This post describes some articles I have noted recently that relate to the Climate Leadership & Community Protection Act (Climate Act) net-zero transition plans. At the core of the Climate Act the key questions are is there a problem that warrants the complete conversion of our energy system and can the alternatives proposed replace the existing system affordably while maintaining current standards of reliability. The articles referenced here address those questions.
I have been following the Climate Act since it was first proposed. I submitted comments on the Climate Act implementation plan and have written over 300 articles about New York’s net-zero transition. The opinions expressed in this post do not reflect the position of any of my previous employers or any other company I have been associated with, these comments are mine alone.
Climate Act Background
The Climate Act established a New York “Net Zero” target (85% reduction and 15% offset of emissions) by 2050 and an interim 2030 target of a 40% reduction by 2030. The Climate Action Council is responsible for preparing the Scoping Plan that outlines how to “achieve the State’s bold clean energy and climate agenda.” In brief, that plan is to electrify everything possible and power the electric gride with zero-emissions generating resources by 2040. The Integration Analysis prepared by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) and its consultants quantifies the impact of the electrification strategies. That material was used to write a Draft Scoping Plan. After a year-long review the Scoping Plan recommendations were finalized at the end of 2022. In 2023 the Scoping Plan recommendations are supposed to be implemented through regulation and legislation.
Health Impacts
Health impacts are a rallying call by activists opposed to most sources of electricity. One of the driving factors relative to the public fear of nuclear power is the argument that there is no safe level of radiation. The basis of that argument is the linear no-threshold (LNT) model. Steve Milloy writing at JunckScience.Com describes the extensive research by Dr. Edward Calabrese of UMass Amherst on the origins and development of the LNT. He recommends that that readers “first watch and have their minds blown by the amazing 22-part Health Physics Society (HPS) video series featuring the incomparable Calabrese’s unparalleled research: HPS.org | YouTube.com. It is 10 hours of truly incredible content. No exaggeration. A written summary of the video series is here (Web | PDF).”
The LNT model approach claims that there are no thresholds for cancer risk associated with radiation exposure. It has been used by regulatory agencies to set permitted exposure standards for radiation. . The article documents how “Calabrese’s research and video series expose the dishonest way the LNT was developed and cemented into regulatory risk assessment, these emails expose the dishonesty, scheming and unscientific behavior of those trying to keep the LNT cemented in place.”
It is of particular interest to me because the concept is also applied to air pollutants. The result is that now we have environmental justice advocates claiming that even if air quality levels meet the National Ambient Air Quality Standards that further reductions are necessary because of alleged health effects calculated using the LNT approach. The mindless pursuit to eliminate risk from ever lower pollution levels at the expense of reliability, affordability, and unintended adverse environmental impacts of the proposed solutions is exemplified by the Climate Act.
Climate Change Problem
There are three items related to the climate change problem of interest. Judith Curry announced that her new book Climate Uncertainty and Risk has been published. I am waiting for my copy to arrive so a review will have to wait until later but I am sure it will be a must read.
In the last summary of articles I described The Frozen Climate Views of the IPCC: report that reviews the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports on the state of the climate. The Clintel Newsletter describes reactions to the report that provide overview summaries in different formats:
Coverage of our report in the blogosphere and alternative media has been fine. WUWT, Judith Curry, Roger Pielke Jr all paid attention to it and Scott Morrison wrote several articles about it on the Daily Sceptic.
Andy May (co-editor of the report) gave a talk/interview about the report at the excellent Tom Nelson Podcast show. You can find the written version of the talk here and the full interview here.
Marcel Crok (co-editor of the report) gave a talk for the really interesting lecture series of the Irish Climate Science Forum (run by Jim O’Brien). In his talk Marcel gave an overview of the Clintel report.
Finally, I want to call attention to work by Roger Pielke, Jr. on hurricanes and climate change. His latest analysis updates earlier work that tells the story about hurricanes that the media doesn’t tell. He makes five points:
- In short —trends in hurricane activity outside the range of documented variability have not been detected, nor is there high confidence in connections of hurricane behavior to greenhouse gas emissions.
