Letter to Jim Hansen

Following up on my previous post (below), I have accessed the actual video of the Hansen talk at Dartmouth and have written to Hansen himself with exact quotes in hand. The letter is as follows:


April 28, 2009

Dear Dr. Hansen,

I had the pleasure of seeing you speak at Dartmouth College on April 2 (video here). I learned much, but was disconcerted by a couple of remarks you made during the question-and-answer session. You said,

Amory Lovins is dead wrong, and I’ve had my high-school students make a graph of what he said in the 1970s — and his graph — y’know, he says renewables can do everything, he says you don’t need nuclear power, you don’t need large hydro, you don’t need coal; energy efficiency plus ‘soft’ technologies will do everything. Well, you make a graph, and these soft technologies — his graph had them doing this [hand zooms upward] but in reality they’ve stayed under 2%.

I am familiar with most of Lovins’s work from the 1970s and am not aware that he ever made any forecasts or predictions about what the “soft path” technologies would do, though he did talk a great deal about what he thought they could do. You seem to be referring to the following graph, which Lovins included in his book Soft Energy Paths (1977, p. 38 -- and I will gratefully accept new information if you have a different reference to point to):



This figure was not a forecast or a prediction. It was (as labeled at top) an “alternative illustrative future,” i.e., a claim about what would or could happen if certain energy policies were adopted. But those policies were not adopted. So how can the figure fairly be characterized as “dead wrong”? How can a conditional prediction be accused of failure if its conditions are not met?

A second point: you also said at Dartmouth,

But Amory Lovins says you don’t need a carbon price. Well, he’s dead wrong on that.

However, I find the following 2008 statement by Lovins at http://www.rmi.org/images/PDFs/Energy/E08-02-the-policy-of-energy-change.pdf:

Carbon pricing is a good idea and we should do it. Putting carbon in the air should not be free any more.

I bring these points up both as a matter of professional fairness and because it seems to me that Lovins is actually a natural ally in the climate-change battle, given the huge need and potential for greenhouse mitigation from increased energy efficiency — his raison d’etre.

One final point. At Dartmouth you characterized 4th-generation nuclear as a way of “burn[ing] essentially 100% of the fuel instead of less than 1%, which is what current technology does.” Actually, as I understand it, in the UREX+ fuel cycle proposed by the US government in 2006, reprocessing would separate the spent fuel from existing once-through reactors into four moieties, only one of which (transuranics, including plutonium) would go to fast-neutron reactors for transmutational burnup; the other three would all be waste. One waste stream would consist of the 30-year-half-life fission products, mostly strontium-90 and cesium-137, constituting the majority of the radiological hazard, to be placed in interim surface storage for several centuries before ultimate deep burial. Thus, fourth-generation nuclear power, as actually proposed, does not offer “essentially 100%” burnup (if a thing sounds too good to be true, it probably is) but rather -- as blueprinted by its advocates -- will continue to generate a large, high-intensity, multigenerational, surface-storage waste burden, with all the vulnerabilities (e.g., terrorism) that such a burden entails. A review for the International Panel on Fissile Materials of the technology and rather grim economics of this matter is given by physicist Frank von Hippel at http://www.carnegieendowment.org/files/FvHReprocPanelCarnegie26June07Rev.pdf .

I earnestly thank you for all your work.

Sincerely,

Larry Gilman

Whoa, Jim

On April 2, 2009, policy wonk Jason Grumet and climate scientist Jim Hansen spoke on climate change at Dartmouth College as part of the engineering school’s “Great Issues in Energy” series. The video of the happening can be found here. Because I am connected to the Internet through a satellite that has about much bandwidth as a tin can attached to a taut string, I cannot download that video just now, but I was present for the event.

I found it depressing. There was not much news for me on the climate front, which is grim enough, but hearing Grumet — who is funny, flashy, and likeable — riffing cleverly on how there is no hope from democracy, only from the skillful exercise of Jedi mind tricks on semi-retarded US senators (though he didn’t say it that way), was pretty bleak. And although I liked Hansen very much, including his unabashed love for children and his insistence that we act responsibly toward future generations, I got an unpleasant shock during the question-and-answer part of the program.

A questioner mentioned Amory Lovins, well-known energy guru since the 1970s. Grumet disarmingly joked, “Well, Amory Lovins is always right — eventually.”

