Even diehard Obama supporters like Mark Shields admit that on this jobs-versus-environment issue, the environment lobby won. Those who follow Shields, mostly in his regular Friday appearances along with David Brooks on the PBS Newshour, know he represents a very articulate and strenuous traditionalist liberal view—especially when it comes to working people and jobs. He has been locked on the plight of working-class Americans through the current recession, and over the past year has relentlessly analyzed the high-level political situation in the U.S. from the viewpoint of jobs and working class voters.

On Friday, Shields appeared deeply disappointed in Obama’s capitulation to loud environmental lobbyists at the expense of working people, as well as in how that will inevitably play in the 2012 electoral political game. The Republicans will harp on this, and if the employment picture does not improve between now and the election, they will score points.

Was this move to appease the green lobby a smart political gamble? Possibly. The president appears to have torn a page from the playbook of Dalton McGuinty, of all people. In the recent Ontario election, McGuinty consciously and deliberately appealed to affluent downtown Toronto environmentalists, at the risk of losing critical rural districts where opposition to wind turbines is overwhelming. He lost those rural seats but kept the downtown seats, squeaking to a very bare victory.

Obama’s campaign kick-off advertising appeals in exactly the same way to exactly the same crowd. Scroll to 09:50 of the following clip, which is from the Newshour of January 22:

Watch Shields, Brooks on Romney’s Message, Gingrich’s Defense, Santorum’s Struggles on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.

Shields and Brooks don’t often agree, but they’re in perfect agreement over the Keystone decision: it’s substantively a terrible decision both for jobs and the environment.

So the big question is, will Obama’s strategic decision to court the “environmental” lobby at the expense of the Big Labor lobby help him or hurt him as the presidential election year progresses?

CBC Radio’s The Current recently published a very interesting interview with the Canadian federal natural resources minister, who during the interview gives a pretty well-explained account of the government’s support of the Northern Gateway pipeline.

In brief, the minister says that moving oil sands bitumen to markets via that particular pipeline is the quickest and most effective way to diversify Canada’s energy export markets. This federal effort to promote Northern Gateway is of course is in the context of what we might call the Keystone fiasco, in which the U.S. federal government has kiboshed TransCanada’s plan to extend the Keystone pipeline from Okahoma to Texas.

Canada’s government is now feeling a bit of pressure to develop at least one way to get syncrude to refineries without relying on truck transportation. It has been defeated, or at least set back until after the 2012 U.S. presidential election, by the mainstream environmental lobby in the U.S. And that lobby, flush with victory, has set its sights on Northern Gateway.

The Canadian federal government is learning the hard way that land-use issues are a major problem—perhaps the biggest problem—in implementing an energy strategy. The government of Ontario learned the same lesson in the October election, which saw that government barely survive after losing a number of rural districts because of local opposition to industrial wind turbines.

I made that point at about the 21:10 mark in a recent televised post-mortem on the Ontario election; see below.

That lesson is: if your energy strategy involves somebody else’s real property, don’t be surprised if that somebody’s legal property rights trump your energy strategy.

The feds might become involved in another major long-term energy strategy: Ontario’s. This province’s electricity system is in dire need of solid long-term planning. The provincial government also faces opposition from the mainstream environmental lobby, though in Ontario’s case that lobby is less concerned with greenhouse gases than it claims to be in the case of the two western oil pipelines. In Ontario, the environmental lobby is only concerned with replacing coal and nuclear generating plants with ones that run on natural gas (the same fossil fuel that makes the oil sands so carbon-heavy).

As I pointed out in the above debate, nuclear plants are the only major electricity providers whose major expansion would involve no land-use issues and little local opposition.

It is difficult to see what role the federal government would play in nuclear expansion in Ontario: the feds recently sold the CANDU division of AECL to a private buyer. But the feds would certainly be delighted to see Ontario move positively on nuclear.

Let’s just hope they haven’t lost their stomach for battles with Big Environment. As the natural resources minister correctly told CBC, that lobby is made up of radicals who are funded with U.S. money. That money comes from all over the place, including Wall Street.

Since beginning this blog, I have suggested ways for the federal government to make serious moves toward effective environmental policy without bankrupting the country. I have been encouraged by the feds’ willingness to mostly ignore the self-styled enviros, who I believe are simply an obstacle to any meaningful action on most environmental issues.