- Hurricane landfalls along the continental U.S. show no trends since at least 1900.
- Development and growth are sufficient to explain why hurricane damage has increased dramatically
- Climate change is important, but far more important for understanding trends and causes of increasing disaster costs is societal change, especially what we build, where we build and how we build.
- The largest climate signal — by far — in the damage record of U.S. hurricanes is the El Niño/Southern Oscillation or ENSO
Proposed Solutions
One of the common narratives supporting the transition to solar and wind power is that the development costs for those resources are cheaper than fossil-fired resources. Willis Eschenbach describes the Lazard April 2023 annual report on the Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE) that is often used as a reference for that narrative. He summarizes the problem with the approach:
The LCOE estimates the total capital, operations, and maintenance costs for new electric power plants coming into service. People use the Lazard LCOE all the time to claim that renewable electricity sources are now cheaper than fossil fuel electricity. However, the Lazard data has a problem—it doesn’t include the cost of backup and other costs for renewable energy. These costs fall into four groups: backup costs, balancing costs, grid connection costs, and grid reinforcement/extension costs.
Another article looks at this issue differently but comes to the same conclusion. Gail Tverberg’s article analyzes renewable energy development at her blog Our Finite World. Her blog highlights her research on “figuring out how energy limits and the economy are really interconnected, and what this means for our future”. She looks at the modeling rationale for using renewable energy and finds that “if a person looks at them narrowly enough–such as by using a model–wind and solar look to be useful”. However, she concludes that energy modeling misses important points and finds that “profitability signals are much more important.”
Robert Bryce explains that “onshore and offshore, from Iowa to Ireland, and Colombia to New Jersey, renewable projects have been getting hammered by a tidal wave of opposition”. He concludes:
I will end by repeating two points that I’ve been making for years. First, the key problem with wind and solar (in addition to their incurable intermittency) is their low power density. For wind, it is 1 watt per square meter. Solar’s power density is about 10 watts per square meter. That low power density means they need lots of land (or ocean) to produce significant quantities of electricity. And we don’t have any “vacant” land available. Indeed, the Renewable Rejection Database proves that local communities from Maine to Hawaii have been resisting the energy sprawl that comes with wind and solar for years.
Second, if we are serious about reducing emissions, the way forward is obvious. It is N2N: natural gas to nuclear. Both technologies are low- or no-carbon, mature, affordable, and scalable. Better still, they have power densities that are measured in hundreds, or even thousands, of watts per square meter.
Alas, big business, big banks, and big law firms can’t make as much money off of natural gas and nuclear as they can from wind and solar. Indeed, Congress has dropped a neutron bomb of cash on the wind and solar industries that I have calculated will cost federal taxpayers some $240 billion between now and 2031 –– and that number is almost certainly too low.
Charlie Munger famously said, “show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome.” The multi-billion-dollar incentive for Big Wind and Big Solar is to continue pushing their landscape- and marine-mammal-destroying projects on our landscapes and oceans. Given that incentive, we shouldn’t be surprised at the outcome.
New York’s Climate Act Scoping Plan claims that the costs of inaction are greater than the costs of action. The largest claimed benefit is from the societal impacts of reducing carbon using the social cost of carbon (SCC) parameter. Canada recently raised their SCC rate from $54 to $247. Ross McKitrick describes the shenanigans that resulted in the higher numbers:
Countless SCC estimates already exist ranging from small negative amounts (i.e. carbon dioxide emissions are beneficial) to many thousands of dollars per tonne. Every such estimate is like a complex “if-then” statement: if the following assumptions hold, then the SCC is $X. Yale economist William Nordhaus won the 2018 Nobel Memorial Prize in economics for developing some of the first methods for combining all the “if” statements into systems called Integrated Assessment Models or IAMs. And using conventional economic and climate modelling methods, he tended to get pretty low SCC values over the years, which has long been a sore point among climate activists and the politicians who share their agenda.
But economists are on the case. The $247 figure referenced by Guilbeault comes from a new report from the Biden administration that tossed out all the previous models, including Nordhaus’s, and instead cobbled together a set of new models that when run together yield much higher SCC values.
