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NYT Profiles Freeman Dyson, polymath and climate skeptic

By Kennedy Maize
Coming in this Sunday’s (March 29) New York Times magazine is a splendid profile of one of the more important global warming skeptics: Freeman Dyson of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Studies. The article by Nicholas Dawidoff – “The Civil Heretic” – is required reading for those who believe climate change is the most dangerous trend facing the world today (Al Gore and Jim Hansen) and those who believe it’s overblown and lacking in scientific rigor (Dyson and Richard Lindzen of MIT).
If you don’t know Freeman Dyson, you simply don’t know much about the history of science in the 20th and 21st century. A brilliant mathematician and a polymath in other disciplines, Dyson is probably the deepest thinker alive today when it comes to science and society, and the best I’ve come across in explaining his scientific insights.
Dyson, as a very young immigrant from Great Britain, was there at the start of the modern world of physics, working with, among others, Albert Einstein, Enrico Fermi, Neils Bohr, Hans Bethe, Edward Teller, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Richard Feynman. Dyson, at 85, has now spent more than a half-century at the institution that gave Einstein refuge in the 1930s, and Oppenheimer in the 1950s. Dawidoff writes perceptively, “Among Dyson’s gifts is interpretive clarity, a penetrating ability to grasp the method and significance of what many kinds of scientists do.”
Of Dyson’s many books on science and society, my favorite is A Many-Colored Glass, Reflections on the Place of Life in the Universe (University of Virginia Press, 2007). The book is a collection of a series of lectures Dyson delivered starting in 2004. The best, for me, is titled “Heretical Thoughts about Science and Society.” Dyson, without mentioning climate science by name, says scientist who get enmeshed in political controversies “tend to speak more clearly than they think. They make confident predictions about the future, and end up believing their own predictions. The public is led to believe that the fashionable scientific dogmas are true, and it may sometimes happen that they are wrong. That is why heretics who question the dogmas are needed.
“As a scientist I do not have much faith in predictions. Science is organized unpredictability. The best scientists like to arrange things in an experiment to be as unpredictable as possible….”
Talking to Dawidoff, Dyson is nearly scornful of former vice president Al Gore and NASA scientist Jim Hansen, the chief drivers of evangelical warnings of climate change. I say nearly because Dyson is so gentle and calm that he would never heap outright scorn on anybody. He describes modern environmentalism as a “worldwide secular religion” and labels Gore the religion’s “chief propagandist.” Dyson accuses Hansen and Gore of leaning on flawed computer models, which result in “lousy science” that turns the public away from “more serious and more immediate dangers to the planet.” Hansen, he says, “has turned his science into ideology.”
Dawidoff’s characterization of Dyson is, to my mind, spot on: Dyson “is a great problem-solver who is not convinced that climate change is a great problem.” Dawidoff writes, “Dyson may be an Obama-loving, Bush-loathing liberal who has spent his life opposing American wars and fighting for the protection of natural resources, but he brooks no ideology and has a withering aversion to scientific consensus.”
The article is currently available on the newspaper’s web site.

Steven Chu: His Irrelevance

The Obama administration’s energy secretary, Dr. Steven Chu, has quickly become Dr. Who. As a recent New York Times article noted, Chu has repeatedly stumbled politically, demonstrating that being a Nobelist in physics is no qualification for the bumps-and-grinds of energy politics in Washington.

The Times observed that Chu is most comfortable with the science role of DOE. That’s entirely understandable. DOE is a major R&D funding agency, which Chu benefited from in his prior job as head of DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. But he’s less comfortable as the administration’s putative lead-dog on policy issues, about which appear to boggle his scientific mind. Indeed, he’s a trail-dog, far from an alpha male in the Obama administration, when it comes to understanding and selling energy policy.

Chu was unable to defend the administration’s decision to scrap the Yucca Mountain high-level nuclear waste dump in Nevada at a recent Senate hearing, when pressed by Sen. John McCain, an Arizona Republican. The Yucca decision was made in the White House. Chu was clueless as to why and unable to offer a credible defense of the administration policy. It was clear that nobody in the White House briefed him on the decision.

That indicates a key problem for Chu and the Department of Energy. They are not in the policy loop. They are not making energy policy decisions, and will not in the future. Chu is a technocratic figurehead who will have no significant impact on Obama administration decisions on energy, the environment, and global warming policy. The White House will trot him out from time to time, basking in the glow of his Nobel prize, but Chu will have no impact on administration policy.

