential", but I'm fairly sure most will not. "There's no smoke without fire," as the cliché goes.
"Johnny Fill would like me to have added a lot more on Solar power..."
No, I'd have liked what you *did* include to have been of a lot higher quality and to have displayed some basic grasp of what you were writing about.
"...but the article is not about solar power I believe it is about the use of 'green rhetoric' to make favourable otherwise unattractive and unwise practices and decisions."
"Green rhetoric"? Not sure what that means. People running multi-billion dollar enterprises don't make their decisions based on "rhetoric".
What would you consider "attractive" or "wise" in relation to the energy economy? If you look at the trends in population, energy consumption, resource depletion, and environmental change, it is pretty obvious that "business as usual" is not an option. Notice that only the last one in the list is capable of being used for "greenwash" - but all of them are equally pressing reasons for changing the way industry works.
"Solar panels have two problems. One is that they can serve no conceivable purpose in replacing oil and gas - they are an irrelevance."
That is simply a ridiculous statement which reeks of ignorance. It serves a useful purpose, however, as a cautionary reminder that it is most unwise to accept what a philosopher has to say about matters of practical technology. I suggest you do some proper research, instead of parroting nonsense like that.
"(If they were ever to become significant, then technologies like the one 'disowned' here might well be massively expanded - it is considered a very 'efficient' kind of panel)"
It is almost certain that III-V technology will never be cost-effective. III-V semiconductors are notoriously expensive and difficult to produce in industrial quantities. The comparatively high efficiency of such devices still cannot make up for the high cost of producing it, in comparison to other technologies. The industry view is that silicon will dominate for at least another decade, possibly longer; while this is by no means certain (as nothing is ever certain), any disruption to the predicted market scenario is extremely unlikely to be caused by the type of technology you focused on.
Considering (as your article did not) the research going on into lifecycle environmental effects, and the existing and planned EHS legislation over the next decade, it is fairly clear that environmentally harmful practices and technologies will not become the basis of any future solar cell market. Your "something wicked this way comes"/"toxic time-bomb" alarmism is silly and baseless when one considers the actual situation that exists. If your article intended to consider the actual situation as it exists, it missed the target.
"Two is that they are very expensive - the Spanish government has lost billions on their support for solar. (I read recently, after writing the article) that the 'green' entrepreneurs there are getting paid ten times the going rate for their electricity - or was it more?"
Apologies in advance for the polemic, but it's less expensive than oil, if you stop to think about it. Clearly you haven't, but try adding up all the costs of the last century of Western interference in the Middle East, all the wars, all the environmental and economic damage from oil spills, all the pollution resulting from the use of fossil fuels, all the social and environmental problems resulting from the domination of society by the car, then see if you can tell me with a straight face that solar energy is expensive, and that "conventional" energy is not hugely subsidised by the taxpayer. Since you so clearly need the practice, I'll leave it to you as a practical exercise in research to do that analysis and see whether the current market price of electricity is anywhere near 1/10th of the *true* cost of producing it. You are not thinking very clearly.
Seriously, whatever you make of my little polemic above (I can probably guess what you think of it), your analysis here as elsewhere is flawed and several years out of date. Recent reports indicate that by the end of 2011, PV will be at grid parity for very large numbers of consumers:
"Photon Consulting in another study calculates that solar power is poised for far greater adoption because of falling costs. "Grid parity," or meeting the cost of electricity from traditional sources of power generation, is close for many places but Photon Consulting did note that there are economy-related risks to hitting that mark.
"Even at $0.15/kWh, the cost of solar power will be below grid parity for more than half of residential customers and 10% of commercial customers in the OECD (Organization for Economic Development countries), as long as grid electricity prices do not decrease through 2010. The other key risk to this view is significantly higher interest rates," Photon Consulting said in its report."
http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-10170650-54.html
(the report itself costs $1,950)
Grid parity is, in fact, the case *now* in many significant markets; I'll refer again to the recent study of Hoffmann and Waldmann, since it appears that you haven't taken the trouble to read it yet:
"The electricity tariff of Tokyo Electric Power Corporation (TEPCO) provides a differentiated tariff that changes during the daytime and over the seasons. Thus, during the summer and at daytime, PV solar electricity in Tokyo is already cost effective for the customer. For this reason the Japanese market is still not collapsing, even though the incentives for PV in Japan went down to zero. A very similar situation can be observed in the liberalized electricity market of California. Differentiated tariffs show the highest price at summer during daytime. In these market situations, PV solar electricity is already cost competitive compared with the price at the private power socket."
Next:
"And the third..."
Hang on, I thought "solar panels have two problems"? OK, well...
"...is that there are environmental costs associated with the technologies too."
Same as with any technology. I really think I have already written enough about this point.
"I have not evaluated them myself, I have read papers about it,"
Clearly not the most recent or the most cited ones, because I *have* read these, and what you are saying doesn't correspond to he current state of affairs in this field. And if you *have* read recent or relevant papers, how was it that you thought III-V cells are representative of the industry, exactly?
"...and the article, which was allowed (and recall that this article originally has a physical presence in a printed magazine, with physical restrictions - unlike the web!)..."
Fair point. The original version of this comment suffered a similar fate!
"... has [sic] the grand total of 132 words to bring all these 'issues' to the reader's attention."
Right. So because of spatial constraints, you had to remove all proportionality, accuracy, and balance - "solar panels are a toxic time-bomb" takes up 7 words, and is utterly false - from your analysis? Perhaps instead, you could have removed all the sarcastic and unnecessary adjectives, such as "oh-so-green" and "solemn", from the text? That would have had the additional benefit of making your piece more pleasant to read, even if you did not then make use of the space you'd have gained to inject a sense of balance.
"I do not pretend or seek to resolve all these matters."
I accept that; however, the piece contains many statements such as "the main problem with solar energy arises from the use of large quantities of arsine and phosphine in the manufacture of solar panels," and "solar panels are a toxic time-bomb". This type of (incorrect) statement *suggests* that you *do* consider the issue resolved, and that the reader should consider your (biased) take on it to be well-informed and based on something, and be "informed" by the (mis)information provided in the article. (I will again point out that I am only referring to the section on solar energy as this is where I can most clearly see the problems I'm talking about; I don't have sufficient knowledge to criticise your analysis of wind energy in Denmark, but I also don't think you have sufficient knowledge to *perform* such an analysis.)
"The aim in this sort of piece is to identify the issues, and offer a different way of looking at them."
Accepted. I still dislike, and disagree with, your unbalanced "way of looking", though; and I still profoundly dislike the snide tone in which the article is written.
"If people then come back with a contrary response - that's the dialectic."
Indeed - a process made possible, like your research for the article, and my research for the argument, by the semiconductor microelectronics industry. Tell me, when the industry was getting "off the ground", in an age of limited/nonexistent EHS legislation and terrible environmental practice, were you there urging people to reject computers because of the supposed environmental risks you could uncover?
I look forward to your response, and I await your next THES piece, in which you argue that the industrialised human exploitation of the natural environment can just carry on indefinitely as it is, and so we should not attempt to do anything to change it. Because that is the message I hear in your "profits of doom" piece - "don't act".
Johnny
Martin: As far as the physics related to global warming is concerned and its consequences, you have had it spot-on both in the past and in this article. Let’s hope that solar cells really do rapidly become a cost-effective alternative to fossil fuels. In the meantime, there is concern that renewables will be unable to ensure medium term energy supply in the UK. If so, then there is no reasonable alternative to building significant new fossil fuel and nuclear generation. I very much hope this is what is done.
