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Inside the Energiewende
German Emissions Increase in 2016
Electricity Production in Germany

Germany isn't even on track to meet their 2020 commitments. The Energiewende isn't working, and while they have sunk enormous resources into replacing (some) nuclear with renewables, the carbon intensity of Germany has barely budged. The dirty little secret is that most of the "renewable" energy comes from "biomass", which is even worse than burning lignite. (so-called brown coal; essentially packed dirt.)

Centuries ago, humanity burned a lot of trees for energy, and it resulted in widespread deforestation. Returning to those times is insane. We are razing North-American forests, turning them into pellets, and shipping them overseas to Europe to burn.

Renewable advocates would have you believe that this is "green", just because it supports their ill-advised attempts to fill landscapes with highly inefficient energy farming technologies. They need something after all, because the sun sets and there are frequent and extended periods where the wind is calm. Even if this practice was carbon-neutral, it will take centuries for the destroyed habitats to be restored, if ever they can be.

It probably isn't wise to hold your breath for the next three decades, and expect a better outcome.

The Energiewende isn't working. Germans now enjoy astronomical energy prices, yet carbon intensity is still essentially flat. They remain dependent on coal, neighboring hydro, and have no hope of meeting their carbon commitments. Highly uncompetitive energy prices will certainly impact future generations, and Merkel is responsible.

Worse yet, the rest of the world refuses to learn from Germany's very expensive experiment. The EU has mandated that the rest of Europe chase Germany over the cliff, even the countries which have already successfully decarbonized with nuclear and hydro.

Having been wrong 99 times in the past in exactly similar situations is not an argument against something?

I have a coin I've been flipping. 99 times in a row, it came up heads.

What are the odds it will come up heads on the 100th flip? Its like saying Malthus was wrong a few times, so he will always be wrong. Which menas the earth can support infinite numbers of people forever.

I'm jut hoping that cool heads will prevail with this change. Because if the 75 percent of jobs lost to automation comes true, http://issues.org/30-3/stuart/ the impact will make those other 99 times (if I told you once, I've told you a million times not to exaggerate) look like a walk in the park. That's a whole lot of the new replacement jobs to make.

+1 insightful

Considering that most fingerprint "matching" is done on just a handful (7 or so IIRC) of specific features of a print, false positives are very likely. (There was a case I read about a year or so back about a guy whose prints "matched" those of a known terrorist and ended up in all kinds of trouble until his lawyers forced a re-examination of the fingerprint ID based on more criteria. There's also this case (and see also the article linked therefrom).

Even aside from the limited point matching, there are questions about fingerprint evidence in general.

The FBI has no interest in finding problems with its investigative methods (look at all the hoopla around the "lie detector" pseudoscience for another example), just with finding more ways to indict someone they don't like. The Hoover legacy is still strong within the Bureau (as in other LE agencies).

Economically speaking, yes, nuclear waste is the biggest problem. Right now the US has enough nuclear waste to fill the proposed Yucca facility more than twice.

Yucca Mountain's capacity limit has no scientific basis it could be expanded to take several times more waste. AFAIK it was negotiated by a senator from Nevada on purely political grounds. Dry cask storage is not bankrupting anyone so far.

And breeder reactors are not a magic bullet... we'd need hundreds of breeder reactors to reprocess all that fuel.

You are ignoring the fact that breeder reactors would provide huge amounts of energy in the process. It's common to fixate on how nuclear waste is bad but ignore how much emissions-free electricity it is responsible for.

Nuclear power is not getting cheaper. All the research is pretty much done, and we've squeezed that R&D bone dry.

Far from true. The only well developed field is light water reactors using uranium dioxide fuel, but there's a lot more to reactor technology than that. Breeder reactor research has just scratched the surface. The LFTR was built only once, despite being a success. Thorium breeding in light water reactors is known to be possible but is not investigated very well. Overbearing regulations on everything related to radiation and nuclear technology are slowing down progress in this area.