I am paraphrasing from memory, but Hansen’s follow-up went partly like this:

“Well, at least we’ve finally found a point on which Jason and I disagree. Lovins is not always right. He is dead wrong. He says you don’t need coal, you don’t need nuclear — that you can do it all with ‘soft energy.’ But I’ve had my students graph what he said back in the 70s was going to happen with alternative energy versus what has actually happened. There’s no resemblance.”

(When my tin-can link permits me to download the video of the event, I may be able to substitute a verbatim transcript for that paraphrase.)

The problem? I have read almost everything by Amory Lovins, and I am reasonably certain that he never, in the 1970s or later, made any predictions at all about the shape of the energy future. The only Lovins graphs that I can imagine that Hansen is referring to were not predictions but illustrative scenarios concocted to show where we might go, energywise, if we made certain decisions. Here is the most famous of them, the one, I’m betting, that Hansen has his students debunk:


That is from page 38 of Lovins’s most influential book, Soft Energy Paths (1977). I speculate that it is the one Hansen offers his students because so far as I know, it is the only graph explicitly showing an alternative-dominated future that Lovins ever published. But note its title: this is an “alternative illustrative future,” not a forecast. Nine pages earlier, Lovins supplied a similar graphic showing coal and nuclear power’s possible contribution to gross primary energy swelling and dominating through 2025, with no visible contribution from “soft technologies” (which include, but are not limited to, what we now call “renewables”).

Such charts are not forecasts and so cannot be accused of making inaccurate predictions. Lovins was not predicting that we would make the choices leading to a “soft energy path” future; he was arguing that we could and should. In the event, we didn’t, so there is nothing surprising —or meaningful — about the graph’s non-realization.

A real scientist and a thoroughly likeable chap, Hansen should know better than to treat a scenario as a prediction. That is what depressed me about his response. Hansen has produced charts like this himself, only for greenhouse-emissions scenarios rather than energy-usage scenarios. Here’s one:


So Lovins was doing exactly the same thing with energy supplies in 1977 that Hansen was doing in 2008 with carbon dioxide: not forecasting, but choice-picturing. A perfectly legitimate exercise.

Also, Hansen said during the Q&A that Lovins “says we don’t need a price on carbon.” (This according both to my memory and to a partial real-time transcript that skips over the remarks I’ve paraphrased above.) But that’s simply not true. Lovins said in 2008, “carbon pricing is a good idea and we should do it. Putting carbon in the air should not be free any more.” He does caution that both main ways of putting a price on carbon — a carbon tax and cap-and-trade — could fail if done improperly, but that is hardly a controversial statement.

I am not a mindless Lovins groupie: I think he projects too much optimism about the ability of profit-driven corporate reform and “technical fixes” to preserve our technical civilization while absolving us of any unwelcome changes in lifestyle whatsoever. But when Hansen speaks about Lovins I hear, to my alarm and surprise, the sound of axes being ground against grudges. My guess is that Lovins’s opposition to nuclear power, which Hansen supports, is the nub. But fair is fair. And Hansen, when I heard him, was not being fair to Lovins. And the stakes are too high for someone as important as Hansen to indulge in annoyance-driven inaccuracies.

Whoa, Jim.

Consensus Conshmensus

The Cato Institute is an intellectual stopped clock. When right thinking aligns with dislike for centralized authority, the one clear notion at the heart of its libertarian faith, Cato is right on. If the White House decreed tomorrow that we must all get the Number of the Beast tattooed on our foreheads, Cato would be there for us, man! But when reality doesn’t align with its fixed idea, Cato opts for fantasy.

Case in point, as Rod Serling might say: climate change. Cato is brewing up a full-page ad respectfully telling President Obama that it is just not true that the science on climate change is settled. Why, look at this list of credentialed names we have produced. All these PhDs reject the “consensus.” Isn’t it obvious that there is at least room for honest doubt? That at least some independent thinkers are refusing to bleat along with the rest of the white-coated sheep?

Listen to that word “consensus.” It gives me the willies. We should exile it from the discourse. It has the same leaden ring, the same negative semantic charge long accumulated, as “dogma,” “doctrine,” “orthodoxy,” “party line.” Who or what, except a group of vaguely-imagined New Agers trying to decide where to plant the quinoa without hurting any feelings, works by “consensus”? The word smells of doubts suppressed, of group approval sought. No wonder so many people who know some science, including a few once-brilliant folks like Freeman Dyson (now slipping into a particularly spectacular and public dotage, climate-changewise), are eager to declare their independence from “the scientific consensus on climate change.” I sympathize. Screw the consensus. Speak up for the truth, every time.