Having read the article and the comments I feel that a word should be said on philosophical grounds concerning the debate between Martin Cohen and Johnny Fill. I, like Martin Cohen, do not profess to be an expert on solar cells, wind turbines, or indeed renewable energies in general, however I find it worrisome how such apparent ill-informed nonsense could be published. Clearly Johnny Fill knows the field he is discussing and though Martin Cohen may find his ‘corrections’ ‘tangential’, I feel this to be the opposite.
When one researches a topic outside their field of expertise that person must ensure that what they publish is both accurate (to the best of their knowledge, through correct and thorough research) and contemporary, it seems Martin Cohen’s factual basis forming his understanding on the ‘Green rhetoric’ of climate change are neither. I fully understand the importance of this issue to a political philosopher and am not arguing that it is a matter only to be discussed by those qualified, such as Johnny Fill, I only suggest that if one makes assertions that are then refuted, with supporting evidence, then any ‘negative’ ( as is inferred) comments should be appreciated.
I can fully understand why much of the feedback following the article can be seen to be positive as although I found much of Martin Cohen’s Philosophy lacking, irrespective of the discrepancies clearly highlighted by Johnny Fill, I would have most probably accepted the evidence base. This may seem off topic to Martin Cohen but as he is indeed a professor of philosophy I am sure he will understand its importance, as though appearing to be aside from the main issue of the article I feel it in fact addresses the fundamental parts.
I will now use a cliché that abounds, that is that we live in an age of information, and that because of this, misinformation is indeed a necessary symptom. Climate change is a monumental issue which needs to be treated regardless of any political sidings. I fail to understand the attack that anything that contradicts the accepted fact of the indispensability of renewable energies should be considered leftist. The term is in fact derogatory and meaningless. What matters is factual data; this, as any self respecting scientist will tell you, is the only dogma. Those putting positive comments above have entrusted Martin Cohen, the philosopher, with the responsibility of being scientifically factual, he is clearly not, or has, at best, ‘cherry-picked’ the facts that suit his thesis. Moreover, his attitude to the constructive criticism supplied seems to directly contradict the ideals of a philosophical education, obviously Martin Cohen fails to see that tools of argumentation(including facts that influence opinion, something being abused in the piece) are an intrinsic part of a philosophical education.
Joseph Webster
Student in Humanities
I have been following this argument with some interest. Johnny Fill appears to know quite a bit about PV cells, but I'm afraid his appreciation of the social and economic context comes up a bit short.
His argument is essentially that the worst PV technologies are the least used, so that Martin Cohen has cherry-picked the toxic risks involved. But if we are to expand PV generation substantially, it will be those technologies we will turn to, for the simple reason that the silicon technology that dominates the field (one cannot use the word ‘market’ in an area so distorted by subsidies) for reasons I set out below.
Johnny Fill asks ‘Tell me, ….were you there urging people to reject computers because of the supposed environmental risks you could uncover?’ I doubt Martin Cohen is old enough to have been there at the birth of computers, but is Johnny Fill unaware that the risks associated with the life cycle of microelectronics have rightly been the subject of intense scrutiny — as numerous Greenpeace campaigns against recycling in the Third World attest?
Johnny Fill clearly subscribes to the tired old neo-Malthusian meme we have heard for so long, equating economic growth with physical throughput. The giveaway is his expectation that Martin Cohen's next piece will 'argue that the industrialised human exploitation of the natural environment can just carry on indefinitely as it is, and so we should not attempt to do anything to change it.' This view embodies the same mistaken belief that we need some wise scientists to help institute the changes we must have. It misses entirely to point that society adapts by the actions of millions of individuals, and the grand attempts to 'change it' do not have a particularly good track record.
Next, Johnny Fill's account of Middle East conflict is risible. Wars in this, and any other region, have multiple causes, many of which predate the emergence of oil as an energy source. You might as well charge the costs of such conflicts to the PV industry because there is a lot of sand there.
But let's turn to PV electricity. The thing about its advocates that always amazes me is that they are at once prepared to argue it should be expanded enormously AND to ignore the consequences of that expansion. PV is fine in remote locations, like navigation buoys, or where it displaces high-cost diesel generation, but Martin Cohen is correct to question seriously its ability to replace existing large-scale base-load generation.
Aside from failing to consider the true operational cost of large-scale PV (storage or system back-up, cleaning to prevent efficiency losses, damage from hailstorms, etc), it's advocates conveniently overlook its one big problem: the solar constant.
Incoming solar radiation is limited at about 1366 W/sp.m. Being on a rotating sphere reduces that to a quarter of that value - about 342 W/sp.m. At current (silicon) efficiencies of about 18%, that means a PV cell can capture around 61.5 W/sq.m. So my 7kW heat pump would require 114 sq.m of PV arrays to power it - not allowing for any storage losses. That's more then 16 sq.km of land (1600 hectares) to replace a 1000MW coal-fired power station.
This is why existing large-scale solar installations tend to be in remote areas like the Mohave Desert, where land can be acquired for close to zero cost because it is 'worthless' - except, of course, as desert wilderness (which is why they are often opposed by environmental groups, concerned about their impacts). As they tend to be remote sites, the transmission losses (and costs) increase.
Increases in efficiency can reduce the land required - but then we start moving away from silicon to those more toxic alternatives, so the questions about toxicity are entirely germane.
So PV will find its niche, where it is backed up by conventional sources, but it is far from being able to replace such sources. As with wind, whether those back-up (or storage) costs are charged to PV is important
There is no environmental free lunch with any energy conversion technology, and PV has its own toxic risks, and we are right to be concerned over those as manufacturing moves to locations such as China, the technology is scaled up, and new technologies are adopted in the search for better efficiency.
Johnny Fill is rather typical of advocates for particular technologies — he is one of what a (female) friend who was an alternative technology writer once referred to as the 'boys for the toys.' They will always be strong advocates for the technologies they favour, but we should take their advocacy with a sceptical grain of salt and adopt them only when they make economic, social, and environmental sense.
Which is exactly why we must not allow a free pass to technological or any other interests that might hide behind the normative skirts of good causes.
Apologies: Second sentence, second para should read:
But if we are to expand PV generation substantially, it will be those technologies we will turn to, for the simple reason that the silicon technology that dominates the field (one cannot use the word ‘market’ in an area so distorted by subsidies) is likely to be displaced by more efficient technology for reasons I set out below.
Joe Webster, you assert: “Climate change is a monumental issue which needs to be treated regardless of any political sidings.”
A member of the Oxburgh enquiry panel, Professor David Hand FBA, is a distinguished statistician. The understated second conclusion of the Oxburgh enquiry (see below) suggests that there is a problem with the UEA CRU’s statistical work. That is certainly statistician Steve McIntyre’s view. Should you not rather be asking the question: “Is climate change a monumental issue?” If climate change is a monumental issue, which at the very least seems to be debatable, is it unknown future warming or future cooling that is the more troublesome concern? I would propose that the history of climate change implies that it is the latter.
Incidentally, since the first wind turbine to provide electricity was made in 1887, it is surprising that modern investors in wind-power stations still require subsidy to compete.
Oxburgh Conclusion 2
We cannot help remarking that it is very surprising that research in an area that
depends so heavily on statistical methods has not been carried out in close
collaboration with professional statisticians. Indeed there would be mutual
benefit if there were closer collaboration and interaction between CRU and a
much wider scientific group outside the relatively small international circle of
temperature specialists.
I work in the renewable energy industry, but my background is philosophy and I am utterly appalled at the uses Cohen has put it to here. Quite aside from the obvious errors, there are several pieces of the article which contradict each other, which I'd have hoped that anyone with even a basic training in logic could've spotted. For example, Cohen claims:
Denmark is about to launch a new generation of 20MW turbines (actually 10MW, as even a cursory Google could've told you). However, at the same time, Denmark is cutting the subsidy the wind industry recieves. So either the wind industry isn't reliant on subsidies, which the article *appears* to claim, or it is, and yet nonsensically trying to expand when its revenue is collapsing. Again, either the industry is insane or Cohen is misrepresenting the truth.
