House of Eratosthenes

You know that “Doomsday Clock” the anti-nuclear egghead scientists rolled out during the cold war era to show how close to midnight we were getting, the “moment” when we’d supposedly use our amazing nuclear arsenal to blow up the planet? My son has been asking me here & there about the difference between Fahrenheit and Celsius, and I was describing for him how both scales are based on 0 to 100 but use different definitions to define those two calibration points.

Well, Rick has been thinking some more about that Cristy article, as have I…

I’ve had a lot of fun recently with my tiny (and unofficial) slice of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize awarded to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But, though I was one of thousands of IPCC participants, I don’t think I will add “0.0001 Nobel Laureate” to my resume.
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I’m sure the majority (but not all) of my IPCC colleagues cringe when I say this, but I see neither the developing catastrophe nor the smoking gun proving that human activity is to blame for most of the warming we see. Rather, I see a reliance on climate models (useful but never “proof”) and the coincidence that changes in carbon dioxide and global temperatures have loose similarity over time.
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Suppose you are very serious about making a dent in carbon emissions and could replace about 10% of the world’s energy sources with non-CO2-emitting nuclear power by 2020 — roughly equivalent to halving U.S. emissions. Based on IPCC-like projections, the required 1,000 new nuclear power plants would slow the warming by about 0.2 ?176 degrees Fahrenheit per century. It’s a dent.

But what is the economic and human price, and what is it worth given the scientific uncertainty?

My experience as a missionary teacher in Africa opened my eyes to this simple fact: Without access to energy, life is brutal and short. The uncertain impacts of global warming far in the future must be weighed against disasters at our doorsteps today. Bjorn Lomborg’s Copenhagen Consensus 2004, a cost-benefit analysis of health issues by leading economists (including three Nobelists), calculated that spending on health issues such as micronutrients for children, HIV/AIDS and water purification has benefits 50 to 200 times those of attempting to marginally limit “global warming.”

So what’s the whole global warming movement about? If it was about keeping poor kids from starving, it wouldn’t be posing this threat to them…if it was about curtailing the carbon emissions into the atmosphere, people wouldn’t be flying around in private jets to promote it.

It’s not about stopping us from supplying people with energy. I think it would be far more accurate to say it’s about stopping us from providing that energy independently.

Which, already, we don’t do. You build a power plant, nuclear or otherwise, you have to get permits, file environmental impact statements, zone, design, approve, get blessings from Department of Labor, OSHA…

Just like any business. But someone has figured out, you can hamstring us by regulating businesses in general — or, you can hamstring us so much more effectively by regulating businesses that produce energy all other businesses use.

That’s what it’s all about. Greenhouse gases are just a distraction. A cow farts and burps greenhouse gases that are far more potent than anything you’ll produce by driving down the road. But cow doesn’t do anything to drive commerce. It just makes beef steaks and milk products, that’s all. So nobody even bats an eyelash at the cows. It’s our technology-related greenhouse gas output that has to be attacked.

As I said, we already don’t produce energy in the private sector with free-enterprise independence. We have the standard regulations. We have the Endangered Species Act. Our elected officials prohibit the production of energy, which is needed by poor people more than anybody else…or, they control the production of that energy. Their decisions determine, in whole or in part, who lives and who dies. Global warming is just a way to get some more of that going on.

I propose a thermometer. A thermometer, just like the Doomsday Clock. An “Energy Thermometer.”

Zero degrees means private industry produces the energy we need, with complete independence. A hundred degrees means the public sector determines all, and if private industry has any role to play whatsoever, it is simply to do what government says.

This would be a valuable thermometer. It would define the real purpose to all this fear-mongering and weird, other-worldly legislating. The above mentioned Endangered Species Act, for example — which has few defenders anymore, but pointedly nobody’s rushing to take off the books even at the dawn of our most long and drawn-out campaign season ever — probably boosted the “temperature” on such a scale by a good fifteen to twenty degrees.

Let’s build a thermometer like that. Then we could see the real point to these anti-technological, anti-capitalist movements we get from time to time…and we could measure their achieved effects, as well.

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Energy ThermometerFriday, November 2nd, 2007

Energy Thermometer
Friday, November 2nd, 2007