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Freeman Dyson, Still Brilliant After All These Years

By Kennedy Maize

Washington, D.C., February 24, 2011 – The most committed global warming alarmists are alarmed by the fact that – contrary to their claims that the science is settled – formidable scientists with worldwide reputations disagree. Credentialed experts such as Richard Lindzen and Roy Spencer do not buy what Jim Hansen, Michael Mann, and Kevin Trenberth are selling.

But Princeton polymath Freeman Dyson really drives them nuts.

A mathematician by training and life-long intellectual adventurer by avocation, Dyson’s storied scientific escapades date to the Manhattan Project of the 1940s, and continue today in a wide range of published thoughts and musings on the relationship of science and society. He is the most prominent of the scientists who don’t buy the doxology of global warming. That he is also the clearest and most accessible writers of all of the scientific icons from the glory days of atomic discovery makes him doubly dangerous to the brook-no-dissent acolytes of the church of the warming world.

Here’s Dyson at his most lucid and lyrical, in the Frederick S. Pardee Distinguished Lecture in the fall of 2005, reprinted in the fine collection, “A Many-Colored Glass” (University of Virginia Press, 2007): “My first heresy says that all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated. Here I am opposing the holy brotherhood of climate model experts and the crowd of deluded citizens who believe the numbers predicted by the computer models. Of course, they say, I have no degree in meteorology and I am therefore not qualified to speak. But I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry, and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand.”

So a whispering campaign has circulated in academia and on the web, among the committed climate crowd, wondering why Dyson has lost his way. Maybe he’s been bought by satan, a.k.a. “Big Oil,” the all-purpose explanation for any nasty thoughts that disturb the congregation. Or – the most persistent and pernicious rumor of all – he’s gone gaga, blinded to the true faith.

Kenneth Brower, a committed environmentalist writer, comes by his green tint genetically as the son of the late, iconic David Brower, the man who put the Sierra Club on the map after John Muir and made Friends of the Earth up out of nothing. Ken Brower has entered the argument about Dyson. He’s known the man most of his life and wrote a book about Freeman’s son George, also a writer. Brower participated in the reconciliation of the elder and younger Dyson 35 years ago.

In an article in the December 2010 edition of The Atlantic, Brower explores Dyson’s apostasy on warming. The article asks, “How could someone as smart as Dyson be so dumb about the environment?” The implication is clear: Dyson can’t be right and so many other scientists wrong.

Brower advances several hypotheses about what might be ailing Dyson. Maybe he’s just a stubborn contrarian? Maybe he doesn’t really mean it? Maybe he’s just a nutty professor type with no sense of the practical world? Maybe he’s senile?

To his credit, Brower doesn’t buy any of those possible explanations, although he accepts aspects of some of them. That’s fair enough. Scientists ought to be contrarians. Puncturing gas bags is beautiful work.

Dyson, in a book review in the February 22 edition of the New York Review of Books, clearly disposes of the incipient Alzheimer’s diagnosis. His brilliant review of James Gleick’s “The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood,” demonstrates that Dyson’s mind is a supple, as strong, and as fascinating as ever. The highlight of the review is a glittering excursion into the physical failure of Lord Kelvin’s dogma of “heat death,” which postulated how the world would end as heat dissipated from warmer to cooler bodies. Dyson knowingly cites the work of Fang Lizhi and Li Shuxian, which proved the errors of that accepted scientific dogma. Has anyone else ever heard of this scientific couple?

Where does Brower come down on Dyson? He concludes that Dyson has embraced his own, offshoot religion, one that relies on technology and the ingenuity of mankind to overcome the kind of obstacles that environmentalists believe have been revealed as beyond, or outside, the power of humankind. “Freeman Dyson does not have the religion. He has another religion,” concludes Brower. He defines “the religion,” his religios, as the lessons he absorbed growing up at his father’s knee. “By this, my father meant that the person in question understood, felt the cause and the imperative of environmentalism in his or her bones. The tenets go something like this: this living planet is the greatest of miracles. We Homo sapiens, for all the exceptionalism of our species, are part of a terrestrial web of life and are utterly dependent upon it. Nature runs the biosphere much better than we do, as we demonstrate with our ham-handedness each time we try. The arc of human history is unsustainable. We cannot go on destroying natural systems and expect to survive.”