Secondly, Cohen claims that building wind turbines requires clearfelling of trees when it's done in a forest. This is quite surprising, as the article points that out that wind turbines are really quite big. Surely they'd be sufficiently above the treetops that you'd only need to cut access ways and the area around the base? And you could then restore the areas around the base once the turbine had been installed? It may not surprise you to learn that's actually what happens - which is why the Forestry Commission actively encourages the development of turbines on its land.
Thirdly - and perhaps most importantly - the first part of the article is a horrendous misrepresentation of the way in which language actually works in society. Cohen appears to be claiming that the 'bootleggers' can use language in exactly the same way as the 'baptists' in order to achieve their goals. This patronising assumption requires that consumers of that language - i.e. the public, you and I, are unable to check that language against the world except via the medium of some skilled analyser of language - Cohen. Otherwise we'd be content to assume that words retain their prior meaning. The first few comments do nothing but stoke this egotism.
Cohen relies upon a notion of language as world-defining, rather than something that is continually checked by the speaker for both use and usefulness - read some Millikan for an understanding of the latter. I'd assumed that conception of language died out sometime during the 80s, but clearly I was wrong.
Mike Post - suppose for the sake of argument that it is indisputably shown that there is no climate change going on due to greenhouse gas emissions. Suppose we entirely discount the AGW hypotheses. There would still be no choice but to change the way industrialised society generates the energy it consumes, due to the trends in population, environmental pollution, energy consumption per capita and predicted demand, and resource depletion. The article is not about statistical evidence for or against "global warming" and the discussion will not be productive if it takes that turn, so let's stick with the article.
On that note, thanks for your contribution, Aynsley Kellow. I’m glad to see a response to my criticisms that is based on knowledge and reasoning, even if it’s not from Dr Cohen; perhaps you should also have written the article, then the commentaries might have been more productive.
On some of what you wrote, I am in agreement with you. I am aware of and concerned about, for example, harmful practices that some unscrupulous businesses use in microelectronics “recycling”; and I agree that there’s “no environmental free lunch” with any technology (I think I’ve written sufficiently about this, though – and the PV/renewables buffet costs a lot less than the coal-based lunch). I’ll try to indicate where I disagree with your analysis.
I think you are incorrect in saying that “if we are to expand PV generation substantially [...] the silicon technology that dominates the field (one cannot use the word ‘market’ in an area so distorted by subsidies) is likely to be displaced by more efficient technology.” This is not the industry view. As I have written in my last comment, the economics of high-efficiency cells don’t make sense – the efficiency gain and hence reduced spatial requirement is more than offset by the increased cost of production. We will see more CdTe photovoltaics over the next few years, but the outlook to 2020 at least is for continued Si-technology dominance. Cadmium-based PV safety issues have been extensively investigated by many researchers (e.g. Zweibel et al. (1990), Fthenakis et al. (2003)), hence the absurdity of Cohen’s alarmist approach. The high cost of II-VI semiconductors, by the way, is reason for optimism that the valuable heavy metals in these cells will probably never be simply thrown into landfill – it makes economic sense to extract the scarce materials and use them again.
You say “Johnny Fill clearly subscribes to the tired old neo-Malthusian meme we have heard for so long, equating economic growth with physical throughput.” I’d like to hear your take on how the emerging “powerhouses” (BRIC countries) are achieving such stupendous rates of economic growth, if it is not through massive annual increases in exports, manufacturing, agriculture, mining, and energy production capabilities - all of which point to “physical throughput” - whereas stagnation and recession is experienced in the non-manufacturing countries. I am always amazed at how people can come up with ways that the “service economy” is supposed to grow if there are no computers being produced so that people can log onto Amazon, and how Amazon is supposed to work if there are no products to sell and no means of delivering them to the customer. The word “consumer” should really tell you all you need to know. And if not, why not look at the graphs of energy usage versus time for the last thirty years? Can you give me an example of an economy that grew while consuming less? The reason that economic growth has long been considered correlated with consumption of natural resources is, simply, because that is the case in fact.
“[His] view embodies the same mistaken belief that we need some wise scientists to help institute the changes we must have. It misses entirely to [sic] point that society adapts by the actions of millions of individuals, and the grand attempts to 'change it' do not have a particularly good track record.”
It’s unclear whether you think it’s a mistaken belief that changes must be made or simply that it’s a mistaken belief that “scientists” are required in order to implement the necessary changes. If you think we can carry on as we are, you’re wrong; but if as I suspect you are just saying that scientific input is unnecessary – actually, you’d be wrong there, too. Your woolly statement “society adapts by the actions of millions of individuals” doesn’t actually *mean* anything. By definition an action requires one to do something, and the list of things we can do are limited by practical, technological, economic realities. Millions of individuals have not taken a conscious choice to live in the unsustainable consumer economies of the West, they were just born and raised here; and I didn’t choose to have coal-fired power stations - that choice was made for me and for everyone else, by an elite of politicians, technologists, and captains of industry. Rather than accusing me of ignorance of social and economic realities, perhaps you yourself should recognise that for over a hundred years, the choices that most individuals can make have been limited (or even made for them) by technological elites. The building of the roads and railways in the USA; the “space race” and arms races of the 20th century; the great changes in agriculture in Britain after the Second World War; these were not matters of democratic choice, and nor were they emergent properties of a system of interacting free individuals (except in the extremely loose sense that the elites and the power structure could be thought of as emergent properties of society).
“Next, Johnny Fill's account of Middle East conflict is risible. Wars in this, and any other region, have multiple causes, many of which predate the emergence of oil as an energy source.”
Undoubtedly there are many factors, but at the heart, imperialism is driven by economic engines. Look at how the original borders of Iraq were defined – lines on a map drawn by British and French imperialists, dividing up the main oil fields they were aware of at the time, with no concern for the effect on the pre-existing local tensions. Or, look at who’s rich and powerful in the Middle East – people with oil who do what the West wants them to. Look who gets bombed – people with oil, who don’t do what the West tells them to. The problem with Saddam Hussein, for example, was that in Michael Meacher’s memorable phrase “he turned his guns on the oil-rich rulers of Kuwait”, rather than do what the USA wanted him to do and just keep the peace in his own oil-drenched fiefdom – it didn’t matter that keeping the peace meant killing Kurds, it mattered that he caused problems that disrupted the oil supply to the West. Do you really think that the West has been so long involved in the politics of the Middle East for any other reason than to secure the supply of hydrocarbons that Western industry and transport is so dependent on?
“But let's turn to PV electricity. The thing about its advocates that always amazes me is that they are at once prepared to argue it should be expanded enormously AND to ignore the consequences of that expansion.”
I’m sorry if I gave you that impression – I’m not prepared to ignore real consequences and real issues. I am well aware of the issues surrounding the connection of PV (or any variable source) to pre-existing electricity grids that were designed for the constant output of environmentally destructive coal-fired power stations; the modernisation of distribution networks is an essential part of the integration of variable renewable energy generation into the electricity supply “mix”. People are well aware of these issues; there is no need for Martin Cohen’s hysterical approach to “raising” them.
“...but Martin Cohen is correct to question seriously [PV’s] ability to replace existing large-scale base-load generation.”
I agree that he would have been correct to question this *seriously*, that would have led to an interesting article; my problem with his article is that it has the taste of poor research, and I don’t think he *has* taken the issues seriously. The article is written in a sanctimonious tone and its research basis seems to me to be flawed and out of date.