The problem: scientifically, in the special sense discussed above, there is no “global consensus on climate change.” That is, there is no touchy-feely global community of scientists all Om-ing together to drive out the vibes of dissent. There is an overwhelming, complex, convergent, stewing, bubbling, ongoing mass of good work done by the best people intimately involved with the data, the uncertainties, and the alternatives. This is not a process of “consensus” in the sense of a show of hands, the adoption of a common view for the sake of happy harmony. This is the largest body of hard-core, peer-reviewed research on a single topic ever done in the history of science. There are mathematical models, ice cores from Antarctica going back 800,000 years without a glitch, measurements of the shrinking gravitational pull of Greenland’s melting glaciers, sludge cores from the bottoms of the oceans, instrumental records, tree rings, sea-level measurements, satellite measurements of land, sea, and air temperature . . . why, just to name the categories of information that have been enlisted to shed light on whether (a) climate is warming (b) humans are the cause (c) the warming will continue and is dangerous would take a whole page of single-spaced fine print. The answers are Yes, Yes, and Yes. Stay tuned for resolution of all details -- but Yes.

The Cato Institute people seem to dislike these answers because they threaten, by implication, to empower governments. If climate change is real, human-caused, and mitigable, then government action is obviously essential to saving our collective ass. Since all government action is disasteful to Cato, from Wall Street bailouts to public schools, it seems clear to them that science cannot be telling us what it seems to be telling us. There must be some kind of mass delusion or fraud afoot. Our libertarian desires are an infallible index of reality, are they not? At least that much is clear!

But climate science's triple Yes (climate change is real, our fault, bad news) is not a “consensus,” a manufactured consent. It is just science. It is exactly the same kind of science that tells us how the Solar System runs, what the stars are, how DNA works, how transistors transist. Some people -- hundreds with science degrees, as Cato shows -- don’t like what science is saying. That is understandable. Science is telling us that we are in a frig of a mess and that we are sliding deeper into it, maybe to a disastrous degree, especially if we don’t make some highly annoying changes to the way we live and make them fast. So they blink. They suddenly conceive of themselves as independent-minded truth-lovers resisting a phony “consensus.”

“Science isn’t democratic!” they bark, while Cato holds out its microphone. “Scientific truth is not decided by a show of hands!” True, very true, although a show of hands is an odd way to make that point. And the science on climate change has not, in fact, been decided by hand-counting. It has been decided the hard way, the old-fashioned way, the scientific way, piece by piece, dispute by dispute, fact by fact. The natural and healthful friction of that machine, that is, the fact-based disputation which is the basis of scientific integrity, is amplified and distorted by the “realists,” as the fantasists like to call themselves, until in their picture there is only friction, no machine. Only uncertainty. No science. No knowledge of the real world. No meaningful -- spit between fingers! -- “consensus.”

I am fascinated by the fact that Creationism operates in the same mode. In Creationist public relations, petitions of this sort -- declarations of incompetence signed by hundreds of dissenters with science degrees (almost invariably opining out-of-area) -- are a tradition. While the Cato Institute is assembling its Roll of Cluelessness for pricey publication in the New York Times and elsewhere, it might wish to check out the competition over at the Discovery Institute, which offers a long list of credentialed people who think evolution is hogwash. Its structure is the same. Its function is the same.

Its value is the same.

If I Was Bogart

If I was Bogart, I’d be reaching for my whiskey right now. Because they’re playing that song again. I’ve heard it so many times, so many damn times, and every time I hear it I want to reach for my whiskey. Not because I'm tortured by memories of love in Paris before the invasion, but because the song is so sadly, brightly, inanely, insanely dumb.

It goes like this: space travel has made spectacularly visible the glorious fact that the world is one place, our single shared big-blue-marble home, and that boundaries are cultural fictions. This realization promotes world peace by making nationalisms seem arbitrary. In some versions of the lyric, photographs alone work the magic: in others, only personal, in situ experience of the vision suffices.

Rusty Schweickart, Apollo 9 astronaut, has eloquently described a personal epiphany of this type during his 1968 mission to Earth orbit. In his essay “No Frames, No Boundaries,” he recounts looking down on the Middle East as he skimmed high above, marveling that “hundreds of people [are] killing each other over some imaginary line that you're not even aware of, that you can't see.”

