\\"Doc\\" Williamson

My company works on a number of fronts in the biofuels area, and we are delighted to hear recently of a call from AEP for proposals for the delivery of biomass as early as this year as a co-firing fuel for several of their power plants. And while I don’t want this comment to become a litany of praise for Mike Morris, he also has a very realistic grip on the political realities of this period, and a sensible view of cap and trade, which he points out in an interview with Business Week, was essentially how SOx, NOx, and mercury were handled in the past. (see http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/next/archives/2009/01/five_answers_fr_4.html ).

However, I also agree with the folks who say that the idea that “man made” global climate change is “settled science” are grossly exaggerating, especially because they pin so much of the “blame” on human contributions to carbon dioxide which is such a tiny fraction of the mix in the atmosphere. No one has explained how, if we are in a phase of inexorable rising temperatures, why 2008 was colder than 2007. There certainly was no significant dip in the carbon dioxide content of the world’s atmosphere generally. If we are in a state of global warming, isn’t it at least as likely that the record of sunspot activity shows massive bursts of radiation at a statistically significant increase of rate in the last 12 years a more likely primary cause? The amount of energy from the sun that arrives in the earth’s atmosphere every week is more than all the man-made energy in the entire millions of years of human evolution. I think that “scientists” have an inflated opinion about the importance of our species on the planet.

It is likely that a change-over to renewable resources will have an economic impact on some people, and on the electric power industry in particular, but the “creation of wealth” in a capitalist system has traditionally depended on a mild trend of inflation so that those who control the capital assets can periodically have “capital gains” (not all of which are taxed away) which creates new “wealth” and opportunities to re-deploy the capital. We may need to strengthen our social security safety net to avoid unconscionable harm to the disadvantaged, but I think that this transition will be a very good thing.

I expect that “green energy” from renewable resources will be a very good thing for the planet, and for capital and industry. This “renewal” of our industrial base will be much like the shift from rail travel to airplane travel. a mighty leap forward, with tremendous benefits, though not without some bumps in the road along the way. Fortunately the airline industry itself is pioneering in the exploration of renewable fuels and the result will be a significant boost to the foundations of the renewable fuels industry.

Can the coal industry manage to drag the feet of legislators? Probably. Should they? Perhaps, but I think their time would be better spent in developing alternative technologies that make coal a feedstock material to the chemical manufacturing industry instead of a mere combustible fuel. Coal mining interests would be better served by making new alliances than simply opposing the political forces of change. Coal mining towns could experience fabulous growth if they became manufacturing centers of those products being made from coal, and coal as a feedstock resource becomes even cheaper when it is turned into manufactured products without the cost fo transportation of taking it (the raw material) to some other location. As Steven Covey says, “Think win:win.”

We need too to think about economic development for those parts of the world that languish in abject poverty. The Gates contribution to worldwide disease control is a mere drop in the bucket of the work that needs to be done, though it is a great place to start. We need to develop these “third world” regions into a thriving middle class, and renewable energy, from locally cultivated resources and with a fair share (significant equity interest) in the revenues going to benefit local populations, the transition can be far more rapid that most people today can even imagine. (Do a search for a video “green fuel = economic development” to see what I mean.) Daming rivers is expensive and disruptive, even though it is “renewable” energy, but establishing local distributed sources of “green energy” in both electric power and transportation fuels can made a tremendous difference. Combined with smart grid techniques those “earth at night” satellite shots could show a world with more than diamond necklaces of light, but a glimmer of prosperity everywhere thanks to distributed source power development.

Sincerely,
Stafford “Doc” Williamson

The EPA should get real jobs.

We\’ve been controlling greenhouse gasses for 50 years under EPA direction. The air is cleaner, the water clearer and vehicles more efficient. Carbon dioxide is not a greenhouse gas, it\’s plant food. The EPA bases their plans on the IPCC report written mostly by politicians and non-science professors who have disregarded good science in favor of inaccuracy and speculation.

It\’s about time we begin using the energy we have while developing alternatives that will take decades to integrate into the system. The fuel for solar and wind energy is free so the energy from those sources must cost less that energy from fossil fuel. Some other alternatives produce more pollution than they cure. The \"smoke\" coming from a power plant stack is white because it is mostly water vapor. I\’m surprised that so many people fall for the fiction of \"man made climate change\". We can\’t even accurately predict the weather for tomorrow.