Ontario is where the first true environmental steps have been taken in Canada, and it is where most progress will be made. Here’s to meaningful fed-prov action on energy and environment.

The high temperature of NGNP opens the door to a radical change in the hydrocarbon fuel sector. An entire new class of hydrocarbon products is now possible. This is because NGNP, and other reactors with similar temperature, will revolutionize the hydrogen market, by finally making water-derived hydrogen competitive, as a commodity, with natural gas-derived hydrogen.

This will make hydrogen-intensive chemical manufacturing processes—like oil sands upgrading, fertilizer production, and petroleum refining—far less carbon-intensive. Water-derived hydrogen involves none of the process carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions that come with natural gas-derived hydrogen. And of course the process heat comes from nuclear fission, which is also CO₂-free.

This explains why organizations like Petroleum Technology Alliance Canada, Potash Corp., and ConocoPhilips are part of the NGNP Industry Alliance. All represent industries that are under the gun because of economic pressures (the continental price of natural gas will not stay cheap forever) and environmental concerns.

But beyond satisfying the demand for hydrogen in current industries, what doors will the cheap, clean, plentiful hydrogen from NGNP open?

The real breakthrough will come with the advent of hydrocarbon fuels made from recycled CO₂. As I mentioned in “Game-changing nuclear moves in the US,” carbon is about the closest anything has ever come to being a perfect storage material for hydrogen. Hydrogen on its own is an extremely uncooperative substance when it comes to fueling motorized vehicles like the ones we use today. You cannot use it in a normal-size fuel tank; it has to be so pressurized that only a spherical or cylindrical tank will suffice, and tanks of that shape are not practical in the current vehicle fleet.

But if you store hydrogen in a molecular bond with carbon, you get a fuel that is liquid at most temperatures found on this planet. That allows you much more latitude when it comes to fuel tank design. It also gives your vehicle a reasonable range—400 to 500 kilometers from a single tank.

To use CO₂ as a raw material to make liquid hydrocarbons, it is best to first turn it into carbon monoxide (CO), which is far more reactive and therefore useful than CO₂. To make CO from CO₂, you need heat and hydrogen.

Hence the NGNP’s vital role in the new fuel economy. If the heat for both water- and CO₂-splitting comes from a zero-carbon source, then you’ve got a low-carbon manufacturing process.

And if the CO₂ itself were to come from the captured emissions of coal-fired power plants, then fuels made from it would contain recycled carbon.

That’s the Three Rs in action.

Not one single gram of those 10 billion tons of CO₂ comes out of a nuclear plant. Almost all of those 10 billion tons come from coal and gas plants (some also comes out of oil-fired plants).

What happens to that CO₂? Well, it swirls around in the atmosphere, acting as a trap for heat energy that would otherwise radiate into outer space. It does this for literally hundreds of thousands—some say millions—of years. CO₂ is an extremely tough and stable molecule. I know: one of my R&D projects aims to deprive CO₂ of one of its oxygen atoms, in order to turn it into a reactant to make other products. Hiving an oxygen atom off CO₂ requires a lot of energy and ingenuity.

Left on its own in the earth’s atmosphere, without people like me devoting time and effort to split it, CO₂ remains subject only to time. And time—hundreds of thousands of years of time—eventually does bring it back to earth, by entraining it weathering rock and water. Most of our planet is water, so most of that CO₂ winds up in the oceans, making them more acidic.

This has profound implications for the future of life on this planet. The entire ocean ecosystem, from phytoplankton to blue whales, is a giant carbon sink. Dr. Sylvia Earle, an oceanographer, points out in the video clip below that ocean acidification—the conversion of atmospheric CO₂ into carbonic acid in water—is the result of the rate at which CO₂ is becoming entrained in the oceans. Too much carbonic acid will kill ocean creatures, thereby depriving us of an enormous source of atmospheric oxygen.

Ocean acidification is recognized by many, including many of the leading environmental groups, as a major problem. The Natural Resources Defense Council (NDRC) warns against it, and recommends, not surprisingly, steep reductions in CO₂ emissions. The NDRC obviously went to a lot of trouble producing the fancy videos on its site. It obviously feels ocean acidification is a serious problem.