This week the BBC reports gushingly on the latter-day fruits of Schweickart 's epiphany:

Forty years on, as Schweickart approaches his 74th birthday, we are on the brink of an opportunity for his wish to come true, as commercial teams around the world race to launch the first suborbital tourist flights.
These new aerospace pioneers, striving to bring us space tourism today, were young impressionable children and teenagers during the 1960s -- inspired to take up their careers, in part, by the Apollo programme.

If these "children of Apollo" succeed, then they may give us the chance to launch those leaders locked in conflict around the world on their own epiphanal flights above the Earth.

For only then, as Schweickart pointed out, will they truly appreciate that we are one people on one planet - "riders on the Earth together".

Where’s that whiskey? It’s all so empty, my God, so empty . . . “Only then will they truly appreciate . . .”

People said the same thing about airplanes, you know, almost a hundred years ago. From the sky, we can all see at last that national borders are often not coincident with large-scale geological features such as rivers! World peace is at hand! Well, it wasn’t. Damn it, you can see from 10 feet away that any dryland national border is artificial: you don’t need to stand back 100 vertical miles and squint. Lack of opportunities to see the obvious isn’t what keeps the world crazy.

People are killing each other in the Middle East over grave injustices, colonial bids for wealth and acreage, water rights, petroleum, insane nationalist or religious hatreds -- good reasons, bad reasons, you name it -- but almost never for “an imaginary line” as such. Almost never for motives that could be obliterated by a tearful rush of zero-G oceanic feeling. Which is why so very few astronauts have, in fact, become emissaries of internationalism (they have taken up a great diversity causes, from Noah’s Ark to attempted murder of romantic rivals, but rarely that one) and why launching several score politicians and dictators briefly into orbit would have no significant impact on world affairs. One-way shipment might, I admit, produce a temporary benign effect.

And one of the biggest reasons that people are suffering and dying in droves down here on the good Earth, as novelist Pearl Buck and Apollo 8 astronaut Frank Borman both called it, is inequality. Here is poverty like a sad brown sea, wealth bobbing merrily on its surface like a gilded cork. And what is space tourism, Schweickart’s proferred salvation, but the ultimate joy-toy of the rich? Ninety-nine point however many nines you care to write down percent of Earth’s billions, me included, will never make an arcing trip to the official 62-mile (100 km) edge of “space” -- the Kármán line, one imaginary border that seems strangely important to the would-be space-tourist industry -- much less orbit the Earth or fly to the Moon. We are stuck here, for good and ill. That is a material, mechanical fact as certain as gravity: it is gravity, or one of its consequences. This ground underfoot is our heaven or our hell. And every time that some dizzy fool acquires more unearned wealth and then invests it in a nonproductive, hyperpolluting joyride to nowhere, whether on a 747 or a Spaceship One, we inch a micron closer to hell.

That’s one giant leap for a man, one small step backward for mankind.

On second thought -- play it, Sam. If they can take it, I can take it . . .

Climate Creationism

Recently I wrote a large number of subject-specific articles for a two-volume reference work entitled Climate Change: In Context. Somehow it fell into the hands of a climate-change “skeptic” for review. This person snarked to the publisher:

Most interesting is that the atmosphere reached a peak in 1998 and has been cooling since 2002. I'd be interested in seeing one of your writers response to that.

My pleasure; I’ll respond in full in a moment. But I’d like to note first the rhetorical, gestural kinship between creationism and climate-change denial. Both schools of thought claim that a small, intrepid minority of truly independent-minded thinkers sees an elephant in the living room (e.g., the unreality of climate change, the lack of any evidence whatever for evolution) that most of the world’s practicing scientists dishonestly refuse to see or are mysteriously unable to see. To bolster this vision of a beleaguered prophetic minority they rely heavily on the careful framing of certain facts in isolation from the patterns around them. These factoids, when properly isolated, colored, framed, spun, and cross-linked to other, similarly processed factoids, seem to make a convincing case -- especially to well-meaning people with little or no knowledge of science -- against the mainstream scientific view. This omission of context is a powerful tool for causing confusion and creating the appearance of mass scientific delusion or controversy over basic ideas where none exists.

In this case, the facts or factoids being isolated from their surrounding pattern are global average surface temperatures for the last decade or so.