The driver of the Obama administration’s energy and environmental policy is Carol Browner, the White House “czar” on energy and environment. Former head of the Environmental Protection Agency in the Clinton administration, she’s an acolyte of former Vice President Al Gore. Her views on energy policy issues are well-known, and seem not amendable to serious discussions with energy interests that disagree. She appears to be, in short, a zealot.

That’s a real problem for Chu, who is already seen by fossil energy folks as a zealot against coal and natural gas. He’s had to backtrack on statements about clean coal technologies and acknowledge ignorance about OPEC oil pricing strategies (confessing the truth that he doesn’t really know much about U.S. energy policy).

DOE is a major research and development funding agency, as Chu knows well as a beneficiary at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. But is it also the front group for the White House when it comes to energy policy (and is the dispenser of some $40 billion in “stimulus” funds aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions). That means that Chu must be much more than an advocate for energy science funding, as he has been to date, and immerse himself in the nasty gore of competing technologies and energy politics.

Don’t expect much of Chu, who may be the smartest energy secretary in history. Brains don’t count. As was the case for most of his predecessors as energy secretary, Chu’s a puppet. The White House pulls the strings, and the energy secretary reacts accordingly. Chu probably doesn’t yet understand that reality, but he’s a bright guy and he will quickly figure it out.

Will technology lead to ANWR drilling?

Here’s a hoot. Call it thinking “outside the box,” or, more specifically, thinking outside the boundaries drawn by Congress. Maybe we can drill for oil and gas in the 1002 lands in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska from outside the refuge.

The technology is directional drilling, which the oil and gas industry has perfected over the past decade or so. It’s possible to stand off from an area, miles away, and send the snaking drill bit into the oil-bearing strata. The oil industry has long said it could put up a drill rig in Maryland and explore for oil and gas under the White House. This is not science fiction, but industry fact.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) has offered a bill in the Senate to allow directional drilling into the oil-rich coastal plain, with the rigs located outside the limits of the territory laid out in the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act of 1980. The legislation ruled oil and gas exploration out of bounds for most of the 19-million-acre ANWR, located in northeastern Alaska close to the Canadian border, but left open the possibility drilling in a 1.5 million acre coastal area, where the evidence of large reserves of oil and gas are unmistakable. Congress could authorize exploration and development in this area, but has not for nearly 30 years.

ANWR drilling has become a shibboleth for the environmental movement in the U.S., much as has global warming. Opposition to ANWR drilling, for many greens, defines their greenness.

Now, environmental groups opposed to ANWR drilling are quaking in their hiking boots over the prospect that their arguments about drilling in the “pristine” ANWR wilderness may be overcome by technology. They have prevented the exploitation of energy resources from the 1002 lands for over 20 years.

Today, the greens may be facing the greatest challenge to drilling yet, at the hands of a Democratic administration.

Historically, Republicans have pushed for ANWR drilling, and the greenest element of the Democrats have resisted.
The Obama administration, while skeptical, says it is willing to consider the idea of directional drilling into ANWR.

In a telephone press conference this week, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said he’s open to directional drilling from outside the boundaries into ANWR if it can be demonstrated to be environmentally sound. Salazar expressed doubts, observing, “Most of what I’ve seen up to this point is it would not be possible to do that.”

Salazar is scheduled to meet with oil industry officials soon to discuss the Obama administration’s views about the oil business. He says he’s going to reassure them that the administration is not anti-oil.

The meeting will undoubtedly touch on the long-stalemated ANWR drilling issue. But, unlike earlier discussions among the industry, the White House, and Congress, there is less urgency today. Oil prices are a fifth of what they were at the peak last summer, meaning the oil industry is less frantic about tapping the ANWR coastal plains reserves, and the administration feels less pressure to cave into industry desires in the face of skyrocketing gasoline prices.

As for the environmental arguments about preserving the pristine nature of ANWR, both the industry and the White House should agree that these are bogus. I’ve been to the area, including spending time at Kaktovic, the Inupiat town on the edge of the coastal 1002 lands. There is nothing approaching wilderness in those lands.

It’s worth noting that most of the photographs we see from groups opposed to drilling in Alaska involve the photographer standing on the coastal plain, shooting south into the gorgeous Brooks Range. Nobody has proposed drilling in the Brooks Range, way out of the coastal area Congress set aside for exploration in the Alaska lands law.
The 1002 lands, by contrast, are flat and featureless, pockmarked with thousands of small, black-fly-harboring ponds. Abandoned skimobiles litter the landscape. Looking north toward Kaktovic shows the village, its airstrip, and what looks likes a 1950s dual-screen drive-in-movie theatre. That’s the remnant of a “distant early warning line” radar base from the days of the cold war. Pristine wilderness? I don’t think so.

