Oil barons really know how to dig holes in the ground. And they need a better place to put their money than trying to confuse the public about how serious global fever has become. I think they are missing a old-fashioned business opportunity, and a giant one at that.
This aphorism by Yogi Berra, the Baseball Hall of Fame philosopher, used to be a funny example of a tangled arrow of time. But now it means that, thanks to global warming and ocean acidification, our kids and grandkids cannot have the kind of future that we had; they can count on a future of high risk, both directly from climate change and from the regional collapse of civilization.
People take sensible precautions when the risk is high. Ask a roomful of people if they have fire insurance. Almost all will raise a hand. Ask how many have had a fire in the last ten years, and almost none will respond. Yet people pay for insurance because, should a fire happen, they could lose everything—and still have to pay off the mortgage.
But uncertainty is another matter. Those with money to loan will worry about ever getting it back, and so loan rates will soar.
I recently stood next to an electrical generator, big enough to power a city the size of Seattle (about 1,000 megawatts, known as a gigawatt). It was surprisingly small, no larger than a classroom with a tall ceiling.
The generator’s spinning shaft could be seen where it connected to the steam turbine, next in line. And backing it up were three more turbines, helping to keep that long shaft spinning at 1,800 revolutions every minute.
The generator doesn’t spin freely because every electrical light and appliance in that gigawatt-sized city is resisting it. It takes a lot of push from the four steam turbines to keep it up to speed. Some power plants create the steam in a boiler heated by burning coal, others by using nuclear fission of uranium-235 to generate the requisite heat. The cleanest method of all is harvesting steam from water sprayed on hot granite a few miles [5 km] underground.
But standing in the electricity half of the power plant, you cannot tell what the heat source is. All you see are the big steam pipes coming in at the far end of the giant hall from an adjacent building. Looking out the big open doors, however, two giant cooling towers are immediately visible. (more…)