Presumably, NDRC feels that the CO₂ from power generation, which to repeat dumps 10 billion tons of CO₂ into our air each and every year, should be one of the first places to start with the necessary carbon reductions. So which of the three power generation fuels—coal, natural gas, and nuclear—does the NDRC recommend we uptake in a big way?

The answer may surprise, upset, and disappoint you. While waxing eloquent about the perils of ocean acidification, the NDRC, from the other corner of its mouth, proceeds to in effect advocate for coal and natural gas and against nuclear.

With this kind of mealy-mouthed hypocrisy at the cutting edge of the self-styled “environmental movement,” is it any wonder that 10 billion tons of CO₂ are getting dumped into our air and oceans every year.

The “environmental movement” is the oceans’ and atmosphere’s worst enemy.

Those who follow the Ontario electricity debate know that the infamous Debt Retirement Charge on your electricity bill is 0.7 ¢ per kWh. That is regularly ascribed to the cost of building the Darlington nuclear generating station, a project that began in 1979 and finished in 1994. Darlington ended up costing $14 billion, twice the original estimate.

Those who ascribe the entire DRC to Darlington do so with a fair amount of outrage. To them, that 0.7 ¢ per kWh represents an increase to the cost of electricity that is simply unacceptable.

It is ironic that most of those who ascribe the DRC entirely to Darlington and feel the 0.7 ¢ per kWh is unacceptable are perfectly fine with the Feed-In Tariff (FIT) program, which forces Ontario rate payers to pay wind farms 13.5 cents per kWh for wind-powered electricity. It must be pointed out that rate-payers only have to pay 5.5 cents per kWh for Darlington’s electricity.

It is doubly ironic that most of those who complain about the exorbitant 0.7-cent DRC almost all advocate the replacement of Ontario’s nuclear fleet with natural gas-fired plants. As I have shown above, gas-fired power would cost an extra 0.8 cents per kWh if there were a modest $15-per-ton tax on CO₂ emissions.

In other words, these people oppose the 0.7 cent DRC, but support a 0.8 cent increase for their favourite power source.

If there were a $15 per ton carbon tax, the most we could ever expect from a major nuclear cost overrun would be an extra 0.7 cent per kWh increase. That is LESS than what we would pay for gas-fired power.

And if the carbon tax were made truly meaningful, say $30 per ton? Then gas-fired power would cost an extra 1.6 cents per kWh. Nuclear would stay at, at most, 0.7 cents. It does not emit any CO₂.

The U.S. was truly unique. There were twelve extreme weather episodes in the U.S. this year. Texas had the hottest year it has ever experienced. In all, six thousand heat records were broken around the country. In addition to lethal heat waves, other extreme events like blizzards, tornadoes, floods, and droughts—more than in any year since recordkeeping began—ended up costing the U.S. around $52 billion this year. Here’s a very interesting and alarming TV interview about that:

Watch How 2011 Became a ‘Mind-Boggling’ Year of Extreme Weather on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.

It’s the thermodynamic effects of global warming that are the most alarming from a long-term perspective. As Jeff Masters of Weather Underground (not to be confused with THE Weather Underground) tells Hari Sreenivasan of PBS, the extra heat in the earth’s atmosphere gives extra energy to tornadoes and heat waves, in effect turning them into heat waves on steroids.

And what’s putting the heat into the air? More accurately, what’s keeping the heat in the air? Substances like man-made carbon dioxide (CO₂), which comes out of car tailpipes and natural gas-fired electricity generators. Look in the upper right-hand side of this post, to the blue-bordered table entitled “Ontario power in the last hour,” and you’ll see the hourly CO₂ output of Ontario’s fleet of 40 gas-fired generators.

At the time I was writing this post (early afternoon of December 29, 2011), Ontario’s gas-fired generators had dumped roughly 1,433 metric tons of CO₂ into our atmosphere. They do much more than that in the intermediate and peaking hours of normal weekdays (today, a Thursday between Christmas and New Year, is not a normal weekday). And they do that hour after hour, day after day, month after month, and year after year.

