I am, believe it or not, very much in favor of sound environmental policy. But sound environmental policy begins by rejecting distorted views or reality. When you began to write off facts, because they do not fit into your ideological framework, sound policy is impossible. A primary example of this is found in a recent document offered by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and Allianz, a large insurance organization. The Title of the document is G8: 2009 Climate Scorecard. We shall quickly see that whatever value this document might have is utterly undermined by a single statement:
WWF does not consider nuclear power to be a viable policy option. The indicators “emissions per capita”, “emissions per GDP” and “CO2 per kWh electricity” for all countries have therefore been adjusted as if the generation of electricity from nuclear power had produced 350 gCO2/kWh (emission factor for natural gas). Without the adjustment, the original indicators for France would have been much lower, e.g. 86 gCO2/kWh. A country using nuclear energy is therefore rated as a country using gas, the most efficient fossil fuel.Thus it is not actual performance that gets you a passing grade in the WWF scorecard, it is ideological correctness. The WWF is profoundly confused if it believes that by adopting this standard it is fighting climate change. That WWF panda is shaking the chair against reality.
Hat tip to Klaus Allmendinger.
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7 comments:
Charles, that graphic is terrific. It looks like the pandas have started their own wrestling federation.
Seriously, I reread the WWF quote about 4 times before it started to make any sense. And it still makes no sense. This is symptomatic of the "romantic" types that love the environment. Not that there's anything wrong with that but it is the type of person who is very susceptible to adopting the standard second-hand ignorant group think that is the anti-nuclear platform.
Allianz is not just a German insurance giant, they have a subsidiary called Allianz Climate Solutions, they're involved in emissions trading and other nonsense.
http://www.acs.allianz.com/en/markets/carbon_market/index.html
Dishonest sacks of shit.
Apparently my comment got automatically rejected because I just a little too colourful language to describe Allianz.
Allianz is a German company and it has a carbon trading subsidiary with ties to the "renewables" industry.
Lying sacks of horse hockey.
Wow. Just wow. Thanks Charles.
that is insane. Thank god that people don't (for the most part) look to WWF and Greenpeace as having any viable, pragmatic solution to our energy problems. Right? Uhhhh.. well it seems that in Ontario Canada our energy minister would rather listen to David Suzuki and other eco-guilt wind advocates who base their predictions the capacity not output model and are pro natural gas base-loading while rallying against nuclear. For those who are tired of this backwards solution please go and sign the petition to keep Canadian and keep upgrading our nuclear capabilities in Ontario here.
And on the topic of France and nuclear, even the credit France gets for its nuclear fleet is underrated. The number you always hear is that they get 78-80% of their electricity from nuclear. But they export a ton of electricity on the European grid. The relevant metric is nuclear production compared to (divided by) total domestic consumption of electricity, to get a sense of how far a country has gone towards energy independence.
In 2006 France produced 450,191 GWh of electricity from nuclear, 78.4% of their 574473 GWh of total electricity production, but also just over 100.6% of the 447,270 GWh of electricity the French consumed in 2006. Production numbers are from IEA,
http://www.iea.org/Textbase/stats/electricitydata.asp?COUNTRY_CODE=FR
consumption numbers from EIA, http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/country/country_energy_data.cfm?fips=FR
Using 2007 data of 430 billion KWh nuc production relative to 447 billion KWh of consumption from http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf40.html
yields 96.2%. Regardless, the point is that nuclear advocates who point to France's 78-80% nuclear generation are being far too modest.
You are correct to be outraged by WWF nonsense. Like the baby seal the cute panda is little more than an instrument of propaganda, designed to fool the feeble.
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