OK, here is my critique. This will be a rather long post.
First off, they don't try to do it in 10 years, which is intelligent. Anyone with half a brain knows that the 10 year warning is nothing more than a ruse to scare (or even panic) governments and people into making rash decisions thereby lining the pockets of scam artists such as Gore et al, and/or advancing the alarmist political agenda. These people envision a 100 year effort and this report is focused on the first 50 years. Commendable.
The next thing I noticed was they focus on leveling off atmospheric concentrations rather than reducing emissions by 80% so it doesn't really address the exact question, but it does address the question of what to do about AGW so it deserves consideration.
Option 1.- Increased fuel efficiency of cars to average 60 MPG. They say these can be accomplished by using existing tech but the car companies are having a tough time figuring out how to reach the recently mandated 35 mpg. My bro-in-law swears he read an article in popular mechanics back in the '50's that described a carb that could give a Ford flathead V8 100 mpg. Such stories have been around for years. Are they true or just urban ledgends? There's also this;
"A FLEET of Volkswagen Golfs (Rabbits to Americans) that get a staggering 94 miles per gallon (or, as Europeans say, 2.5 litres per 100km) are running around Berlin. Something like the Golf “Twin Drive” is what many of us will be driving within five years.… "
You gotta pay, sorry.
http://www.economist.com/daily/columns/techview/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12492042&fsrc=nwl
It just might be possible.
Option 2. Reduced reliance on cars. Nice thought but how realistic is it to think that people will go along? I've known refugees from Kosovo, Sudan and Chile, and all of them got a car just as soon as possible. People all over the world want cars and as their countries develop they won't want to be restricted any more than we do. This scenario won't fly.
Option 3. More efficient buildings. Great idea, and it's already being done in new construction. Are they suggesting re-fitting old buildings? They don't say but I don't think so and I'd be surprised if they can get their results without. New construction means more buildings that need heat and light, and while they can be made very efficient, the addition of new buildings always means increased energy consumption, not reduction.
Option 5. Substitute N. gas for coal. Good idea, it would make a difference. Problem is a lot of environmental groups don't want it. They want the coal plants shut down but they're also opposed to any fossil fuel plant construction, even natural gas. To convert 6000 coal plants to gas would require 120 conversions a year. That's a huge expense, and it doesn't seem all that feasible in difficult economic times as this. It would be made much more expensive by all the litigation brought by enviro-groups and considering some of the rediculous decisions rendered by courts recently they might just win. Such conversion isn't likely feasible within 50 years on more than a minor scale.
Option 6. Storage of carbon captured in power plants. It would work, but very expensive and once again, enviro-groups oppose it. Plus there is the cost. The chemical steps in the capture consume energy, as do the compression and transport of the carbon dioxide. That will use up a quarter or more of the output of a power station fitted with CCS, according to most estimates. So plants with CCS will need to be at least a third bigger than normal ones to generate the same net amount of power, and will also consume at least a third more fuel. In addition, there is the extra expense of building the capture plant and the injection pipelines. If the storage site is far from the power plant, yet more energy will be needed to move the carbon dioxide. Is it worth the price to the customers? The consumer will only stand for so much.
Option 9. Nuclear power replacing coal. Again, strongly opposed by enviro-groups. Did they take into consideration the time required to get through all the litigation and environmental reviews? They'd need much more than 50 years to get any amount of them converted. I like nuclear and it would work. I also like the idea in this article, I'd be happy to have one in my neighbourhood, hell I'd even rent my yard space to BC Hydro for the installation, but most people are very leary of nuclear plants any where near them.
Toshiba has developed a new class of micro size Nuclear Reactors that is designed to power individual apartment buildings or city blocks. The new reactor, which is only 20 feet by 6 feet, could change everything for small remote communities, small businesses or even a group of neighbors who are fed up with the power companies and want more control over their energy needs
http://www.nextenergynews.com/news1/next-energy-news-toshiba-micro-nuclear-12.17b.html
Option 10. Windmill electricity. Lots of problems with wind power that doesn't get much press. For example, there's a world wide kaffufle over 500 ducks that were killed in a tailings pond at the tar sands, yet many magnitude more birds are killed by windmills and we hardly ever know it. To build the number of windmills mentioned in this article would result in massive slaughter of birds and bats. Eventually the people would learn about it. There's a price to pay for any kind of energy but do you really think they'd stand for that?
Besides wind power requires huge subsidies and governments are reaching the point where they can no longer fund anything and everything that catches their fancy.
“Spain admits that the green economy as sold to Obama is a disaster,” read the headline in La Gaceta, a Spanish business newspaper that reported a leaked internal Cabinet document in a full-page article (Obama has often cited Spain as a model Green Economy). The Cabinet document indicated that more than two jobs were lost for every green job created, that the country’s spending binge on renewables had made Spain a high-electricity-cost country, and that Spanish businesses now faced electricity costs 17% higher than the European average. Thanks to the green economy, Spain has Europe’s highest unemployment rate, at 20%, and is now staring at bankruptcy.
http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2010/05/28/green-elites-meet-the-people/#ixzz0pHgXMKAV
* The U.S. can expect 2.2 jobs to be destroyed for every 1 renewable job financed by the government.