If Dr. Masters is right that the increased heat trapped in our atmosphere by, among other things, gas-plant CO₂, will give extra oomph to heat waves and wind storms, then the swath of North America from Ontario down to Texas had better be ready for some pretty nasty heat waves in the coming years.

What do heat waves produce? They produce spikes in the demand for electricity, as everyone in the affected region turns up their air conditioner. That means as heat waves from Ontario to Texas get more intense, we will need more electricity generating capacity.

Should that capacity be in the form of gas-fired plants? Of course not—as you can see, gas-fired plants dump enormous amounts of heat-trapping CO₂ into our air. Using natural gas to run air conditioners would be like putting out fire with gasoline.

Our only viable alternative is more nuclear plants. Nuclear plants do not dump any CO₂ into the air. Nor do they require vast networks of earthquake-vulnerable piping to distribute the fuel, which in its raw form is a dangerous explosive.

Dr. Masters pointed up the effect of global warming on drought. The Russian drought of 2010 ruined that country’s wheat harvest, which jacked up the world price of wheat. Increases in the wheat price cause immediate crisis among the very poor: it only takes a few hours to feel hunger pangs, and if you can’t afford even the cheapest foodstuffs you are in crisis mode literally within hours.

The high price of wheat is recognized as one of the triggers of the so-called Arab Spring, which began in Tunisia.

As Dr. Masters points out to Hari Sreenivasan, had the agricultural heartland of America—Ohio southwest to Missouri, and north through Iowa to Minnesota—experienced a general drought in 2011, political instability would have been much worse.

And that’s not even considering the immediate effects of a really extreme heat wave on the people in central North America.

How much more unstable will our climate become if we keep dumping CO₂ into our atmosphere? I don’t want to find out the hard way.

We need more nuclear plants. Now.

Ford’s position was the culmination of two years of congressional pressure on Ford as a result of India’s “surprise” test, in 1974, of a plutonium bomb. India had made the plutonium in a research reactor that Canada had given it in the late 1950s; it got the plutonium out of the irradiated target materials by means of an extraction method allegedly developed solely in India. The test was India’s way of showing arch-enemies China and Pakistan that India was not to be fooled with. India felt internationally isolated and alone against these enemies, especially after president Nixon’s strong diplomatic overtures to both China (the intermediary was Pakistan) and the USSR.

Congress was able to exert pressure on Ford because it was experiencing a revival of sorts in its influence on U.S. foreign policy in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, which had forced Nixon to resign the presidency in August 1974. Watergate had revealed decades of executive branch unilateralism in foreign affairs. Post-Watergate Washington was therefore full of new, and newly dusted off, theories about congress’s role in shaping foreign policy. Nixon’s successor Ford had himself been a congressman before Nixon appointed him Vice President in late 1973.

Ford’s 1976 decision to stop reprocessing was based on the assumption that if the U.S. refrained from the activity then other countries would follow its example and refrain from reprocessing their own used nuclear fuel. A general worldwide halt to reprocessing would thereby stem nuclear proliferation.

Here are his words:

… the reprocessing and recycling of plutonium should not proceed unless there is sound reason to conclude that the world community can effectively overcome the associated risks of proliferation… .

In other words, reprocessing leads to proliferation.

That is a pretty simplistic argument. The fact that India was the trigger for the U.S. to publicly get out of reprocessing suggests that Ford and the congress felt that had the U.S. gotten out of reprocessing earlier then India might not have tested its plutonium bomb (or made it in the first place). The circumstances India was in in 1974—alone and diplomatically isolated from countries that could have provided support against enemies on its western and northeastern borders—make this assumption on the part of the U.S. seem naive and almost divorced from reality. India tested a plutonium bomb in 1974 not because the U.S. had not yet made a big show out of halting the reprocessing of used nuclear power reactor fuel. India tested a bomb to show China and Pakistan—and possibly, according to the U.S. embassy in New Delhi, certain domestic constituencies—what it was capable of.

The notion that other countries would blindly follow the U.S. lead on reprocessing has shown remarkable longevity over the years. If it were anything but a political hypothesis it would have been discarded before it ever became a policy. Anybody could have understood India’s motivation in 1974 and explained it to the president. And subsequent developments in civilian nuclear energy around the world showed that countries will reprocess and recycle nuclear fuel if they feel it is worth their while. France, the UK, Russia, and Japan are good examples. France in particular ramped up reprocessing in the same year the U.S. decided to halt it.