I have two points to make. The first is general. The second responds to the specific point raised about cooler years.

(1) The reality of human-caused global warming is affirmed by every single US government science agency and by every major non-governmental science organizations in the world. For example, NASA states that “recent observations of warming support the theory that greenhouse gases are warming the world.” [1] NASA attributes these gases’ increase to human agency. [2] The US Climate Change Science Program states that for North America -- which has experienced less warming than the global average -- “seven of the warmest ten years for annual surface temperatures from 1951 to 2006 have occurred between 1997 and 2006.” [3] The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration states that air temperatures at the Earth’s surface, as well as at higher altitudes, have been increasing and notes that “seven of the eight warmest years on record have occurred since 2001 and the 10 warmest years have all occurred since 1995.” [4] Here are the data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [5]:


There are critics of this overwhelming scientific consensus, and some of these critics even have scientific credentials. However, their claims that global climate change is either not real or is not primarily human-caused are almost never defended in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. [6] They are expressed in blogs, media interviews, newspaper articles, speeches, petitions, testimony to Congress, and non-peer-reviewed books -- in a word, outside the scientific process. Creationists, of course, operate in exactly the same fringe zone.

In writing a climate textbook it would therefore be the height of scholarly irresponsibility, akin to advancing Creationism in a biology textbook, to adopt or give serious consideration to any view of climate change other than the only view articulated extensively in the recent scientific literature: namely, that global climate change is real and human-caused. To even pretend that there is substantial scientific debate over the basic reality and human-caused nature of global warming would be to essentially lie to readers.

(2) “Most interesting is that the atmosphere reached a peak in 1998 and has been cooling since 2002.”

I reproduce again the IPCC’s figure:


Note that climate does not warm uniformly, in a smoothly climbing ramp or curve. It bobbles as it rises. Runs of cooling years alternate with runs of warming years. The process is a noisy one. The occurrence of a run of cooling years, either recently or in the near future, is almost inevitable. To point to such a run as evidence against global warming is fallacious, exactly as it would be to point to a cold snap in April as evidence that summer was not coming. Those who argue so misunderstand -- one can hardly help but feel, when the claim is coming from a scientist, willfully misunderstand -- the obvious character of the instrumental record.

In particular, any cooling that has occurred in recent years has done so against the background of dramatic overall warming (unprecedented in at least the last 1300 years) seen in the figure. Taking 2 steps back when you have already gone 30 steps ahead leaves you 28 steps ahead.

The last decade of data can be spun as “a peak in 1998 followed by cooling.” But what the data actually show, in the historical context, is a spike in 1998 followed by a string of some of the hottest years on record. NASA states that the 2008 meteorological year “was the ninth warmest year in the period of instrumental measurements, which extends back to 1880. The nine warmest years all occur within the eleven-year period 1998-2008.” [7]

The 1998 spike is clearly visible in the above graph (the lone gray dot floating above the black 5-year averaged line). Both that spike and the “cooling trend” of the years since are noisy squiggles on a very long-standing rising trend. Similar squiggles are superimposed over the entire instrumental record. And it is the long-term trend that matters. Nothing else matters. Nobody is arguing in the real, peer-reviewed scientific literature that anything else matters. All claims to the contrary are pseudoscience.

Our book drew solely upon the most reliable scientific sources, such as the US government science agencies and the peer-reviewed literature (e.g., Science and Nature). It assumed throughout the only responsible educational account of global warming possible, given the state of the science: global warming is occurring, it is significant in magnitude, and it is human-caused. Recent weather has nothing to do with these conclusions because it is too short-term.


NOTES

[1] http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/GlobalWarming/global_warming_update3.php
[2] http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/GlobalWarming/global_warming_update2.php
[3] http://downloads.climatescience.gov/sap/sap1-3/sap1-3-final-exec-sum.pdf
[4] http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/globalwarming.html#q3
[5] http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/syr/ar4_syr_spm.pdf
[6] Naomi Oreskes, “The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change,” Science, 3 December 2004, p. 1686. I will send a PDF of this article to any inquirer.
[7] http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/2008/

Senator, Stand Up

This is an open letter to Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont.

Senator:

Yesterday the Senate adopted by unanimous voice vote S. Res. 10, supporting Israel’s ongoing actions in Gaza. I called your office to find out if you voted Yea, remained silent, or were absent. Your staff directed me to your online statement on Res. 10. I read it, but remained puzzled: it does not say how, or even whether, you voted. It is oddly silent on that point.