Physicist Jonathan Katz of Washington University called Brower’s Atlantic article “attempted intellectual assassination,” but I think that goes too far. Brower is simply unable to overcome his religious rigidity. The doctrine of global warming fits with Brower’s religious imperative perfectly. Brower, when contemplating Dyson’s skepticism, is blinded by the green rapture. He is unable posit the simple solution to the quandary of why Freeman Dyson says what he says about the climate. Maybe Dyson is right?

Will NRG Hit the DOE Jackpot?

By Kennedy Maize

Washington, D.C., 22 February 2011 – NRG Energy’s South Texas two-unit nuclear project, which has been on life support for months, may soon win a loan guarantee from the U.S. Department of Energy, according to several industry sources. But the money for the loan guarantee may get tangled up in Congress’s current budget wrangling.

Nuclear industry supporters are arguing for increasing the energy department’s nuclear loan authority in a continuing spending resolution to keep the federal government from shutting down early next month. They want the federal government to be able to support both the NRG project in Texas and a competing project in South Carolina.

NRG has been shepherding the two-unit, 2,700-MW project located at the site of the existing two-unit South Texas project in Matagorda County, Texas, for a half-decade. NRG applied for a Nuclear Regulatory Commission combined operating and construction license in September of 2007. NRG owns 44% of both the existing plant and the proposed expansion. But the project has recently fallen on hard times, a combination of escalating construction cost estimates, recession-induced declining demand, and natural gas prices that have been falling for over two years. The most recent cost estimate for the two units is $12.7 billion.

NRG recently got sued by the city of San Antonio’s municipal utility, owner of a minority share of the project, and was forced to reach a settlement with the city. Since then, NRG has put spending on the project on ice, pending a decision on a loan guarantee. The project has been in competition with the Scana Corp./Santee Cooper project in South Carolina to expand the V.C. Summer nuclear plant.

What’s working in NRG’s favor, according to my sources, is the international situation. NRG plans to employ Toshiba’s advanced boiling water reactors at the project. Those reactors are already in service in the Tokyo Electric Company. Both Toshiba and the Japanese utility are now equity investors in South Texas, increasing their ownership as San Antonio City Public Service’s share has gone down after the lawsuit settlement. Toshiba and Tepco are seeking loan guarantees from their government, through the Japan Bank for International Cooperation. According to a Washington expert close to the project, JBIC is telling Toshiba and Tepco that it won’t come through with support unless the U.S. agrees to loan guarantees. This is putting pressure on DOE to choose NRG for its second nuclear guarantee.

Last year, DOE agreed to put up $8.3 billion in a guarantee to Southern Co. for an expansion of its Vogtle nuclear plant. But that action ate up nearly half of the $18 billion Congress authorized in the 2005 Energy Policy Act for nuclear loan guarantees. There is only enough left in the authorization for one additional award, and NRG faces strong competition from the South Carolina project.

One factor in NRG’s favor is that South Texas is a merchant generating plant, competing in the wholesale electric market run by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. The Scana project would be built for a conventional utility environment, with regulated rates and a regulated return on investment and cost recovery during construction. So there is a greater likelihood that the Summer project will go forward even if Washington fails to guarantee 80% of the debt. Without federal support, according to several experts on nuclear finance, South Texas will go south in a hurry.

According to Washington officials, DOE would like to give both NRG and Scana loan guarantees, but would need additional spending authority from Congress to do that. While the Obama administration has proposed $36 billion more in loan guarantee support in both its never-enacted fiscal year 2011 budget and the proposed 2012 spending plan unveiled this month, for a total pot of some $54 billion, the money is not in hand nor are the prospects very good.