Remember how Ford explained the decision to halt reprocessing: “the reprocessing and recycling of plutonium should not proceed unless there is sound reason to conclude that the world community can effectively overcome the associated risks of proliferation.” Is there sound reason? What can we say after 35 years?

In the years after the U.S. announced its reprocessing halt, four countries—South Africa, India (again), Pakistan, and North Korea—have built or tested nuclear weapons. Four more began efforts to develop nuclear explosive: Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Iran. Of these eight countries, only three—Pakistan, India, and North Korea—have developed plutonium weapons. None of these used plutonium from dedicated power reactors; all made plutonium in dedicated production machines.

Most important, none of these eight countries based decisions regarding their weapons programs on whether the U.S. does or does not reprocess used reactor fuel. U.S. action or non-action in this area is simply irrelevant. Nor did any of them base their nuclear decisions on whether, for example, France was reprocessing.

Which begs the question: why does the U.S. continue with its anti-reprocessing policy even with decades of history proving it has been totally irrelevant to proliferant states’ decisions to develop weapons? The answer: bureaucratic momentum. The decision to halt reprocessing was taken at a time when plutonium was seen as the ultimate route to a bomb, and when the congress was reasserting itself in foreign affairs. That gave rise to bureaucracies, which after formation can develop a life of their own. The U.S. government is full of bureaucratic fiefdoms that know how to survive. Sometimes they survive by playing on fear: in this case fears of proliferation. The fact that the arguments justifying the fears are based on non-sequiturs and have been contradicted by the real world is secondary. Fear is a common rhetorical tool in politics.

(Alert readers will notice I have already dropped my original claim of 26 tons—that’s what happens when you base today’s projections on last month’s data).

I base this on Environment Canada’s National Inventory figures (linked here—see Table A13-7—and I’ll embed a table soon), which says that Ontario’s electricity GHG emissions were 39.6 million tons in 2003. Why 2003 as the reference year? I’m just trying to put this into political terms. The McGuinty Liberals were first elected in 2003, on a platform that called for closure of the provincial coal-fired power plants.

The second part of my comparison is my own estimate of the CO₂ emissions from Ontario power plants so far in 2011, which is roughly 16 million tons:

As far as I know, I’m the only person who has pointed this out. Which is strange, because the data on which I make the 23 million ton reduction claim is available to anybody with an internet connection.

The upshot is that Ontario as a jurisdiction is achieving pretty amazing CO₂ reductions, and these reductions are due in most part to the nuclear generating fleet. I believe it is because of nuclear’s central role in this reduction that nobody knows about it. The provincial government wants to pretend that wind and solar did the job (they plainly did not), and the constituencies the government wants to please are theologically anti-nuclear.

Nuclear delivered most of those 23 million tons, more cheaply and effectively than the other emission-free sources. And what does it get? No credit.

Meanwhile we’re deeper in debt paying for the expensive unreliable sources.

I’ll elaborate in upcoming days.

In times of majority government, a critical AG report is always seized on by the opposition and media. The government mouths some platitudes about trying to do better, then the issue fades away.

But this is not a majority, it’s a minority. Combined, the opposition Progressive Conservatives and New Democratic Party outnumber the incumbent Liberals in the 107-seat legislature by a single seat—54 to 53.

That means the Liberals cannot rely on their party whip alone to ensure that their bills pass in the legislature and opposition bills are defeated. They also no longer control membership of the standing legislative committees. And it means they can’t buy time with platitudes about the AG’s report, unless the platitudes satisfy at least some opposition members. The opposition could introduce a bill in the legislature, have it sent to committee, and make it become law.

This would of course be difficult without Liberal support. The ideological differences between the PCs and NDP make a scenario in which a collaboration on legislation survives all the necessary stages hard to envision. Plus, if the bill were introduced from committee they would need at least some Liberal support—the bill has to pass committee with two-thirds support. But it’s possible. We are in uncharted waters.

How plausible is a scenario in which the PCs and NDP collaborate on energy? The AG’s report gives them both plenty of ammunition. The PCs said during the election they would scrap the FIT program; the NDP support the basic philosophy of FIT but vowed to reconstitute the old Ontario Hydro (i.e., re-regulate electricity).