Let me explain why I care. In your online statement you note, accurately, that as of January 8, Israel had killed 758 Palestinians, including 257 children, while 10 Israelis had died, including 7 soldiers (4 of those by friendly fire). Those are shocking numbers, and I’m glad you mention them, but you evade the core issue: that Israel is bombing, apparently deliberately, UN-run refugee centers and convoys as well as homes and facilities that keep civilians alive. It is killing over 200 times as many civilians as Hamas is. It has killed hundreds of children. All this has been done with US funds and arms that could not flow without the assent of you and your colleagues in the Senate and House.

Balanced-sounding calls for better behavior from “both sides” are out of order. This is not a “war,” a conflict in which two “sides” contend in some militarily meaningful way. There are more Israelis dying each day in traffic accidents than by Hamas's actions. What is happening in Gaza is collective capital punishment. To suggest, as you do, that Israel’s actions are ill-considered from a strategic point of view — badly calculated to preserve Israel itself in the long run — is true but, to say the least, inadequate.

Yesterday former Knesset member Uri Avnery called Israel’s actions “inhuman, immoral, totally unjustified and unnecessary.” Can you do the same? Can you say that Israel’s actions are mass murder that cannot be excused as self-defense against Hamas's criminal but militarily pathetic vengeance rockets?

I ask you to stand up and speak out on this massacre. Speak up loud and clear, please, and on the record.

Sincerely,

Larry Gilman
Vermont

Friends Don't Let Friends Drive Nukes

November 21, 2008

To:

The Nature Conservancy

4245 North Fairfax Drive
Suite 100

Arlington, VA 22203-1606

Dear Nature Conservancy,

I’m not mad. Really I’m not. I’m not canceling my subscription and I’m not swearing to never give another dime to the Nature Conservancy. You guys truly do rock and I love you forever. But it’s a great pity that Jimmie Powell, head of the Conservancy’s energy team, has fallen like a ton of waste drums for industry propaganda on the nuclear question.

In the Fall 2008 Oak Log, the magazine of the Vermont chapter of the Conservancy, Mr. Powell says that “we’re going to need to build about 250 new power plants in the next 30 years to replace coal-fired capacity that must be shut down. Surprisingly, nuclear is the most cost effective way to get there.”

It is indeed surprising, given that it shows no signs of being true. The November 20, 2008 issue of Nature reports that the global credit crunch makes the “role of fission in fighting climate change . . . likely to wane,” and quotes Matthew Bunn of Harvard as stating that “nuclear can no longer support climate-change needs and targets” because it is too expensive (“Nuclear renaissance plans hit by financial crisis,” Nature, Nov. 20 2008, 286-187).

Huh? What happened to “cost-effective”? The credit crunch is simply proving that you can kill what is already dead: or at least bury it deeper. Nuclear power, due to its long lead times and extraordinary liabilities, has never been able to exist without big government subsidies and easy debt. Tight money, as Nature details, means no nukes even with the billions in subsidies the federal government is proferring on its golden shovels. Quick-deploying alternatives (wind and other renewables, efficiency, and cogeneration), though not all equally affordable and not all equally suited to all tasks, are, on the other hand, relatively immune to financial volatilities and have a consistent history of declining cost per kilowatt-hour delivered, contrary to nuclear’s dismal history of broken promises and wrecked budget forecasts. Far from being the most “cost-effective” way of buying new power, erecting nukes is one of the most expensive of all options -- and was so before the credit crunch -- and this according not merely to Greenpeace, but to the nuclear-industry literature. No wonder that The Economist’s May 19, 2001 cover story proclaimed that “Nuclear power, once claimed to be too cheap to meter, is now too costly to matter.”

Buying nuclear power incurs a high opportunity cost because the same money could deliver far more energy services if spent on cheaper low-carbon rivals such as wind or end-use efficiency. Buying nukes will lead to more CO2 emissions, not less, than we would have had under more effective investment, just as buying caviar on food stamps actually reduces the amount of food on a family’s table.

The details are given with relentless completeness by Amory Lovins in his recent piece “The Nuclear Illusion”. I commend it very seriously to Mr. Powell’s attention.

Sincerely,

Larry Gilman, PhD (Engineering Sciences, Dartmouth, 1995)