In many ways the new models are just like the old ones. For example, they persist in using an Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity of 3 degrees C. This refers to the warming expected from doubling the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. The authors cite the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as the basis for this decision, apparently unaware that that estimate has already been shown in the climate literature to be flawed. Using the IPCC’s own method on updated data yields a sensitivity estimate of about 2.2 C or less, and as I have shown in a recent publication this is enough to cause the SCC estimate in a standard model to drop to nearly zero.
New York State has a mandate to go all electric for school buses. From what I hear the school districts are adopting a “you go first” approach. Duggan Flanakin explains that is probably because the costs are extraordinary. He includes the following example:
Take the Dallas (TX) Independent School District, which has about 860 buses. To replace the entire fleet with large diesel buses would cost, therefore, about $86 million. But those 860 buses, if battery-electric, would cost a minimum of $275 million. And that does not include the cost of charging stations and retraining mechanics. That’s over three times as many taxpayer dollars the school district would have to extract from voters.
I have a friend who is in the car business and he is unimpressed with the future of electric vehicles. One problem he has mentioned is that the used EV market is non-existent for a variety of reasons. The implications of that problem have yet to be addressed by the Hochul Administration. In this vein I found this article by an early adopter who is becoming increasingly disillusioned interesting:
I bought my first electric hybrid 18 years ago and my first pure electric car nine years ago and (notwithstanding our poor electric charging infrastructure) have enjoyed my time with both very much. Electric vehicles may be a bit soulless, but they’re wonderful mechanisms: fast, quiet and, until recently, very cheap to run. But increasingly, I feel a little duped. When you start to drill into the facts, electric motoring doesn’t seem to be quite the environmental panacea it is claimed to be.
Shuttering LIs Power Stations
Mark Stevens, a regular reader at this blog, send me an article suitable for a post that got pushed to the bottom of the pile. In the meantime, it was picked up at Natural Gas Now. Mark is a retired science and technology teacher from Long Island. I am including it in its entirety below because it is a topic that is on my list to address:
The EPA’s proposed rules for cutting emissions are so onerous that older generators like Northport and Port Jefferson as well as hundreds around the country will be shut down because the expense to upgrade would be prohibitive. Electricity costs will massively increase. These power stations have operated since the ‘60’s with incredible reliability and cost-effectiveness. They have blessed Long Island and the communities that host them with tax income and life-sustaining, consistent energy. The developed world survives on this. A main difference between our society and the third world is their lack of affordable, reliable energy. It is also a matter of survival; one can broil in the heat and freeze in the cold. One can starve for lack of food and water. One can die from inadequate health care facilities and resources.
Note well that these power plants have operated within EPA pollution regulations. Now the EPA is moving the goal posts. Companies, towns and cities that have relied on the energy for our civilization will be in mortal danger.
It is extremely difficult, costly and lengthy to site, plan, permit and build a new power station. The real estate is gone. The possibility of rebuilding an old power station to new standards, repowering, may not be cost-effective, especially if there are the preferential power purchase agreements that put wind and solar electricity ahead of fossil fuel generation.
Another consideration is China, Russia, India, and the Global South in general are building fossil-fueled power plants, including coal, at a breathtaking rate, hundreds a year. Why do China, with one of the biggest industrial economies in the world and India, South Africa, Thailand, Cambodia and even Germany and the UK open coal-fueled power plants? Did they consider prosperity and survival paramount? Decarbonization of NYS and US power plant emissions will have no effect.
Furthermore, wind and solar power operate on average, about 20% of the nameplate capacity of generation. Spinning reserves are mandatory. Battery backup, aside from the huge expense, child labor and devastation to the environment in obtaining rare earths, may work for a few hours. Where is that coming from if Northport, PJ and other power stations are closed?
Planet Earth, throughout its billions of years, experienced much higher temperatures and CO2. In fact the Holocene Period, the greatest explosion of flora and fauna in history, flourished with way higher temperatures and CO2. Life adapted and thrived. In fact, thousands of scientists confirm there is NO CO2 crisis.
Buy some candles if this goes through.
Pragmatic Environmentalist of New York 