* Only 1 in 10 of the jobs actually created through green investment is permanent.
* Since 2000, Spain has spent €571,138 ($753,770 to create each “green job,” including subsidies of more than €1 million ($1,319,783) per wind industry job.
* Those programs resulted in the destruction of nearly 113,000 jobs elsewhere in the economy.
* Each “green” megawatt installed destroyed 5.39 jobs in non-energy sectors of the Spanish economy.
* The total over-cost—the amount paid over the cost that would result from buying the electricity generated by the renewable power plants at market prices—between 2000 and 2008 amounts to 7,918.54 million Euros ($10 billion).
* The total subsidy spent and committed to these three renewable sources amounts to €28,671 million ($36 billion).
* Consumer energy costs in Spain would have to be increased 31 percent to repay the debt generated by the green jobs subsidies.
http://www.juandemariana.org/pdf/090327-employment-public-aid-renewable.pdf
And are the results really as good as claimed?
The wind farm industry has been forced to admit that the environmental benefit of wind power in reducing carbon emissions is only half as big as it had previously claimed.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/windpower/3867232/Promoters-overstated-the-environmental-benefit-of-wind-farms.html
Option 11. Photovoltaic electricity. Problems are very similar to wind electricity so I won't list them.
Option 13. Biofuels. They have a caveat on this one,
"provided the ethanol itself were fossil-carbon free".
It isn't. It takes 29% more energy to produce ethanol than it contains. Biofuels increase emissions. Someday we may develop technology that would enable us to produce ethanol without the input of fossil energy but that would likely negate the need for alternate fuel.
In addition, massive production of biofuels would result in major hardship for the poorest of the worlds peoples. According to the World Bank's top economist, Don Mitchell, biofuels have been responsible for three-quarters of the 140 per cent rise in world food prices between 2002 and 2008. Not that there's been any shortage of food, but the perception resulted in hoarding and higher prices in third world countries on top of the increase in grain prices in commodity markets. Recall the angry demonstrations and riots by those poor? Imagine what would happen if biofuel production were ramped up the levels this report wants.
Are their estimates of land requirements accurate? A 2006 report from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation suggested that for the EU to meet its 10 per cent target from home-grown biofuels would require a staggering 70 per cent of arable land to be taken out of food production. What's more, far from helping to cut global CO2 emissions, biofuel production can often give off much more CO2 than it saves – not least by disturbing huge quantities of carbon dioxide locked in the soil which, according to the University of Minnesota, could release "17 to 420 times more CO2" than is saved by the fuels themselves.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/3347046/The-Great-Biofuels-Con.html
Option 14. Forest management. First on their list is reduced tropical deforestation, but this is completely at odds with the biofuel option. Currently one of the biggest causes of tropical deforestation is to provide cropland for palm oil plantations to produce biofuel supplements for European deisel fuel. You can't have both increased biofuel production and reduced deforestation.
Next they want to restore temperate forests to massive areas which is also at odds with the biofuels option. While trees are a carbon sink, once the forest is grown it achieves an equilibrium. Trees grow and die but the forest as a whole maintains basically a static level of carbon so there would be no more sequestation from that point on. In certain boreal forests carbon is gradually built up on the forest floor in muskeg or peat deposits but it takes centuries to achieve any significant amount. Moreover, establishing a forest takes far longer than the 50 year timeframe they use. A concerted effort might be able to plant the trees, but another century would be needed to reach full capacity.
All those options would be very expensive to implement and the question that must be answered is where the money will come from. The western economies which have been so wealthy have got themselves into a debt crisis that is rapidly coming to a head. The gravy train is over. We can't even fund existing programs, let alone embark on such an expensive venture.
The welfare states of Europe that rose out of the ashes of the Second World War are now facing destruction because of the sovereign debt crisis, analysts say.
The troubles that began with the collapse of Greece and which now threaten the euro spell the end for excessive and occasionally corrupt welfare systems, they say.
http://pensionpulse.blogspot.com/2010/05/end-of-welfare-states.html
Back in 2008, when I was fulminating against multiculturalism on a more or less weekly basis, a reader wrote to advise me to lighten up, on the grounds that “we’re rich enough to afford to be stupid.”
Two years later, we’re a lot less rich. In fact, many Western nations are, in any objective sense, insolvent. Hence last week’s column, on the EU’s decision to toss a trillion dollars into the great sucking maw of Greece’s public-sector kleptocracy. It no longer matters whether you’re intellectually in favour of European-style social democracy: simply as a practical matter, it’s unaffordable.
http://www2.macleans.ca/2010/05/27/were-too-broke-to-be-this-stupid/
My conclusion is it's a good effort, much more realistic than most other scenarios proposed by the alarmists but it's unrealistic. Lomborg still has the only sensible plan.
