How Big Oil Benefits From Global Warming Alarmism

Forbes
Larry Bell

I find it somewhat comical when scientists and others who publicly express skepticism about a looming man-made global warming catastrophe are accused of being in the pocket of Big Oil. Here we are referring to oil and gas… master resource trade commodities that the entire world urgently depends upon. Can you imagine they are losing sleep over market competition from non-fossil “renewable alternatives” such as ethanol, windmills and sunbeams? Do you really think rampaging greenhouse gas regulatory attacks on coal-fired power are anything but a blessing?

First, regarding that “green” ethanol, consider that it really produces little or no net fuel gain at all…not after the diesel required to power the tractors needed to plant, fertilize and harvest all that corn, along with the energy needed to brew it into 180-proof grain alcohol, are factored in. Then, for those who care, after CO2 emissions released in producing it and burning it in vehicles are accounted for, there’s not much difference, if any, compared with petroleum there either. What should matter to everyone, however, is that ethanol has a much lower energy density than gasoline, meaning that it yields fewer miles per gallon.

And although ethanol has no rational connection with climate, it’s not like Big Oil has a problem hitching a ride on the green bandwagon. Koch Industries, through its subsidiaries Flint Hill Renewables and Koch Supply & Trading, for example, has purchased several ethanol plants in Iowa, and together with its Minnesota refinery, reportedly has the capacity to supply about one-tenth of the U.S. market.

As Flint Hills President Brad Razook told his employees in a company newsletter, “New or emerging markets, such as renewable fuels, are an opportunity for us to create value within rules the government sets.” He went on to say, “After all, ethanol production is heavily subsidized, mandated and protected”…then adding, “…while Koch companies openly oppose such government programs.”

Yes, and why blame them? Why pass up money that can be made blending sweet lemonade petroleum with grain alcohol to produce bitter lemon juice…at least so long as voters are gullible enough to tolerate such state and federal lunacy, and taxpayers and consumers can afford to cover the extra costs.
Then again, the EPA doesn’t want petroleum refiners to make too much money, and is doing a good job to prevent this from happening. Over the past six months three refineries supplying about half of all the East Coast’s gasoline, diesel and jet fuel have closed down in large part due to overly burdensome environmental compliance costs. Philadelphia-based Sunoco’s Northeast refinery business lost nearly $1 billion over the past three years after spending more than $1.3 billion to meet stricter rules.

UN Global Governance Funded by Climate Change Policies

Activist Post
Suzanne Posel

The European Union is clamping down on China and India’s carbon emissions, claiming that the Kyoto protocol is outdated.

The argument between under-developed nations and industrialized countries has spawned a demand for responsibility for carbon emissions while the fear-mongering of man-made climate change moves into the political areas.

After failing to convince the scientific communities that this propaganda holds up while real world empirical data holds evidence that the projections have been derived from fraudulent computer models, the alarmists are seeking governmental approval. Because scaring elected officials into mandating climate change policies ratified by the UN is easier than changing the general population’s perspective.

In 1997, the Kyoto protocol was formulated from the UN Rio+20 Earth Summit just five years prior. Technological advancing nations like China and India were left out of the obligated countries to curb emissions outputs.

World leaders backed by the UN are prompting questions about the applicability of the Kyoto protocol as unfair, while China moves ahead to become another industrialized country.

In a two-day meeting preceding global climate change talks, Connie Hedegaard, the European climate chief said, “Countries have recognized that the old division between developed and developing countries – there are limits to how useful that is in the 21st century.”
 
A new global treaty is championed as the answer to carbon emissions. While scientific data shows that carbon dioxide has nothing to do with the temperature of the earth, climate change alarmists are using this manufactured threat to usher in global treaties to usurp nations' sovereign right to conduct business, as well as force governments to pay a global “carbon tax” as a funding source for development and manufacturing for products the alarmists plan on selling to nations and individuals as a necessity for the coming “global warming age”.

By November of this year, Hedegaard hopes to see a new treaty ratified that will begin a new era of falsified claims that the control over man is an imperative to save the planet.

Hedegaard said: “We need to set out a work program [for drawing up a global agreement] and how to get there.”

UK Minister Compares Inaction on Climate Change to Hitler Appeasement

Reuters

World leaders who oppose a global agreement to tackle climate change are making a similar mistake to the one made by politicians who tried to appease Adolf Hitler before World War Two, a British government minister said on Thursday.

Energy and Climate Change Minister Chris Huhne said governments must redouble efforts to find a successor to the United Nations Kyoto Protocol on emissions, although it was unlikely that a breakthrough would be made at a conference later this year in Durban, South Africa.