You then make a reasonable argument to do with the space required for large-scale, centralised PV. Now, I don’t want to give the impression that I think PV is a cure-all for every application. At UK latitudes, it arguably makes more sense to use one’s roof space for solar hot water, as the domestic energy bill is heavily weighted by water-heating uses, which can be reduced to zero with some of the solar hot water systems available (I read with pleasure yesterday that huge increases in solar hot water system installations are being planned for New York: http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2010/07/new-yorks-solar-thermal-plans). In some cases, such as parts of Portugal, or deserts as you rightly mention, large-scale PV makes sense. It’s interesting to note that the 1600 hectares per 1000 MW PV generation figure that you calculate is the same as the land-use for a coal-mine capable of providing 1000 MW over the operating life of a coal-fired power station (Luque and Hegedus 2003, “Handbook of photovoltaic systems and engineering”, Wiley). I know which I’d rather live next to...
Furthermore, large-scale PV is just one part (and not the largest) of the PV market; distributed (“off-grid”) applications make up a larger part, as do “developing world” applications such as powering fridges to keep vaccines cool in Africa, or driving inter-village radio communications systems in Nepal.
“Increases in efficiency can reduce the land required - but then we start moving away from silicon to those more toxic alternatives, so the questions about toxicity are entirely germane.”
The idea that we’ll be “moving away from silicon” any time soon is not correct; I’ve already written about this. We’ll probably see more CdTe products hitting the market, but the majority of experts/analysts predict silicon domination will continue. Silicon is the second most abundant element in the Earth (after oxygen) and is entirely stable and non-toxic.
But, even if we allow a significant shift away from Si-PV over the next decade, as I’ve said already Cohen’s style in the article is not to ask “germane” questions, but to make bold sweeping statements without backing them up with a single reference or source. This is what I was trying to get at in my comments – the statement “solar panels are a toxic time-bomb” is not a “germane question” but rather an incorrect assertion. The issues are not raised for discussion; Cohen’s incorrect conclusions are simply presented belligerently, without sources, and without argument. You and I may understand the issues, but the “average reader” (if such exists) would benefit more from a measured analysis than the silly polemic that characterises the article. See the comment above yours, for example, from Joseph Webster – “I would have most probably accepted the evidence base” – to see why I think my criticisms were needed.
There *are* issues here – I’m not saying there aren’t – what I was arguing is that those working in the industry and in relevant governmental and academic fields are aware of these issues and are working on them. What you have written in your comment is in the “ball-park” of what I’d expect from an article in the THES; it’s measured, (largely) reasonable, fair and balanced, and based on analysis which is presented for the reader to scrutinise and criticise. Cohen’s article was not – it shrieked about “time-bombs” and “dire consequences”.
I don’t want to come across as a “boy for the toys” or whatever your friend said. Sorry if that’s the impression you get – the reason I have entered into argument with Cohen is because his writing here is not seasoned with the salt of caution that you recommend. I’d never say that one technology is the panacea to all our energy-economic woes, and of course I advocate PV only as an element of a larger, diverse energy mix, which has to be appropriate to the sources of power available in that location and which match the loads they will be required to drive.
I hope I only ever advocate PV in situations where it makes sense to use it. You and I may perhaps disagree on which situations those are, but at least then there is hope of a “dialectic”, rather than the simple “I’m right/You’re wrong” competition arising from Cohen’s own dismissive article and comments based on poor research, ideological bias, and an unsophisticated conception/usage of language. I am fully in agreement with the concise analysis of Adam Bell (5th August 2010) on this matter.
If JOHNNY FILL says that
" If you think we can carry on as we are, you’re wrong;
WHO IS WE ?
but if as I suspect you are just saying that scientific input is unnecessary – actually, you’d be wrong there, too.
NO EVIDENCE AYNSLE AND MARTIN ARE RIGHT - THIS IS ALL JUST ASSERTION LIKE SO MUCH ELSE IN THIS CONTRIBUTION
Your woolly statement “society adapts by the actions of millions of individuals” doesn’t actually *mean* anything.WHY NOT, TO ME IT MEANS WHAT IT SAYS, READ SOME HISTORY! ADAPTATION TAKES PALCE OVER TIME AND IN GROUPS, NOT BY INDIVIDIALS IN ISOLATION
By definition an action requires one to do something, and the list of things we can do are limited by practical, technological, economic realities. VERY TRUE BUT EVEN REALITIES CHANGE WHY?Millions of individuals have not taken a conscious choice to live in the unsustainable consumer economies ???MEANING WHAT? of the West, UNSUSTAINBLE? ANOTHER IDEOLOGICAL ASSERTIONthey were just born and raised here; and I
YOU ARE ONLY ONE AND I DO NOT CARE WHAT YOU DO
didn’t choose to have coal-fired power stations - that choice was made for me and for everyone else, by an elite of politicians, technologists, and captains of industry. UTTER SELF-CENTRED NON-SENSE! I CAN'T READ ON... HE REALLYHAS IT IN FOR 'ELITES'..THE NEW DEVIL ? BACK TO THE STONE AGE FOR JF, OR EVEN BEYOND
Thanks to Johnny Fill for introducing important objections to Martin Cohen’s article. I do agree with Dr. Cohan, if he is actually saying it, that the larger the green organization becomes, the further they depart from their stated mission. The largest have sold themselves to corporate power.
Regarding energy subsidies:
”Fossil Fuel Subsidies Are 12 Times Support for Renewables, Study Shows.
“Global subsidies for fossil fuels dwarf support given to renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power and biofuels, Bloomberg New Energy Finance said.
“Governments last year gave $43 billion to $46 billion of support to renewable energy through tax credits, guaranteed electricity prices known as feed-in tariffs and alternative energy credits, the London-based research group said today in a statement. That compares with the $557 billion that the International Energy Agency last month said was spent to subsidize fossil fuels in 2008.
“One of the reasons the clean energy sector is starved of funding is because mainstream investors worry that renewable energy only works with direct government support,” said Michael Liebreich, chief executive of New Energy Finance. “This analysis shows that the global direct subsidy for fossil fuels is around ten times the subsidy for renewables…”
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-07-29/fossil-fuel-subsidies-are-12-times-support-for-renewables-study-shows.html
Granted that the energy we get from fossil fuels is vastly greater than that from renewables, but the fossil fuel industry has also been in existence far longer. Why do they still require subsidies? They don’t require them; they just have the political clout to acquire them.
Wars in the Middle East:
Anyone who doubts that they are about oil is at least half wrong. They are also about protecting Israel, but why is that important, especially to the US, of which I am a citizen? This is a subject far beyond the scope of a few comments here, and I am not an expert on the subject anyway, but nonetheless: there is a powerful Zionist lobby here, and a lot of fundamentalist Christians who believe that the Holy Land belongs to them. The ruthless leaders of Israel take every advantage of these forces and exert tremendous control over US foreign policy.
For example, President Lyndon Johnson recalled the fighter planes that the US Navy sent in response to the treacherous Israeli attack on the USS Liberty in 1967. As a veteran of the US Navy, and as a US citizen, the fact that our government allowed that unprovoked slaughter to go unanswered is beyond my comprehension.
Today, Israel is determined to attack Iran, since Israel believes that only they have the right to possess nuclear weapons in that region. Forty-seven members of the US House of Representatives have passed a resolution supporting Israel’s plans:
http://news.suite101.com/article.cfm/us-house-resolution-supports-israeli-action-against-iran-a266789
Why is Israel so important to the US? Aside from the domestic political pressure to support Israel without question, a powerful Israel is the main assurance of US access to Middle Eastern oil.
The effectiveness of renewable energy:
There is plenty of it, but it is intermittent. We could live on it if we develop a way to store it. I am sorry to see that the intermittency argument is still so common.