As a stop-gap, some in the Congress and the industry have pushed for an additional $10 billion to be added to a continuing resolution so that both NRG and Scana can get funds. The prospects for that are also cloudy, as Congress appears to be averse to any spending increases in the continuing spending resolution, which is coupled to an increase in the federal debt ceiling. The Republican-controlled House of Representatives has slashed $61 billion from the planned interim spending plan for the federal government for the rest of the year. Democratic leaders are working hard just to get existing levels restored, without much attention to increases.

Will NRG get a loan guarantee? “If anybody gets anything,” said one source, “I’d bet on NRG. The factor of the Japanese government saying it will support the project if Washington does looks like a powerful argument.”

Can Steven Chu Lobby?

By Kennedy Maize

Washington, D.C., February 15, 2011 – Can Energy Secretary Steven Chu learn to lobby? The fate of the Obama administration’s budget for his department hangs in the answer to that question. So does the fate of the tattered remnants of the strategy the administration brought to Washington to deal with its apocalyptic views of the future of the world’s climate. Chu must learn new job skills.

Amidst all the fervor and furor over budget cutting, the White House has proposed remarkably generous increases for the energy agency. The agenda put forward in the wreckage of its cap-and-trade climate adventure includes a major incursion of electric cars into the economy, new nuclear power plants, plus-sized and mini, and double-and-triple-digit percentage increases in funding for a panoply of allegedly green activities. The Energy Daily characterized the administration’s proposed fiscal 2012 spending plan as “surprisingly lush.”

Here are some particulars: vehicle technologies would get $558 million for FY 2012 (the fiscal year begins Oct. 1), up 83 percent over current spending (not counting the enormous slug of stimulus funding that flowed to DOE outside the usual budget process for FY 2010 and FY 2011); geothermal energy would land $102 million, up 135 percent; building energy technologies $471 million, a 115 percent hike; solar at $457 million, up 88 percent. Obamabudget would add $36 billion in loan guarantee authority for conventional nukes. It would set aside $67 million for a steel cage death match among small reactor designs. (Yes, DOE would, gasp, be picking winners and losers). And so it goes.

But House Republicans, now in the majority on that side (right, looking East from the White House) of the legislative edifice, have somewhat different ideas for DOE spending. They would pull out the political machetes and whack away at the agency from all directions. The House GOP hasn’t made its energy spending plans available (they probably haven’t formulated a plan yet), but it is not likely to embrace the kinds of dollars the White House wants.

The energy agency has few allies for such expansive spending ambitions, on both the right and the left. Republicans have traditionally viewed the green-tinted portions of the agency with considerable jaundice. But even supporters of the development of renewable technologies have doubts about the efficacy of the energy department in picking technology gems from the hyperbolic ooze that characterizes much of what comes before the agency seeking funding. Ed Lyman, a long-time observer of Washington energy policy from his perch at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told Politico this week, “I’m not sure how much appetite there is right now for large infusions of money into government-financed projects, because there’s no question that the Department of Energy has an abysmal track record in actually deploying [new technologies]. Its structure, its management are just not suited for that kind of work.”

So it’s going to be up to Chu to save the administration’s energy spending plans. Is Chu suited for that kind of work? Based on what we have seen so far, it’s not clear that the Nobel Prize winner in physics possesses the talents and temperament to schmooze, cajole, and horse trade that it usually takes to win money battles on Capitol Hill. Shortly before the White House unveiled its new budget proposal, there were rumors that Chu was ready to return to academia, from whence he came.

Energy Daily editor George Lobsenz, who has been covering Washington energy politics for decades, wrote recently that working the Hill in behalf of the Obama budget “is likely to be particularly difficult for Chu because political skills have never been his long suit,” and that he has a reputation among veteran DOE watchers as not “a hands-on energy secretary in terms of being closely engaged in department operations.”