The global economic crisis has pushed the search for a legally binding treaty to limit planet-warming emissions down the political agenda and countries do not want to lose their competitive edge by going it alone on strict climate targets, he said.

In a speech urging countries to keep pressing for a climate deal, Huhne evoked the memory of British wartime leader Winston Churchill and the fight against Nazi Germany led by Hitler.

“Climate change is getting less political attention now than it did two years ago. There is a vacuum, and the forces of low ambition are looking to fill it,” he said. “Giving in to the forces of low ambition would be an act of climate appeasement.

“This is our Munich moment,” he added, referring to the Munich Agreement, a 1938 pact that gave Hitler land in the former Czechoslovakia as part of a failed attempt to persuade him to abandon further territorial expansion.

“Winston Churchill…once said that ‘an appeaser is someone that feeds a crocodile, hoping that it will eat him last’.”

The Kyoto Protocol, which controls greenhouse gas emissions only in developed countries, expires at the end of 2012. Developing nations want to extend Kyoto, but Japan, Russia and Canada want a new, wider agreement.

Confessions of a Nuclear Power Safety Expert

Miller-McMCune
John Perlin

"Why not consider Three Mile Island, Chernobyl
and Fukushima as warnings of greater
catastrophes to come and avoid the inevitable by shutting
them down," Cesare Silvi says.

Nuclear engineer Cesare Silvi studied unlikely outside threats to nuclear plants in Italy, which soured him on the energy source and caused him to go solar

When Italy decided in the mid-’70s to add nuclear power to its power portfolio, young mechanical and nuclear engineer Cesare Silvi was among those attracted to the opportunities it presented. His work centered on nuclear safety issues — in particular, what might happen if something unexpected struck a power plant.

Corners he saw cut there eventually soured Silvi on that endeavor. His next position — at the Italian Commission on Nuclear and Alternative Energy Sources, which included work on nuclear disarmament — eventually soured him on nuclear energy itself.

“[If we] continue with nuclear power, there will definitely be worse accidents,” he argued in the wake of Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi disaster. Over the weekend, Italian voters agreed and overwhelming rejected restarting nuclear power in their country.

“Why not consider Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima as warnings of greater catastrophes to come and avoid the inevitable by shutting them down, much like changing your diet and/or lifestyle after finding out that your cholesterol or blood pressure is elevated, rather than continuing down the same path until a heart attack or stroke strikes?”

In the meantime, he suggests that wrangling existing power plants requires a global response toward the dangers he predicts.

“Instead of a Kyoto accord,” he says, “we will have to have some kind of multilateral nuclear agreement to deal with such threats.”

In the last two decades, Silvi has gone on to acclaim in the world of solar energy, where has been president of the International Solar Energy Society and founder of the Italian Group for the History of Solar Energy.

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Silvi originally worked in the north of Italy as a engineer. He did not like the polluted Po River valley, where the smell from various industries near his flat — despite his boss’ assurances of “You’ll get used to it” — annoyed him.

Then the 1973 Arab-Israeli War and its attendant oil crisis prompted the Italian government to consider nuclear energy, and a door opened for Silvi. The newly formed Italian National Commission on Nuclear Energy sought out young engineers like Silvi, who saw the opportunity as a means to return home to Rome. His top scores on the entrance tests won him a spot in the Directorate for Nuclear Safety and Radioactive Protection, and in 1975, the directorate tasked Silvi to examine and analyze threats to the well-being of nuclear power plants from the outside environment.

“I was looking at low-possibility events, like a meteor striking the housing of a reactor or a car thrown at it by a tornado. These definitely had a small chance of happening, but the end result would have been horrific.” Plus, he says now, the proliferation of nuclear plants just adds more targets.
“Many laughed at such speculation and planning,” he says, “but then again, how many would have taken seriously a recommendation of extending the height of the seawall at Fukishima another six meters? They would have questioned your sanity, if you had argued that the 10-meter barrier was inadequate.

“Our problem is that we don’t know what will happen on any scale of time. Such uncertainty is OK when dealing with train trips or dinner choices. But it becomes problematic when considering the possible spread of very dangerous material that will stay deadly for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.”

In his introduction to risk analysis, Silvi provides a very simple equation: R=PxC. In English, that translates to the probability of something happening (the P) times the consequences if it does (C) equals the risk to society (R).