The first thing we must do is conserve energy. When we have done everything possible in that field, then we will know how to proceed with energy supply. Not that we can wait, we must be doing both, but continuing reliance on fossil fuels will destroy what is left of the natural world, as would a reliance on nuclear energy. Renewable energy is the only rational source, but it appears that biofuels should not be a significant part of it.
Global warming:
It is a fact that we are the main cause of the current warming, but history shows that most of us will never accept this fact or take the necessary actions. It will put an end to our civilization in the lifetime of many of us, aided by the peak of oil production and many other resources, along with the relentless growth in the human population.
I have no children. I will be 62 years old in October and will not be having any. Not because of my age, but the knowledge of what they would face.
I am absolutely positive that the great fight for energy (fighting peoples and fighting nature/technology) is unnecessary. Drop in supply of energy will cause disasters in "economy", but "economy" is an artificially blown up monster. The number of jet flights can drop probably 100 times and "economy" will only get better. People are moving nobody knows why and where. A corporation that stops flying people would be severely criticised for political reasons and thrown out of business. People spend crazy amounts of money on "travel" God knows where and why, but I know - they have nothing to occupy their brain with. The number of jets, cars, buses can be reduced to one hundredth of it without hurting people, but making them considerably more sane.
So with the amount of electricity generated. So with the amount of garments produced. And much more so - with the amount of plastics and drugs. The product that now is guaranteed for 5-10 years used to last from 200 to 2000 years. They don't satisfy the demand, they create it. They also create jobs, i. e. try to keep people busy; they otherwise would do a lot of other product. There are enormous difficulties, bureaucratic and financial, in buying raw materials privately.
We use expensive materials needlessly. Soda, Na2CO3, was used for washing dishes, cloth, floors and everything else, it does not have pungent smell, not poisonous, easily washed out and is "environmentally friendly". Introduction of detergents was fraud. I know a girl who graduated with M.Sc. in chemical engineering, but cannot write the above formula.
Yet, I am certain that even small drop in supply of oil will leave people in cold in winter. Jets will continue to fly.
This is the result of conspiracies, monopolies, collusion, bribes, union activity, total deception in the media, economic crimes, administrative crimes and completely screwed taxation law. I once talked to a businessman who said that he has to buy every year a new car because of the taxation law. How "economy" is actually working, this is kept secret.
99% of people believe that the problem is "capitalism". People are stupid and kept that way. Some begin to discover "natural" ways but 9/10 of this new enterprise is fraud too: they go as low as selling you 1mg of nickel in one liter jar for $20; "it boosts your immune system". They compete with pharma, doing the same, but on a small scale.
Education doesn't help (look above). It is designed to keep you on a minimal budget for 20 years, to prevent you from working for your family and producing real product, the only thing you are supposed to remember for life is to obey.
The Israel thing is of exactly the same nature: deceit, brainwashing and selling unworthy product. Are you buying? As in all other cases, you have no choice. But that particular product might soon cost you much more...
To "SONJA CHRISTIANSEN " (clearly not the real one):
You say "read some history" to me; I say "read a dictionary" to you. Your idiotic, aggressive, misspelled rant is a complete waste of space on this thread, and your ridiculous use of capital letters simply reminds one of those English tourists who think the locals will understand them if they speak in English slower and louder.
Anyone wishing to see where and how Martin Cohen has got several basic facts wrong in this article is directed to my comments starting 01/08/2010 above, and to the comment of Adam Bell on 05/08/2010.
Johnny Fill MPhys (Sussex), AMInstP
Trinity College, Oxford
I’d like to thank Johnny Fill for his comments, if slightly less for repeating the same point several times, chest-beating, spurious appeals to authorities and digressing. (not to mention the ad hominem stuff...) But just in case anyone is confused by those tactics into thinking he has some sort of valid point, I’d perhaps better just reprise the arguments in the original piece:
This is simply that energy policy is a practical matter rooted in costs. And all forms of energy have both an economic cost and a more often neglected environmental cost. Coal is both efficient and cheap. It’s recent recasting as the doomsday fuel has been rooted in dubious science and murky politics. But renewables, like solar, are worse. They are economically massively more expensive (solar, remember, played a large part in the near bankruptcy fo the Spanish recently), functionally irrelevant (they cannot provide energy of the kind that present society requires, merely negligible add-on power) AND there are environmental costs.
In the cae of solar, I gave an example. Given I had only that 132 words of space to discuss solar in, I chose to use the problem of toxic ingredients. I might have chosen problem (as noted by Aynsley Kellow above) of the amount of space solar panels require. or the problem of the amount of water some systems use in arid areas, of the problem of hailstorms in other areas. Point is, there are environmental costs associated with the supposedly ‘clean and green’ technology. If solar, wind or nuclear are expanded, these costs go up proportionately.
Solar power is promoted at present on the back of massive public subsides which benefit just a handful of ‘entrepreneurs’ and of course, solar energy researchers.
***Apologies to readers, it seems there was some problem posting first time, so I am trying again here:
Dr Cohen:
1) I wouldn’t have had to “repeat the same point several times” if you had not persisted in making incorrect and misleading assertions in your poorly-spelled replies to my posts.
2) “spurious appeals to authorities” – do you mean “basing claims on published, peer-reviewed sources, and giving sufficient information to the reader that they may themselves locate and check the source”? Something you have not done, in either your article or your posts...
3) “ad hominen stuff” – do you actually know what “ad hominen” means, Cohen? I have not made any comments about any person – only about what they have written.
4) “Coal is both efficient and cheap. [sounds like an advertisement...] It’s recent recasting as the doomsday fuel has been rooted in dubious science and murky politics.”
- Burning coal produces the following pollutants (among others): mercury, nitrogen oxides, carbon dioxide, cadmium, lead, soot, sulphur dioxides, selenium, fluorine, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons... (see e.g. Rubin (1999) Environ. Sci. Technol. (33), pp.3062-3067)
- “The northern part of the Czech Republic ranks among the most industrially polluted areas of Europe due mainly to combustion of brown coal with high contents of pyrite and heavy metals.” Kapicka, A. et al. (1999) Journal of Geochemical Exploration 66 (1-2), pp. 291-297
- “Domestic coal combustion has had profound adverse effects on the health of millions of people worldwide. [...] At least 3,000 people in Guizhou Province in southwest China are suffering from severe arsenic poisoning. The primary source of the arsenic appears to be consumption of chili peppers dried over fires fueled with high-arsenic coal. Coal samples in the region were found to contain up to 35,000 ppm arsenic. Chili peppers dried over high-arsenic coal fires adsorb 500 ppm arsenic on average. More than 10 million people in Guizhou Province and surrounding areas suffer from dental and skeletal fluorosis. The excess fluorine is caused by eating corn dried over burning briquettes made from high-fluorine coals and high-fluorine clay binders. Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons formed during coal combustion are believed to cause or contribute to the high incidence of esophageal and lung cancers in parts of China. Domestic coal combustion also has caused selenium poisoning and possibly mercury poisoning.”
