Somewhat sobering editorial in the current issue of Forbes magazine .... who just picked ExxonMobil as their Green Company of the Year for their sudden interest in natural gas.
William Baldwin, Editor wrote:
You want to get carbon out of the atmosphere? There's an easy way to do it. Pay an electric utility to throttle back one of its older coal-fueled plants and fire up an efficient turbine burning clean natural gas. Gas is more expensive than coal (per unit of energy) but spits out not much more than half the carbon. The higher fuel cost translates into something in the neighborhood of $20 per ton of avoided CO2, according to calculations from EPRI, the Electric Power Research Institute.
The hero of this tale is Rex Tillerson, the boss at ExxonMobil, who is betting big on natural gas (see Forbes story by Christopher Helman, "ExxonMobil: Green Company of the Year"). What? That old fossil of a company is an environmental savior? It will be one, if we let it. A carbon tax or permit system that prices CO2 at $20 or more is a win for gas producers.
I'll concede that Exxon's drift into gas was inspired more by the difficulty of finding petroleum than by any love for the environment. But the numbers are undeniable. Twenty bucks per CO2 ton would be a good price for greenhouse gas reduction. That, moreover, is for switching existing power plants. When you're building new plants, gas, because of its lower capital costs, is competitive with coal these days. The greenhouse benefit in this case is free.
Now let's look at a bad way to reduce atmospheric carbon: subsidizing electric cars. The federal government will chip in $7,500 to the cost of a Nissan Leaf BEV or a General Motors Volt PHEV (see Forbes story by Joann Muller, "Nissan's Plug-In Gamble"). A Leaf will displace a little sedan burning maybe 5,000 gallons of gas over its 150,000-mile life span. That much gasoline produces not even 50 tons of carbon dioxide. Don't believe that the electric is an "emission-free" vehicle; the juice comes from somewhere, and today the incremental source of electric power is going to be a fossil-fueled plant. You'd be generous to the electric car industry in assuming that the car, the power plant and the charger in your garage are, taken together, four times as efficient as a gasoline car engine. The math is simple. Using a Leaf to reduce carbon dioxide costs taxpayers $200 a ton. Throw in the subsidy for the charger and the price goes to $250.
Congress is debating whether to extend the Cash for Clunkers subsidy. Applied to a ramshackle pickup nearing the end of its useful life, this handout is good for CO2 elimination at $1,700 a ton. Biofuels are probably even more expensive than that as carbon savers.
Crazy, isn't it? Understand something. In this country environmentalism is a religion, not a science. As columnist Peter Huber has explained in our pages, the very thesis that atmospheric carbon is bad is a matter of faith, not science. In this religion the forces of evil are represented by Exxon's dark, satanic wells and the forces of good by things labeled "emission free" and "renewable." Numbers don't enter the picture.
Link: http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2009/0824/opinions...
Mark Twain:
"Ain't what you don't know that gets you in trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so."