For your several points about subsidies and R&D spending, see: http://www.issues.org/22.3/realnumbers.html

Just as an example, the costs of solar has been more than halved in the last 10 years, and this done without heavy government investment. Over time, I'd estimate in the next 20 years, solar power will become as cheap, in reality, as proliferators claim that nuclear is now.

1. Who is "proliferators"? Some guilt-by-association neologism for nuclear power proponents?
2. Despite the cost halving, solar is still far more expensive than other renewables and is already starting to suffer from diminishing returns. It's physically impossible to build a solar panel that is more than 100% efficient, and the economies of scale also have some limit.

For Pete's sake, the guy was saying we should stop oil production to force people to use non-existent renewable energy.

Ever hear of geothermal? Solar? Wind? They all exist. And if they were given as much in subsidies as coal, nuclear power, and petroleum they would be producing a lot more energy.

Falcon

Um... no. No they would not.
Geothermal, while prevalent in some parts of the world, is not that big of a resource here. And most of the places where geothermal is available are national parks. Could you imagine the uproar if you tried to build a power plant at Yellowstone?
Solar is nowhere near efficient enough to power the country. It can be a nice boost, hardly economic, and government subsidies are not enough to help. For starters, government subsidies exist. There are also several tax breaks you can receive for "greening" your home, but it will never be enough to make it cost effective:

He found the cost for an installation ranges from nearly $86,000 to $91,000, while the value of the power produced ranges from $19,000 to $51,000.

I don't know about you, but I don't have an extra $91,000 sitting around to spend on something that will save me $51,000 over the next 20 years. Also, this study fails to consider the sunk costs. In other words, if I were wisely invest that $90 G's instead of blowing it on solar panels, it would grow. Take whatever money it would have made and add that to the loss. I'm not alone here. A very small percentage of Americans have $900.00 to spend, much less $90,000.00. Oh, and then there are cloudy days, night, snow covered roof tops, hail, shadows from when the sun crosses to the other side of your house and so on that make solar an even less economic proposition.
Now, if you are talking about massive power plants located in the desert, when then you have other issues. See, you green buddies at the Sierra Club tend to block most of these programs because, even though they could save the earth, they may endanger a turtle that lives in the sand. That pretty much stands for any of these green projects. Someone, somewhere is going to get their feelings hurt. And these someones tend to have lawyers. So, don't bitch at me. Call the Sierra Club!
Finally, Wind! Wow! This is a fun one. I'll start with this quote:

Another interesting point with wind systems is that fossil fuel plants normally run on standby to support the wind fluctuations that occur. So, not only do we see only 8 to 10% of a rated power output, but this is offset by the fossil fuel consumed an not delivered to the grid. The net result is that most wind packages deliver less then zero power, when you consider the wasted fuel at the fossil fuel plant.

Of course, as the Kennedys showed us, some people don't like the way they look. You remember Ted Kennedy, right? That big green liberal that BLOCKED wind power because it might disrupt the view from some of his mansions?

So, in to put it more succinctly, renewable energy does not exist, at least not to the point where it can completely replace fossil fuels. While all these other ideas do produce energy and will reduce our fossil fuel dependence for producing electricity, I believe the only viable solution is nuclear. Oh, your green buddies blocked that too!
Now the elephant in the room that I've ignored until now is that all the proposals yo

For Pete's sake, the guy was saying we should stop oil production to force people to use non-existent renewable energy.

Ever hear of geothermal? Solar? Wind? They all exist. And if they were given as much in subsidies as coal, nuclear power, and petroleum they would be producing a lot more energy.

Falcon

If someone actually comes up with a feasible, scalable alternative to fossil fuels, the switch to using that idea would just take care of itself due to market forces.

Only if that were true, but it's not. Those who use fossil fuels get to pass on the external costs to others. One way to make polluters pay is by taxing carbon. But of course some complain that that harms businesses or people. Are you one of them?

