Dr. Scheer has been a pioneer in his advocacy of renewable energy and sustainability goals. I agree with him on most of the goals and admire his early insights

Environmentalists vs Pragmentalists

First, it is worth reviewing the situation we find ourselves in. Electric power worldwide is over 40% of total global carbon dioxide releases, and it is the fastest growing portion (in terms of human-released greenhouse gases). India, China, and other countries are rapidly industrializing and bringing basic electric power services to their peoples. Their development, like US electric power, follows least-cost options. Our least-cost electric power options - coal-fired power plants - are by far our most destructive and dangerous ones. Coal burning directly kills hundreds of thousands of people worldwide in particulate, sulfate and mercury releases, thousands of tons of radioactive emission yearly and emits over twice as much CO2 per KWH as any other form of power generation. The coming costs from worsening droughts from Africa to Indiana, intensified storms, and rising sea levels will bring misery to billions. Nevertheless, US utilities and their banking partners are planning to build about 150 new coal-fired power plants in the US over the next 5 years, and China is building roughly 60 large plants every year ( the recent TXU settlement is a step in the right direction but will probably not make a dent). Electric power is an engine of economic growth, bringing light, cooling, and communication to billions, but every coal-fired power plant is a ticking slow bomb. Knowing this, we need solutions that work - now.

As such, we must address some basic rules: For any energy scheme to be viable, it must be cost effective, and it must be scalable. If solutions don't get adopted in India and China global warming control efforts are futile. To scale they must make economic sense in China and India. The EIA projects that from 2003-2030, Asia's energy consumption will grow at 3.7% - faster than anywhere else in the world. India and China are also the home of more than one-third of the world's population and are likely to continue to grow furiously in the near future, using lowest cost energy. If we allocate the same carbon emission per person worldwide (an equal right to pollute for every human) we are toast at anywhere near current levels of US emissions or even at levels of carbon emission in Europe. It is reasonable to assume that when India and China are part of a global carbon emissions pact, they will demand the same per capita emission rights for their people as we have in the west. This will require huge transfers (the president of the World Bank recently suggested over a hundred billion dollars a year!) of "quota purchases" UNLESS the new lower carbon emission approach to power generation is cheaper than coal (or nuclear - do we want hundreds of nuclear plants in India and China?) based power generation.

Moreover, these lower carbon emission generation technologies must be attractive not only to government planners, but also to private capital that cares only about economics and regulation- hundreds of billions if not trillions of which needs to become available. Simply put, government money will never be enough to reform the world's energy infrastructure. To achieve these goals, we must provide services that consumers want and prefer over their non-sustainable fossil competitors, while at the same time be profitable for business (unless it can politically be mandated worldwide thru policy which seems unlikely, especially in India and China). Applications that meet the engineering needs but fail to meet the commercial ones are doomed to failure, which provides one of the key reasons for my disagreements with Dr. Scheer.

The history of imprudent environmentalism is perhaps most visible in a technology that's regaining attention now - nuclear power, now touted as a solution to the problems with fossil fuels. A relatively old, stable, and cheap to operate (the NEI notes that the average electric product cost in 2005 for nuclear energy was 1.72 cents/ kwH, lower than coal (2.21 cents/kwH), oil (8.09 cents/kwH), and natural gas (7.51 cents/kwH), although nuclear capital costs are higher (to say nothing about the vast subsidies given to nuclear energy, something the NEI obviously does not note), and the EIA notes that nuclear power "makes no contribution to global warming through the emission of carbon dioxide." Nuclear power is responsible for only 15% of worldwide electricity production (about 20% in the US). A fair portion of this can be explained by the limited number of countries that have access to the technology - nonetheless, nuclear power is a viable alternative for any country in the developed world, where most power is used in the first place.

Despite the evidence in its favor, no new nuclear power plant has been built in over 30 years in the United States. The reason? Misguided environmentalism. The partial meltdown at Three Mile island lead to the canceling of many nuclear plant orders and a political climate hostile to further nuclear expansion, despite its significantly cleaner profile than either coal or fossil fuels. To their credit, some environmentalists have started to come around the issue (Patrick Moore, one of the founders of Greenpeace as well as Stuart Brand of Whole Earth) but many are still hostile. This is not to say that some environmental problems do not exist with Nuclear Power. The predominant environmental issue for nuclear plants is spent fuel - radioactive waste. That being said, the lack of R&D into nuclear technology (primarily as a result of environmental backlash, but also due to the innate conservatism of energy companies) suggests that given time and money, technology could have solved or mitigated these issues. I would guess that had we continued on the nuclear trajectory in the 1970's we would have made substantial progress on the issues of nuclear waste and non-proliferation - problems that appear very amenable to a technology optimist like myself. How many millions of tons of carbon emissions do we have because nuclear plants have not been built? The irony of course, is that the typical coal plant spews tons of radioactive uranium and thorium into the air each year (more than their nuclear compatriots!) and we have hundreds of them! Today I suspect we don't have enough time to iterate through all the politics, legalities and technology development cycles of nuclear power generation (given typical 15 year innovation cycles compared to fifteen month innovation cycles for a technology like solar thermal power). In the short to medium term, it is probably too late for nuclear power to make a material difference in carbon emission in the next twenty years. By then it might be too late if we don't take action.

The issue at hand: Sustainable power generation

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More: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/vinod-khosla/scheer-nonsense-the-_b_45590.html