I’ve argued for 15 years that the question about drilling in ANWR is not about energy – the reserves are significant but not game-changing – nor about the environment – there’s no evidence of significant environmental damage from oil production on the North Slope. Rather, it’s a culture war between the industry and the greens, with the victim the locals, the Eskimos who depend on revenues from oil flowing through the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System to keep them living in the modern world. If TAPS empties, they are doomed to the cold and brutish life they escaped when big oil came to Alaska.

Obama administration’s renewable delusions

When it comes to future electricity supply, the Obama administration is engaged in an implicit con game. Whether the president knows this, which I doubt, there must be smart people in his circle who understand that the promises he makes about renewable energy simply don’t stand up to the delusions they create. Those people are cynical manipulators and should be exposed.

In his “not-state-of-the-union address” recently, the president said, “We will double this nation’s supply of renewable energy in the next three years.” Sounds impressive, but is easy peasy. When you start from a small base, doubling is not a big deal. Today, wind and solar power produce a barely significant 1.1% of U.S. electricity, according to Energy Information Administration statistics.

So double that, and double it again, and again, and we are still talking about marginal, at best, contributions to the nation’s need for electricity. Today, as energy journalist Robert Bryce wrote in a recent Wall Street Journal column, the total amount of energy that comes from solar and wind in the U.S. in a year is about the equivalent to the output of one typical underground coal mine in Appalachia.

I’ve got no gripes with wind and solar. My house, which I built in 1989, is passive solar, with large expanses of south-facing glass along a deciduous tree line, a foundation and brick chimney that are excellent thermal sinks, and a backup wood-burning cook stove in the kitchen (as well as a heat pump and ductwork that rarely get used). My farm is very windy. Should I get to the point where I need it, my foundation has electrical heating coils that I can connect to a windmill. That’s the best way I could figure at the time to store wind energy.

But the thought that the U.S. can make some sort of massive shift to renewables in my lifetime (I’m 64) or well beyond that is simply wishful energy thinking. Coal is here to stay, as is natural gas. I also would hope that it would be possible to develop more hydro (the renewable that dare not speak its name).

Bryce, managing editor of the online magazine Energy Tribune, is one of the few energy journalists (including, of course, me) who have taken hard-nosed looks at the current conventional wisdom about electricity generation. He wrote an excellent book, “Gusher of Lies: The Dangerous Delusions of ‘Energy Independence’” (Public Affairs, 2008). I don’t know how well it sold, but it was a clear case of truth-telling.

The truth is that energy independence is impossible; pursuing it is misleading and dangerous. Energy efficiency and conservation make sense. That strategy worked in the 1980s and will work again.

It’s a fools errand to spend vast sums to try to move away from energy imports at any cost. Autarky is folly.

The costs of most of the technologies that the autarkists have proposed probably exceed the benefits by an order of magnitude. Rather, pricing energy properly and letting those prices clear the markets is likely to be a far cheaper, better, and long-term approach to energy policy.

Selling my snake oil, of course, is difficult. It has far less sizzle than windmills and solar panels and “endless” energy. But I believe that consumers will understand the case when presented clearly, with the alternatives laid out in full. I suspect even President Obama would sign on once he understood the fundamentals.

Thoughts of an Orwell fan

I’m a George Orwell fanatic. I own, and display proudly in my office, every book he wrote (Homage to Catalonia is the best), every Orwell (1903-1950) biography, and every critical study of his work. I also have the four-volume edited collection of his works, compiled by his widow, Sonia Orwell, and their friend and collaborator Ian Angus.

Over the past 20-some years I have traditionally written an annual commentary based on Orwell’s powerful 1946 essay, “Politics and the English Language.” Now’s the time to again delve into Orwell’s views on the nature of writing, and the relationship of writing and politics and truth.

In a recent blog posting, I noted that Princeton physicist Will Happer referenced Orwell’s seminal essay on the relationship of writing and thinking, addressing the climate change orthodoxy that now prevails in policy circles. Orwell wrote, “But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” Happer was discussing why Vice President Al Gore fired him at energy research chief at the Department of Energy because Happer didn’t buy into Gore’s view of global warming.

Today, it strikes me that there is a largely unexamined orthodoxy when it comes to modern energy policy. Every day, from almost every figure, starting with Barack Obama (for whom I voted and enthusiastically backed for president) and going down the line to energy secretary Steve Chu, congressmen and senators, lesser figures, and media nonentities, we hear about “clean energy” and “green jobs” and “smart grids” and “carbon footprints” and “sustainability.”

What, Orwell might ask, do these terms and phrases mean? Are there definitions here that make distinctions, and allow us to rationally consider these distinctions in opposition to one another and alternatives? I haven’t found them.