And that's only half of it. Fossil fuel supporters complain about how alternative energy sources get subsidies. Well, guess what? So do fossil fuels. Here's Rep. Edward Markey (D-MA) bragging about how his bill 'Has Huge Subsidies For Clean Coal! Huge!'. He starts by saying the Nuclear Power industry has received $145 Billion in federal subsides over the years. But combined solar and wind have only gotten $5 billion. In another video the CEO of Chevron agrees to lobby with Sierra Club to end coal subsidies. Those subsidies for nuclear power above? The Freemarket CATO institute reprinted a "Forbes" article printed on 26 November 2007 about how the Nulear Power Industry is Hooked on Subsidies. Among other things it says "How do France (and India, China and Russia) build cost-effective nuclear power plants? They don't. Governmental officials in those countries, not private investors, decide what is built. Nuclear power appeals to state planners, not market actors." In 2007 in the US all alternative energy sources including the $3.0 Billion corn based ethanol got, when corn is not a good feedstock for ethanol, got $4.875 Billion dollars. Subtract that $3 Billion and geothermal, solar, wind, and others only got $1.875 Billion. Coal got $3.760 Billion. Itself, oil has gotten the majority of federal energy incentives.

What is happening is the government and not a free market is picking winners and losers. The government should end all subsidies, including allowing industries to pass external costs to others, and let the different players compeat.

Falcon

A recent study ( http://www.issues.org/23.3/wadhwa.html ) done by the Pratt School of Engineering at Duke University determined that the number of ACTUAL engineers produced by India, China, and the U.S. were comparable.

The reason the Indian and Chinese numbers are so ridiculously inflated is that they boost their counts by considering everyone who does something even slightly technical, including things like small engine repair, to be an "engineer". Partially this is because of problems in translation -- the article mentions that the word "Engineer" doesn't translate well to Chinese, for example.

In contrast, in the U.S. the title "engineer" is very specific and refers only to a few specializations that require an advanced degree -- in fact, most states require licensing (with very difficult tests) and several years of experience working under a P.E. (Professional Engineer) before a person can technically call himself one. Here we're not discussing "software engineers" but REAL engineers -- i.e. people who work with physical engineering, i.e. mechanical, civil, and electrical engineers.

So relax about THAT at least. We produce just as many ACTUAL engineers as anyone else, even if we don't give them jobs when they graduate. :(

As far as some of the other things you mentioned, well, what you're describing is the general state of civil service itself. The lawyers HAVE taken over, and they DO only respect other lawyers. As most Americans know (or at least suspect) our current federal government is a "great big pile of dumb" (in the words of a guy I used to work with).

Things are better (somewhat) at the state level. Try New York; we've got our heads screwed on straight.

Subsidized power? Not unless you're on wind or solar.

If you are in the U.S., it is highly likely that all of your power is subsidized on some form or another. For example, in the most recent energy package passed, the subsidies added for nuclear power and the subsidies added for oil and gas drilling were both greater than either for renewable electricity production or for alternative motor vehicle fuels. And this is nothing new, the Oil industry has received roughly half ($302 billion) of Federal energy incentives since 1950.

Given how subsidies are applied, it may be more reasonable to say that the profits of various sectors of the energy industry are subsidized, rather than saying that consumers in the U.S. benefit from subsidized energy. But wind and solar power are in no way unique in receiving government subsidies.

By way of contrast, I thought I would spice things up a bit with a few links to actual data.

Nasa, via a program called the ASRS, maintains a database of all aviation "safety occurrences" since the 40's - this is online and somewhat searchable. Good architecture in action. :)

http://aviation-safety.net/database/

A report about "safety incidents" related to the use of Portable Electronic Devices (PED's) based on their data was released a while ago.

http://asrs.arc.nasa.gov/report_sets/ped.pdf

This seems to be the result of a search; it includes everything from frightening incidents with malfunctioning instrumentation that have been associated with PEDs, to "1st class passenger won't turn off his cell phone" reports. But in the end it's clear that there are some worrying issues with PED interference - or at least the waters are muddied enough that I wouldn't expect relaxation of PED use restrictions to be entirely safe without costly equipment upgrades and testing.

