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And the winner of the most egregiously error-riddled paragraph published in a presumably fact-checked newspaper op-ed this year: According to some recent number crunching by the Breakthrough Institute, a centrist environmental think tank, phasing out Japan’s current nuclear generation capacity and replacing it with wind would require a 1.3-billion-acre wind farm, covering more than half the country’s total land mass. Going for solar instead would require a similar land area, and would in economic terms cost the country more than a trillion dollars. No, it’s not Charlie Sheen weighing into the energy debate. And no, there aren’t any typos. Sadly, this breathtaking collection of whoppers is by none other than Mark Lynas, author of the excellent book, Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet. I’m not quite certain what is more depressing — that Lynas wrote this paragraph in the first place and has since reposted it at the Economist ‘s online nuclear debate (a debate that is, typically, poorly framed). Or that not one person at the LA Times , Economist , or McLatchy thought the numbers looked funny or self-contradictory enough to spend even 10 seconds on Google to fact-check them. Or that even two days later the head-exploding errors are still there. See how many errors you can count before reading the rest of the post. While I realize that “acres” is not a metric most people work with often, presumably if you are going to use acres you would at least check on Google to make sure your answer is not wrong by, say, a factor of 1000 ! Or that you haven’t gotten the area of Japan wrong by a factor of 30! But I’m getting ahead of myself. As bad as the analysis is from The Breakthrough Institute, I was pretty confident they wouldn’t make a numerical mistake this huge. While it may be mostly a red herring to bother calculating what it would take to phase out Japan’s current nuclear generation, their April 5 post, TBI’s post, “The Costs of Replacing Japan’s Nuclear Power,” states: … replacing the generation lost from a complete phase-out of nuclear power entirely with wind energy … would require 152 GW of installed wind capacity, at a total installation cost of $375 billion (using an estimate of $2,466/KWe)
Originally posted here:
Mark Lynas pens error-riddled, cost-less nuke op-ed
by Jess Zimmerman. The EPA dodged Republican attempts to hobble it this week– the continuing resolution on the budget bill is going forward without the riders that would forbid the agency to regulate greenhouse gases. But environmental protections still took some hits.
Go here to see the original:
What stayed in the budget bill?
Comparison of greenhouse gas emissions from shale gas (with low and high estimates of fugitive methane emissions) [with other energy sources]. Top panel (a) is for a 20-year time horizon, and bottom panel (b) is for a 100-year time horizon. Estimates include direct emissions of CO2 during combustion (blue bars), indirect emissions of CO2 necessary to develop and use the energy source (red bars), and fugitive emissions of methane, converted to equivalent value of CO2 as described in the text (pink bars). I was a (relatively) early booster of shale gas as a potential game changer for greenhouse gas mitigation [see Game Changer, Part 1: There appears to be a lot more natural gas than previously thought (6/10) and Part 2: “ Unconventional gas makes the 2020 climate targets so damn easy and cheap to meet “ (7/10)]. But there were always lurking concerns about the impact of methane leakage in from the unconventional gas extraction process known as hydraulic fracturing, since methane is a considerably more potent greenhouse gas (GHG) than carbon dioxide. Now three Cornell University professors have published a major analysis in Climatic Change , “Methane and the Greenhouse-Gas Footprint of Natural Gas from Shale Formations,” that seeks to quantify the impact of the leakage from the best available data
Our guest blogger is Nick Sundt , Director of Climate Change Communications at the World Wildlife Fund, and a longtime forest firefighter . Last Thursday, all but one of the Republican members of the U.S. House of Representatives from Texas voted for H.R. 910 to reverse the Environmental Protection Agency’s endangerment finding that greenhouse gas pollution threatens the health and welfare of Americans with a wide range of impacts, including more frequent and severe droughts and wildfires
Read the rest here:
As record drought hits Texas, Congressional delegation votes to deny climate change
Today, as the UN climate talks came to a close in Bangkok, Ambassador Pablo Solon of