An un-sung record of stunning emission reductions

Meanwhile, the Liberals are sitting on top of a rather enormous accomplishment in the way of greenhouse gas (GHG) reductions from electricity. Ontario electricity GHGs in 2011 are on track to be less than 14 million tons.

For those who follow these things, that is simply stunning. When the Liberals took over in 2003, Ontario power plants belched out nearly 40 million tons of greenhouse gases (see Table A13-7 in Environment Canada’s National GHG Inventory Report 1990?2008, Part 3). So the Liberals can legitimately claim that since 2003 they have reduced electricity GHGs by nearly 26 million tons per year.

The cause of this is mainly the stellar operational performance of the provincial nuclear fleet. Since 2003, four nuclear units—two at the Pickering A station, and two at Bruce A—have come back into service after having been laid up in the late 1990s. As you can see in Table A13-7, annual nuclear generation was 23.4 billion kilowatt-hours more in 2008 than in 2003.

The problem is, those who know about this don’t want to give credit where it’s due. I refer of course to the self-appointed environmental lobby—the “green” NGOs who supported the Liberals in the 2003, 2007, and 2011 elections. They are all anti-nuclear and pro-natural gas.

They are also clustered in the 416 voting districts. The Liberals owe their very electoral survival to 416 voters. So touting their nuclear accomplishments will hardly help the Liberals with this crowd.

But they still have to do something, and soon, to deal with the AG’s report. Do they dare trumpet their 26 million ton GHG reduction? That might buy support from the PCs, provided they push forward on new nuclear units at Darlington and life extension at Pickering B. Nuclear is cheap power, and the PCs support it.

That would require a paradigm shift in political communication on energy and the environment. The Liberals lost their majority because they listened to phony greens who want expensive gas-fired electricity. Why not trumpet their GHG reductions, say up front how they achieved the reductions, and pursue an energy strategy that doesn’t alienate rural Ontario or bankrupt anybody on a low income, and that creates high paying jobs that are truly, not falsely, green? Drop wind, and go nuclear.

In her article, Meredith talks about an AP piece on leaks of a fission-produced radionuclide called strontium-90 from the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant. While the piece mentioned that Sr-90 is “linked to cancer and leukemia,” it did not mention that the actual amount of Sr-90 leaked from Yankee was so tiny that the radiation emitted could not be differentiated from the natural background level.

Why mention the first but not the second?

I admit, up front and proudly, that I am pro-nuclear. So is NEI of course—they are an industry lobbying organization, after all—and so is Meredith. But CJR doesn’t have a dog in the pro- versus anti-nuclear fight. It is simply a well-respected watchdog organization, whose mission “is to encourage and stimulate excellence in journalism in the service of a free society.” So this isn’t just a bunch of pro-nuclear people complaining.

Here are two pieces the CJR has done since late September on AP’s nuclear reporting:

1. “A Frustrating AP Series on Nuclear Safety”
2. “AP Rings the Alarm: Story about cancers from Fukushima plays up the scare factor”

And here’s a very interesting clip of two NEI reps discussing AP’s ongoing smear campaign against nuclear.

Now, I have registered annoyance in recent posts with dedicated anti-nuclear lobbies, like Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, and the David Suzuki Foundation. In my view organizations like these are committed to spreading falsehoods and groundless fear about nuclear energy, which is by any measure demonstrably the cleanest, safest, and lowest-impact form of electric power generation that mankind has yet developed. I confess that I really don’t have much respect for organizations like this.

But I have outright contempt for media organizations that exhibit systematic bias. Media organizations in our society have a far higher responsibility for the public welfare than lobbies do. I have studied the history of societies in which propaganda played a major role. Propaganda does not just help put dangerous thugs in power and keep them there. It does deep and lasting damage to both the public psyche and the psyches of real individuals. It’s immoral.

Here we are, trying to address major global societal issues like poverty and underdevelopment, air quality, and industrial safety. It’s annoying that there are organizations dedicated to blocking the energy source that is by far our best hope for dealing succes with all of these issues.

But it is truly alarming that there is a media organization that uses its power to help these lobbies.