He illustrates this by comparing driving on the Italian highway, the Autostrada, with running a nuclear power station. Driving on the Autostrada has a low risk to the general population. A possibility does exist that you will crash, and perhaps die as a result, but the consequences of the accident to the general society will be next to nil. That’s why countries let almost anyone drive. So a moderately high P times a very low C equals a small risk to society as a whole.

On the other hand, the chance of an earthquake and tsunami of the magnitude that hit Japan are quite remote, especially occurring in tandem, which makes for a tiny P. But the consequences — the C — of them imperiling a nuclear power plant are huge, leading to a much higher risk to society.

That equation played out in the Soviet Union a quarter-century ago at Chernobyl, and the aftereffects still ripple throughout Europe. A 1,600-square-mile exclusionary zone in Ukraine and southern Belarus remains off limits. Students gestated during the Chernobyl disaster in contaminated regions as far north as Sweden and Norway have shown poorer performance in school and lower verbal IQ scores.
Silvi’s sincere assessment of outside threats ultimately butted up against unfortunate human constraints.

“One day,” Silvi recalls, “the boss said, ‘Figure out how far should a nuclear plant be from an airport.’ As I did my study, I found that it wasn’t too easy to protect the reactor from a plane crash. The plant can be perfect from the inside, but the problem arises: How many low-probability events that could result in devastating consequences do you protect against through proper construction before such expenditures make the plant too costly to operate? Even if we could affordably, say, pay to reinforce the plant to withstand a hit from a plane or missile, the question never leaves you — ‘Have I figured in everything that might damage the nuclear reactor over its long lifetime?

“I left the field because I couldn’t do my analyses as I thought necessary. There was this nuclear power plant [the Caroso Nuclear Power Plant] in the north of Italy, along the Po River. An oil pipe broke and caught fire six kilometers from the plant. Oil also spilled into the river. It clogged the reactor’s condenser. After that, my team discovered there were four pipelines less than 500 meters from the plant. I felt it was necessary to determine what was flowing through them.

“But the boss complained, ‘You’re trying to get at too many details,’ and stopped the study. It turned out that some very powerful person owned the pipelines and was hiding what was going through those pipes for tax purposes.”

(Italian voters in 1987 decided to shutter all the nation’s nuclear plants and by 1990 they were closed, although the government opted to restart nuclear power in 2008. Post-Fukushima, the country has placed a moratorium on those plans and over the weekend the country’s voters decisively rejected a return to nuclear power.)

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

So in 1981, Silvi shifted his work to nuclear disarmament with the Agency for the Promotion of European Research, and was working in that field as the Soviet Union spun out of existence. Suddenly, many Warsaw Bloc bases containing atomic arms essentially were abandoned, leaving them vulnerable to nuclear thievery. Silvi was part of a NATO delegation sent to Moscow to account for and inventory atomic supplies throughout Russia.

While at the job, Silvi had an epiphany: “If we are struggling to control the spread of nuclear weapons, why should we extend the technology to civilian use?”

Named a resident fellow of the East West Institute in 1986, being the first physical scientist to labor among its political scientists changed his perspective, he explained on the East West Institute’s blog.
With Chernobyl then in everyone’s mind, he spent his early time there explaining how all nuclear reactors are not created equal.

“With a sheet of paper and a pencil, I illustrated the difference. Cupping the curved sheet in my hand, I placed the pencil at the bottom of the curve to simulate the behavior of a western nuclear reactor. If its equilibrium changes, it rolls back and forth until it finds the stable position again. To simulate nuclear reactor such as the one in Chernobyl, I flipped the curved sheet over and placed the pencil on the top of the curve, illustrating that once equilibrium is lost, it is impossible to control.

“… I soon came to the conclusion that neither international cooperation nor technological advancements would guarantee human societies to build and safely run nuclear reactors in all possible conditions on Earth (earthquakes, floods, droughts, tornadoes, wars, terrorism, climate change, tsunamis, pandemics, etc.). I am sadly reminded of this turning point in my life as I listen to the news about the earthquake, tsunami and extremely worrying nuclear crisis in Japan.”

Upon leaving the Institute, he added, he moved away from nuclear energy and focused on solar energy.
“Nuclear today only generates about 12 percent of the developed world’s electricity. By instituting an energy efficiency program,” Silvi suggests, “we could fill the gap caused by shutting them all down and put this malevolent genie back into the bottle.

“Human history is full of madness, full of catastrophes. Imagine if we had nuclear reactors when we fought wars in the past. If you try to consider all the events that might happen over the years, you start to ask, ‘What are the benefits of such an effort, especially when you have opportunities to get electricity in many other ways?’”