Why is wind power cleaner than nuclear power? Why is manufacturing wind turbines more virtuous than mining coal? What’s sustainable about geothermal energy, when the underground steam can run out, and why is it better than hydropower? In the words of Kurt Vonnegut, “And so it goes.”

To my mind, these modern energy idols are what Orwell described as “dying metaphors,” or, as he wrote, “metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves.”

“Green,” “Clean,” “Smart,” “Sustainable.” All, to my mind, literary frauds that distract us from the real world of energy policy that protects the public interest (I admit, that’s another undefined principle, but I don’t have room here to discuss it). I wrote an article in MANAGING POWER about green and sustainable supply chains. I don’t really have a clue what those terms mean. I asked the purveyors of the studies for definitions, without success. I wrote the article anyhow, figuring that it was probably important, and flagged my concerns about the definition of terms. I hope that stimulates a response.

My suspicion is that these lazy phrases have become marketing terms, aimed at garnering unthinking attention, and financial and political support. But once the curtain is drawn on “green,” “clean,” “smart,” and “sustainable,” we will find a little old man with a jelly belly and a bald pate, call him “Oz,” behind the curtain and at the controls.

We need to focus on clearly defined, measurable, terms to guide our energy polices, not vague and feel-good generalities devoid of on-the-ground reality. We are on the verge of committing vast sums of your taxes and mine on terms and conditions and goals that we can’t define. That’s not, in the words of the food channel, “good eats.”

Feds are transmission obstacles

By Kennedy Maize
When it comes to access for transmission lines to bring renewable power from where it is located to folks who can use it, who poses the biggest obstacles?
In the West, according to Pedro J. Pizarro, Southern California Edison’s vice president of power operations, a chief villain is Uncle Sam. Federal land agencies, Pizarro told the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission at a technical conference in early March, are the practical definition of “not in my back yard,” or NIMBY, approaches to high-voltage transmission.
Pizarro, outlining the efforts of SCE to bring renewables from where they can be turned into electricity to where people can use the power, told FERC, “One of the most significant hurdles is obtaining right-of-way permits over federal lands. In some cases, it takes many months and even years for necessary special use permits, even after a project’s environmental documentation has been approved, and even on existing rights of ways.”
While not a problem in the Eastern interconnection (where the prime issue is gaining access to private land), grid developers face major hurdles in the West. Much of the territory that remote renewable generating resources must traverse to bring their energy to market crosses federal land. The agencies involved are multiple, including the U.S. Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management, Interior’s Fish and Wildlife Service, the Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service, and, on occasion, the Interior’s Park Service and Bureau of Reclamation.
The federal agencies have myriad laws they must implement in granting access to federal lands for electric transmission systems. These include – far from a definitive list – the Federal Land Policy Management Act (FLPMA), the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act, the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, and a host of lesser environmental and regulatory challenges including the laws protecting raptors, migratory birds, wild horses and burros, historic preservation, guaranteeing surface mine reclamation to original conditions, and so it goes.
It’s not easy for the natural resource agencies to act with any kind of speed on requests for transmission line easements, given the requirements of the laws that govern their activities. But transmission developers need speedier access if they are going to move projects expeditiously. What to do?
That puts the policy bulls-eye on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Pizarro said in his testimony, “Since much of the Western renewable resources require transmission traversing federal lands, FERC can play a major role in facilitating its sister agencies review of these projects, so that timely right of way permits are issued.”
There is a considerable irony here. Much of the attention on the inability to site interstate transmission under the obviously failed terms of the 2005 Energy Policy Act has focused on overcoming state opposition, on the assumption that the problem would be bringing coal-fired power and new nuclear to load centers. The large majority of renewable resources are located in areas where the high-voltage transmission lines will have to pass over federal land. As best I understand it, the 2005 act wiffs on that issue.
FERC has a lot of experience working with the federal resource agencies at the Department of Interior and Department of Agriculture. It’s not been a pleasant experience for the energy regulators. In the 1980s, Congress, led by then-House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman John Dingell (D-Mich.) gave the federal natural resources agencies considerable power to derail FERC decisions on hydropower.
Some experienced analysts suggest that hydro law and the ensuing interpretations give federal resource agencies the practical ability to forestall FERC decisions on siting power lines on federal lands.
So large interstate power lines designed to connect major renewable resources in remote areas to urban loads could be hostage not to the states, or to FERC, but the Interior and Agriculture departments.
Interconnecting renewable resources into the grid so they can reach consumers may take new legislation from Congress. That’s not an optimistic outlook.

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