Credit for the post title to Brad Delong.
Far be it from me to say bad things about the natural gas industry. But I can say bad things about people who shill for the natural gas industry. Today in the New York Times the paper publishes something that it never ought to have allowed to see print (or screens): this op-ed by Robert Bryce. It is the worst sort of cant: rhetoric designed to mislead by sleight-of-hand.
The basic argument is as follows. Renewables should be free to be green. Renewables are not free. Therefore, we should build more CCGT plants and nuclear reactors.
That’s really the argument. There’s this bizarre red herring implying (falsely) that it takes so much energy to build the steel in a solar installation as to make it as carbon-emitting as a natural gas turbine. Then there’s a second implication that it would be possible to greatly expand the number of nuclear power plants in the country without building high-power lines. Followed by a completely bizarro-world claim that the U.S. is short of empty land, or that 129 square miles is a lot of territory. (I have written about this elsewhere, although Doug makes a good case in comments that normal EPA review should still apply. But that is nothing compared to Bryce, who claims that they should not be built at all.) There is, of course, no attempt at either cost or carbon accounting.
I should add, of course, that he misrepresents the environmentalist position on nuclear fission. Only in Germany are greens universally opposed to it. Straw man, there, and irrelevant to his argument, inasmuch as he has one.
If he were calling for conservation and downsizing of energy use, he would at least be consistent, if IMHO incorrect. (I think the costs of photoelectric, solar-thermal and wind are worth the benefits, but there are costs.) Thing is, he’s not calling for conservation. He’s calling for more gas-fired plants. WTF?
Disingenuous, at best.
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