Finkelman, R.B., Belkin, H.E., Zheng, B. (1999) Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 96 (7), pp. 3427-3431
- “This paper describes the sources contributing to two seasonal peaks in columnar SO2 amounts measured with a Brewer spectrophotometer at Thessaloniki, Northern Greece since 1982. The SO2 Brewer measurements combined with those at ground level, meteorological analysis and numerical simulations provide estimates on the contribution of local and remote sources to the SO2 column. It is shown that more than 50% of the observed SO2 column can be attributed to lignite-burning sources in Bulgaria, Romania and former Yugoslavia, this percentage rising to 70% at periods with NE flow at 850 hPa. Winds from the NW-N-NE contribute around 60% to the observed mean SO2 column during winter and 75% during the summer. When including all wind directions at 850 hPa, the Greek sources, including the lignite-burning power plant complexes to the WSW of the city, contribute around 40% to the SO2 column. These results are in qualitative agreement with independent observations from inversion of GOME measurements.” Zerefos, C. et al. (2000) Geophysical Research Letters 27 (3), pp. 365-368
- “Industrialized regions in Poland are characterized by high ambient pollution, including polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) from coal burning for industry and home heating. In experimental bioassays, certain PAHs are transplacental carcinogens and developmental toxicants. Biologic markers can facilitate evaluation of effects of environmental PAHs on the developing infant. We measured the amount of PAHs bound to DNA (PAH-DNA adducts) in maternal and umbilical white blood cells. The cohort consisted of 70 mothers and newborns from Krakow, Poland, an industrialized city with elevated air pollution. [...] Results indicate that PAH-induced DNA damage in mothers and newborns is increased by ambient air pollution.” Whyatt, R.M. et al. (1998) Environmental Health Perspectives 106 (SUPPL. 3), pp. 821-826
- “In an average year, a typical coal plant generates:
3,700,000 tons of carbon dioxide (CO2), the primary human cause of global warming--as much carbon dioxide as cutting down 161 million trees.
10,000 tons of sulfur dioxide (SO2), which causes acid rain that damages forests, lakes, and buildings, and forms small airborne particles that can penetrate deep into lungs.
500 tons of small airborne particles, which can cause chronic bronchitis, aggravated asthma, and premature death, as well as haze obstructing visibility.
10,200 tons of nitrogen oxide (NOx), as much as would be emitted by half a million late-model cars. NOx leads to formation of ozone (smog) which inflames the lungs, burning through lung tissue making people more susceptible to respiratory illness.
720 tons of carbon monoxide (CO), which causes headaches and place additional stress on people with heart disease.
220 tons of hydrocarbons, volatile organic compounds (VOC), which form ozone.
170 pounds of mercury, where just 1/70th of a teaspoon deposited on a 25-acre lake can make the fish unsafe to eat.
225 pounds of arsenic, which will cause cancer in one out of 100 people who drink water containing 50 parts per billion.
114 pounds of lead, 4 pounds of cadmium, other toxic heavy metals, and trace amounts of uranium.”
http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_energy/coalvswind/c02c.html
- Professor Sir Chris Llewellyn-Smith FRS, at a lecture on the energy economy that he gave to the Trinity College Scientific Society in February this year, stated that he had estimated that the number of years of human life lost due to the operation of the Didcot coal-burning power station surpassed that due to the Chernobyl disaster.
- Dr Gideon Polya has estimated that “there is a horrendous reality ALREADY of about 170,000 deaths annually throughout the world from the effects of coal-based electricity generation and as many as 0.3 million deaths annually from pollutants from fossil fuel-based electricity generation in general – a huge death toll that cannot be ignored.” (calculated step-by-step, with references given for the data used, at http://www.green-blog.org/2008/06/14/pollutants-from-coal-based-electricity-generation-kill-170000-people-annually/)
- “dubious science” – given that there is no dispute that the temperature of the Earth would be ~258 K (~ -15 deg.C) were it not for the fact that tri-atomic molecules (such as CO2) present in the atmosphere absorb strongly in the IR region of the electromagnetic spectrum and consequently warm the atmosphere, and that human activities over the last ~200 years have significantly increased the concentrations of these gases in the Earth’s atmosphere, it seems fairly obvious that the Earth would warm as a result of this concentration increase. Since temperature records do in fact show an increasing trend since the beginning of the fossil-fuel burning epoch, I fail to see what is so “dubious” here. I also don’t think Dr Cohen is in a position to decide which parts of atmospheric science are “dubious” or not - last time I checked, the man has a PhD in “philosophy of education”, has not got a single scientific qualification to his name, and has published only philosophy, a philosophy magazine, some books of pop-philosophy, and some poorly-researched articles in the THES. The burden of proof is on this so-called “sceptic” - if he would like to produce some well-researched, conclusive experimental evidence that there is in fact some negative feedback mechanism preventing increased IR-absorbing molecule concentrations in the atmosphere from having a warming effect, and that the observed warming is in fact not warming at all, I’ll look forward to seeing it published in a peer-reviewed, proper academic journal. That would be a real breakthrough!
5) “But renewables, like solar, are worse.” – pure (incorrect) assertion; can I see a source, please? Did you not learn how to cite sources during your PhD, or during your undergraduate days at Sussex? I went to Sussex too, but I learnt to reference my sources; the place must have changed since you were there.
6) “They are economically massively more expensive (solar, remember, played a large part in the near bankruptcy fo [sic] the Spanish recently),” – wild, inaccurate assertion; source please? Oh that’s right, you haven’t got one...
I have, though, got one that contradicts your silly claim about Spain. It is part of a letter to the President of the Spanish government from Antonio Rivela MBA:
"Dear President,
We are a group of international investors and investment managers who invest long-term capital on behalf of global pension funds and insurance companies whose beneficiaries are millions of workers – both governmental and private – around the world. Collectively we hold investments in Spanish solar photovoltaic projects with a value of about 3 billion euros.
These projects have been financed with nearly 400 million euros of our clients’ and shareholders’ funds and with approximately 2.6 billion euros of loans from Spanish and European banks. Our investors seek low-risk, regulated assets, thus we made these investments relying on the regulatory assurances of the Spanish Government that the Solar PV tariff under Royal Decree 661/2007 would not be changed or reduced during the life of these projects.
We understand that an unprecedented retroactive change is potentially warranted because based on mistaken beliefs of “excessive profitability,” a contribution to the “tariff deficit,” and “swindles and poor practices in the sector.” These assertions are neither accurate nor warranted and certainly do not apply to our investments. Rather, we call your attention the following facts surrounding investment under the Royal Decree 661/2007 tariff:
- Solar and wind projects have higher capital costs, but lower operating costs than conventional power generation. Feed-in tariffs such as those defined in Royal Decree 661/2007 are provided to attract the lowest cost of capital, and to compensate investors for the substantial risk of large amounts of capital exposed to long-term repayment from equipment performance and the resource meeting the predicted level. Without the confidence that capital will be repaid with reasonable profit offered by the tariff, investors will not invest.
- Our investments were based on market conditions and equipment prices at the time when the investments were made, not today’s market. That solar PV costs have fallen since we made our investments is neither a relevant nor logical argument. Capital expenditures of solar projects are front-loaded and once the project is constructed installation costs and potential returns are locked in at that time. In fact, our early investment to support Spain’s renewable energy policy was the foundation for the technological improvements and efficiencies of scale that allow new projects to enjoy lower costs today. This initial investment has created the possibility of tariff reductions for future projects, effectively reducing costs to consumers. Critical to us in making these pioneering investments was Spain’s promise of long term, stable regulation and profitability assumptions based on equipment costs and technology risks at the time.”
***This is the most important part:
“ - Spain has a “tariff deficit” in large part because it is currently choosing not to pass on to consumers the full cost of either conventional or renewable energy. Of the accumulated deficit of 17 billion euros as of December 2009, ca. 3.5 billion euros is attributable to special regime generation, primarily wind. The balance is attributable to system balancing costs and a decision not to pass on high oil and gas costs in 2007 and 2008. Solar PV is not the underlying problem and is being unfairly targeted when the real issue lies elsewhere.
In short, although it may appear a small action, any retroactive tariff change could have significant negative ramifications for Spain. The mere discussion of such a change at high government levels is already undermining confidence in Spain as a place for foreign direct investment. We are already advising our investors and their Governments of the risk, and enlisting their strongest diplomatic protests. We are not the source of Spain’s tariff deficit or other issues, and should not be made to pay for them.