And why, really, should this money be spent? So your call doesn't have to wait a few hours?

But TFA does make one critical point - if planes are fragile enough for consumer devices to interfere with them, this isn't about passenger convenience - this is a major security problem. Plane electronics do need to be properly shielded, or it's a matter of time before someone begins deliberately attempting to exploit the vulnerability. The debate about whether cell phones should be allowed in flight in general is less interesting to me, personally.

For those curious, there have been some more determined efforts to explore the problem by more professional trade journalists:

http://www.issues.org/19.2/strauss.htm
http://www.popularaviation.com/ListNewsArticleDtl. asp?id=80

No, it's not always lazyness that prompts the 'turn all things off' mentality. I found a nice little article that describes some cases in which even FCC certified equipment raidiates more RF than it should, and why it is bad. Maybe it'll help.

http://www.issues.org/19.2/strauss.htm

If you don't want to do that, here's my own summary from what I read of the above materials: A) Evidence about its use for law enforcement/criminal investigation shows that it is better than chance but "far from perfect", B) There is nearly no scientific evidence about its efficacy for screening or pre-screening employees, and C) there are good reasons for thinking that it would be even less effective for (pre-)screening than it is for law enforcement.

For those unfamiliar with the NAS, there's a Wikipedia article.

There was a good article at issues.org discussing the stigma attached to nuclear power arising due to groups such as greenpeace sensationalizing the debate. By getting scared away from nuclear, we've only increased our coal consumption.

http://www.issues.org/issues/21.3/lorenzini.html

hgh

If you're innocent, no problem.

Until the law changes, and you're guilty of something. Japanese-Americans who cooperated with the government in the late 1930s and gave up information (like, to the Census Bureau) probably regretted it a few years later.

You leave your fingerprints everywhere. You don't cry like a baby about people having access to your fingerprints.

We leave few clean usable prints behind, mostly smeared partials. (And it's interesting that fingerprint identification has never really been proven valid and reliable.)

Heh. The US science and R&D budget is probably bigger than China's whole national budget.

As a matter of fact:
China 2003 (world factbook)
revenues: $265.8 billion
expenditures: $300.2 billion, including capital expenditures of $NA (2003

That would be China's entire National budget. Figures for US

$275 billion - in 2001. Just in Science spending, from here. The US numbers are, of course, including private research - which, btw, is $57 billion in China. We're talking orders of magnitude here :).

The 2001 report also has detailed discussion of model uncertainties. Chapter 8 is all about model evaluation and concludes with a section on what is and is not reliable about the models on a scale ranging from "well-established" to "speculative."

There are numerous graphs showing model calculations versus observed climatic data (see, for instance, figs. 8.15 and 8.19).

The authors of the scientific sections of the IPCC report are indeed real practicing scientists, many of them the best in the field, and they do seem to have read the literature quite comprehensively.

On self interest and scientists, it's amusing that you accuse them of exaggerating their certainty about global warming to keep the funds coming. A couple of years ago, Roger Pielke, Jr., and Daniel Sarewitz accused climate scientists of exaggerating their uncertainty about global warming on the grounds that if everyone accepted that warming was a real threat, politicians might divert funding away from research and toward action. Thus, Pielke and Sarewitz accuse climate scientists of accepting research funding as bribes for continuing to say that things are uncertain and further research is needed. P & S argue that honest climate scientists would say that we know all we need to know; further research is unlikely to resolve uncertainties in any useful way, so we should hang up the expensive research and start taking political action.

I don't buy either your idea that scientists are exaggerating fears of climate change to keep funding coming or Pielke and Sarewitz's idea that they are playing up the uncertainty to keep funding coming. I think they are being honest and recognize that even if they stopped doing climate change research there would still be a lot of well-funded opportunities at predicting ENSO events, droughts, tropical storm trends, etc. It's not as though natural climatic variability is economically or politically negligible.

CNN is also covering the story.

More information:

The relationship between space and survival has been expressed by many others, such as Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, Martin Rees, William Burrows and Robert Shapiro.