We accept that due to recent cost reductions in technology arising from PV investments in recent years (which we were part of funding), there should be a managed and reasonable reduction to the tariff for new solar projects. We support such changes. However this is not relevant to our existing investments which were made in a different time, and at a different cost base...."
http://finance.blogs.ie.edu/archives/2010/06/proposed-spanish-retroactive-reduction-of-solar-pv-feed-in-tariffs.php
The situation here is clearly far more complex than you imply. The fact of the Spanish administration’s displayed incompetence in this affair (having arguably set the tariffs far too high in the first place, then attempting to absorb increases in fossil-fuel prices over two years, then scapegoating solar PV ) is *not* an argument against PV technology in general. Again, you are cherry-picking; and in such a misinformed, misleading way!
7) “functionally irrelevant (they cannot provide energy of the kind that present society requires, merely negligible add-on power),” – wild assertion; source please?; or should we just take you at your word? Like we should have taken you at your word about all the inaccuracies in your article that had to be pointed out by myself and others? (interested readers, please see comments above)
8) “Given I had only that 132 words of space to discuss solar in, I chose to use the problem of toxic ingredients.” – see my earlier comments; I’ve already more than addressed this; if you think the efficient use of small amounts of arsine gas in tightly-controlled and regulated factory environments is problematic, why is the vast amount of arsenic released directly into the atmosphere by coal burning power plants not a worry for you? (see above)
9) “I might have chosen problem [sic] (as noted by Aynsley Kellow above) of the amount of space solar panels require.” – which I responded to (05/08/10), pointing out that the land use for a 1000 MW PV array at 18% efficiency is equivalent to the land use for a mining operation capable of supplying a 1000 MW coal-fired plant over its operational lifetime (Luque and Hegedus 2003, “Handbook of photovoltaic systems and engineering”, Wiley). It seems I *have* to repeat facts “several times”, because you just ignore them first time round!
10) “Point is, there are environmental costs associated with the supposedly ‘clean and green’ technology. If solar, wind or nuclear are expanded, these costs go up proportionately.” – you exaggerate these costs, your article is based on poor research (I see you haven’t responded to Adam Bell, who pointed out (05/08/10) some of your more ludicrous mistakes), and do you really believe that the “renewable bogey-man” you are so foolishly trying to conjure into existence with your badly-researched article is anything near as bad as the “environmental costs” of fossil-fuel use? Or the political and social costs? Isn’t the print version of the article illustrated with a photograph of the burning Deepwater Horizon platform?
11) “Solar power is promoted at present on the back of massive public subsides [sic]...” – well...
“The G20 group of nations has agreed to phase out subsidies for fossil fuels over the coming years to decrease greenhouse gas emissions. Global fossil fuel subsidies are estimated [by the IEA] to total $310 billion/yr, compared with renewables' $40 billion/yr.”
(2009) Chemical Engineer (821), pp. 5
“In 2003, global consumer subsidies for petroleum products totalled nearly $60 billion. They are projected to reach almost $250 billion in 2010. Tax-inclusive subsidies, reflecting suboptimal taxation, are estimated to be much larger—$740 billion in 2010, or 1 percent of global GDP. G-20 countries account for over 70 percent of tax-inclusive subsidies, with emerging G-20 countries accounting for a sizable share. Halving tax-inclusive subsidies could reduce projected fiscal deficits by one-sixth in subsidizing countries and could reduce greenhouse emissions by around 15 percent over the long run.”
Coady, D., Gillingham, R., Ossowski, R., Piotrowski, J., Tareq, S. and Tyson, J., (2010) “Petroleum product subsidies: costly, inequitable, and rising” IMF Staff Position Note, 25 February, Washington, DC. http://pdfserve.informaworld.com/981674_751304857_923297125.pdf
“We estimate that the total "tax subsidy" to motor-vehicle users in the US may be in the range of $19-64 billion per year, or $0.11-0.37 per gallon ($0.03-0.10 per liter) of motor fuel.”
Delucchi & Murphy (2008) Transport Policy 15 (3), pp. 196-208
“This paper presents the first estimate of United States military cost for Persian Gulf force (CPGfp) derived entirely by a quantitative method. [...] For 1976-2007 CPGfp is estimated to be $6.8×10^12 and for 2007 $0.5×10^12 (2008$). This substantial military investment is not a remedy for the market failure at the heart of regional security problem [sic], which is oil market power. When CPGfp is added to economic losses attributed to market power in another recent study (Greene, 2010), the severity of this market failure becomes more apparent.”
Stern (2010) Energy Policy 38 (6), pp. 2816-2825
“This paper reviews existing studies of fossil fuel subsidies within the United States, [...] To facilitate comparison, all data have been converted into 1999 dollars. [...] the average annual value is shown. Aggregate subsidies to fossil fuels ranged from a low of $200 million per year [...] to a high of $1.7 trillion, a span of nearly four orders of magnitude. [...] Though still large, the range of estimates drops by two orders of magnitude once fiscal subsidies alone are evaluated-to between $2.6 and $121 billion.”
Koplow & Dernbach (2001) Annual Review of Energy and the Environment 26, pp. 361-389
By the way, Dr Cohen, I am a semiconducting materials researcher, not a solar cell researcher.
That’s it - I am not going to discuss this article with you anymore, since this discussion is clearly going nowhere. I have so far tried to be civil, but your responses to my posts have been, frankly, pathetic; you have either avoided giving a straight response to the research errors pointed out, or simply repeated the rubbish you have written in the article. Also, you have not given a single source for any of the wild claims made in your posts! How can you justify this? And I note that you haven’t responded to Adam Bell. Caught you out quite succinctly, didn’t he?
You clearly don’t know what you’re talking about; almost everything you’ve said so far, I and other knowledgeable commentators have been able to show up as incorrect, misrepresentative, or baseless. I appreciate that since the THES has paid you for the article, you are probably never going to hold up your hands about the mistakes that I and others have pointed out.
I leave it to the reader to judge the worth of Cohen’s article – devoid of sources, demonstrably riddled with factual inaccuracies and based on poor research, and patronisingly written as it is – in the light of the comments made by myself and others since 01/08/2010.
Johnny Fill MPhys (Sussex) AMInstP
Trinity College, Oxford
This is a message for Johnny Fill—if he is still around, which I suspect he won't be for much longer given the treatment he's received. There isn't any point in discussing or debating with Martin Cohen. Anyone who does engage with his work needs to be aware that Cohen does not accept academic, and certainly not, scientific standards and values. It is clear from past discussions that I have had with Cohen, that he understands science, and in fact all research activity, as rhetorical. He is a, not very good, sophist. I cannot understand why THES publishes, or commissions, material from Cohen—his work is irrelevant to the academy (in that it does not address issues that directly affect academic policy, conduct, management, practice, values, etc.), and does not abide by academic standards (as your criticisms of his article, and his responses to those criticisms attest). The later (lack of academic standards) means that Cohen will happily distort, prejudice, ignore, obfuscate, and duck any critical reflection on his work. He seemed to be under the impression, when I tried to develop a discussion with him on-line, that it would be fine to cut and paste my responses to his 'thinking' (similar to your own—in that they were full, close, attentive replies to Cohen's loose, ill-defined, rhetorical comments) on his website, to which he appended accusations that I had 'missed the point' and that I was being 'irrational' (the meaning of which he never clarified). As with you, Cohen never actually responded directly to anything I said.
Simply put—don't bother Cohen, he has no interest in your views.
Nick says, ‘don’t bother debating with Cohen, he’s not interested in your views’, but it is, more precisely, that I’m not prepared to uncritically accept his views.
In fact, both Johnny Fill and Nick Beech accuse me of not responding to their points. It's a common claim of people with dogmatic views who lack an interest in listening to other perspectives. But re. Nick, he clearly has forgotten that I spent some time 'debating' with him over on the website Philosophical Investigations, where I tried to extract an argument out of his long 'new-Marxist' (that's what he calls himself there) spiel. See, for example
http://www.philosophical-investigations.org/Irrationality_and_the_Global_Warming_Debate
He may not accept my responses, but they're clearly there. Johnny is welcome to start a page there on coal power or whatever too. But don't tire out everyone with long rants here. It's not the place.
"In fact, both Johnny Fill and Nick Beech accuse me of not responding to their points. It's a common claim of people with dogmatic views who lack an interest in listening to other perspectives."
It's a common claim of people who have taken the trouble to provide an evidence-based critical response to somebody's writing, only to find that all points raised are simply ignored. You still haven't actually responded to anything I've said. You still haven't provided any sources for your inaccurate claims.
You're wrong on this, too - I'm always interested in "hearing new perspectives" , provided that they are well-argued and based on good research, critical reflection, and a solid grasp of the subject matter. Your article is none of these things, for reasons that I and others have taken the trouble to point out.
Rather than engage in debate, you have done exactly as Nick Beech accuses you of doing, which is to "distort, prejudice, ignore, obfuscate, and duck any critical reflection on [your] work."
You say I have "dogmatic views" but I have provided ample evidence of a peer-reviewed evidence base for my expressed opinions. You have not done likewise.
Nick Beech is right - you are a (not very good) sophist.
I will, now, leave it to the reader to judge the worth of Cohen’s article – devoid of sources, demonstrably riddled with factual inaccuracies and based on poor research, and patronisingly written as it is – in the light of the comments made by myself and others since 01/08/2010.
Johnny Fill MPhys (Sussex) AMInstP
Trinity College, Oxford
Quick clarification time:
1) I have never presented my own views to Cohen, I have, in the past, asked him to clarify his own. I have never understood his clarifications.
2) I never 'debated' with Cohen—I asked Cohen to clarify a number of contradictions that were evident from a previous article written for the THES. I never understood those clarifications.
3) I did not, and have never, in any context, presented a 'new-Marxist spiel', long or otherwise. I (foolishly) wrote the following: 'If you want to know my philosophical background, I'm not really an analytical philosopher at all but for all intents and purposes a neo-Marxist.'
Re: Nick Beech's non-views
As an example of what Mr. Beech calls requests for "clarifications" to Martin Cohen, I'll simply copy and paste one of those "requests", as found on the link provided by Martin Cohen (http://www.philosophical-investigations.org/Irrationality_and_the_Global_Warming_Debate)
M. Cohen:
"First of all, the sheer amount of electricity that can be saved by swapping to 'low-energy' bulbs is, in terms of the amount of energy that the sun heats the atmosphere by each day, entirely negligible. **The idea that 'saving' this energy could affect the earth's climate is risible.That is one form of irrationality.**"
N. Beech:
"How we distinguish the 'rational' and the 'irrational', and to what extent either is 'useful' in terms of action? (...) **One could argue, rationally, that the comparison should be made across 'traditional' light bulb energy consumption, and 'eco' light bulb energy consumption.** Otherwise, we could 'rationally' make the claim in the opposite direction: we should/can/could switch to a new type of light bulb that consumes huge amounts of energy, because in comparison to the energy of the sun the ratio is negligible."
The views of the two protagonists can be summarized as follows:
MC: **The idea that 'saving' this energy could affect the earth's climate is risible.That is one form of irrationality.**
NB: **One could argue, rationally, that the comparison should be made across 'traditional' light bulb energy consumption, and 'eco' light bulb energy consumption.**
Judge for yourself. Where's the sophism? (tip: often, sophisms start with "one could argue rationally")
Now that Beech and Fill have announced their lack of interest for Cohen's article, now that the flood of words has stopped, perhaps other readers will feel more comfortable to send comments.
PS: Beech later addresses the light bulb issue on the grounds of its symbolic value vs its actual value (in response to Cohen's point that light bulbs are mostly symbolic and defeat their environmental objective). A discussion on irrationality vs symbolic value ensues (if you're really interested, just pay attention to Beech's use of "defeat" and "disconnect" -- the sophism is there).
Letter from Peter Connor, published in THES 12/08/2010:
"Martin Cohen seems determined to reveal some dark hidden truth about the potential for profit in climate change, but this is to miss the point ("Profits of doom", 29 July).
Energy supply is a multibillion-pound business in the UK alone; the sector requires continual massive investment to ensure the security and reliability of supply, and those who invest need to see the potential for a return. Much of the policy to address climate change is about changing investor behaviour, so that solutions that were unprofitable but offer substantial additional benefits (for example, not contributing to massive ecological change) become more attractive. By incentivising increased uptake of less harmful technologies, they become cheaper, hopefully becoming the default investment option. Such changes will reduce damage to the environment, stimulate new employment and potentially mean cheaper energy in the long term (especially as fossil fuels become scarce and thus rise in cost). It would be a victory if we can get to the stage where money goes to renewable sources.
The article reads as if Cohen is trying to pull back the curtain to reveal some dark inner workings to climate change. But since all the evidence suggests that climate change is happening, there is a clear need to better understand its impact (including economically) and address it as best we can. This means starting from the economic framework we have, which is based on the profit motive.
It is not clear whether Cohen is claiming that climate change is not a problem, that it is a problem but one we should not attempt to address, or whether he thinks all the proposed solutions should be rejected for being rooted in profitability. Whichever it is, it is difficult to gel any of these positions with the reality of current science or our existing society.
To address some errors in the text: Denmark's energy is expensive, but is this to cover the costs of renewable energy? Partially, but since the 1990s the country has had a policy of shifting to carbon and environmental taxation, so the differential reflects a society trying to stimulate internal change to address a recognised problem.
Why are photovoltaic cells made in poor countries? That's an odd way to describe Germany, Japan and the US, three nations that have battled to be at the forefront of solar-cell manufacture for the past two to three decades. China is rapidly building its manufacturing capacity in this area, largely for the same reasons as the pioneers: it is a high-tech industry offering high-tech jobs and the potential for significant export income. Why? There's an obvious perception that there is money to be made as global demand increases. By investing now, China, along with its Western competitors, sees huge potential for the future.
Peter Connor, Senior lecturer in renewable energy policy, University of Exeter"
Pierre-Alain Gouanvic above seems to think that he can somehow dismiss my transparently evidence-based criticism of the article on the basis of the views of Nick Beech. He never criticises any of the arguments that *I* have actually made; probably because he can't, he is unfamiliar with the evidence base, unfamiliar with the field, unfamiliar with the facts. Like Cohen reveals himself to be, in the article and in the comments he has made.
PAG provides another example of the obfuscationary tactics of those who cannot win an argument by reference to evidence.
I challenge PAG and MC to provide some evidence, some sources, for their ridiculous claims.
I again refer the interested reader to the comments from 01/08 onwards, so that they can judge for themselves the academic merit of Martin Cohen's article and style of "argument".
Johnny Fill MPhys (Sussex), AMInstP
Trinity College, Oxford
Department of Materials Science, University of Oxford
Johnny Fill,
Has it ever occurred to you that people can simply not be bothered to engage in debate with you?
Best of luck with your doctorate and let me know when solar panels can power 747s.
Kind regards
This was a very poor article, for a whole host of reasons. Why does THE print stuff as tendentious, lacking in authority, and poorly researched and verified as this?
Disclaimer: All user contributions posted on this site are those of the user ONLY and NOT those of TSL Education Ltd or its associated trademarks, websites and services. TSL Education Ltd does not necessarily endorse, support, sanction, encourage, verify or agree with any comments, opinions or statements or other content provided by users.