The article recalled an anecdote from Chu’s early days piloting the difficult agency. “[S]ources say the energy secretary may have gotten off on the wrong foot with appropriators when early in Chu’s tenure he took a ride with them on a nuclear-powered submarine as part of a trip designed to highlight the work of DOE’s Office of Naval Reactors. Multiple sources say that rather than schmoozing the appropriators—as might be expected of a Cabinet officer intent on preserving his budget—an apparently bored Chu sat down to do a crossword puzzle, to the irritation of some of the lawmakers.”

Yet Chu has strengths he can call on when dealing with the folks who sign the checks. First, he has Obama’s support and trust, which is worth plenty. He also has the admiration of many in Congress from both parties for his intellect. Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), ranking minority member of the appropriations subcommittee that funds DOE programs, calls him “the shining light of this administration”

Chu’s first task will be to defend against cuts to the current budget during dealings this month and early next month on a continuing resolution to continue spending at current levels in the absence of a 2011 appropriation. That will take place in the context of the need to increase the debt ceiling for the executive branch and sword rattling (which may, or may not, turn into sword wielding) over shutting down the government.

Only then will Congress turn to the FY 2012 budget. If recent history is any guide, the administration proposal has no chance of being enacted as presented. Nor is there any reason to believe the administration expects or even wants that outcome. The budget is a first offer. It’s as likely as not that, as is true today, the government will go through all of 2012 without a formally-approved budget, working instead from stop-gap measures to keep programs moving.

That’s going to make the energy lobbying job doubly difficult. Whether Chu, who certainly has the brains to solve the political differential equations, has the will or the taste for selling his and the White House’s solutions remains to be seen.

Book Review: Scott Hempling on Regulators

By Kennedy Maize

Washington, D.C., February 5, 2011 – We are all familiar, sometimes too much so, with utility regulation. As customers, we encounter the results regulation every day. Many of us, in our business lives, work with (or against), ponder, and praise (or damn) utility regulation.

But none of us has given more thought, or thought more clearly, about every aspect of utility regulation than Scott Hempling, the executive director of the National Regulatory Research Institute. One of the fine innovations Hempling has brought to NRRI since he moved it from Columbus, Ohio, several years ago to the Washington, D.C., area has been a monthly essay on the NRRI website. These essays are always provocative, frequently funny, sometimes whimsical, and not to be missed.

Let me state here that Scott Hempling is a friend. I have known him for some 25 years, in his previous roles as a regulatory lawyer who often represented state regulators, as a teacher of regulatory principles and policies, and as a provocative source of information and opinion (unfortunately, usually off the record). When I want an original, penetrating, and acutely acerbic view of some regulatory development, I contact Scott. I also republish his essays occasionally in the online magazine I edit, MANAGING POWER.

Now NRRI has collected the first 32 of those essays – each a pointed 1,000 words aimed at the diverse audience that state utility regulators constitute – in a new book, “Preside or Lead? The Attributes and Actions of Effective Regulators.” It is no surprise to those who know him that Hempling advocates “lead” over “preside.”

Hempling has organized the essays into six parts, spanning the globe of regulatory concerns from what makes an effective regulator; the role of regulators; obstacles to regulation; jurisdictional turf wars; desirable characteristics; and one example of regulation at its best, the decision last year of the Maryland Public Service Commission rejecting Baltimore Gas & Electric’s original smart meter proposal as not serving customers, telling the utility, if effect, “No, until you get it right.” BGE eventually got it right.

Hempling’s book deserves – demands – shelf space in the office of anybody who works with, thinks about, or attempts to influence utility regulators. It’s also very accessible and presents important concepts with remarkable clarity, simplicity, modesty and good humor.

Hempling, after many years of contact with the men and women who deal with our utility monopolies as surrogates for market forces, is honest about the process of regulation and often uplifted by the people who make regulatory decisions and policy. He writes: “Inspiring these essays are these several hundred, multi-billion-dollar decision-makers. Their diversity amazes: appointed or elected; ages 25 to 75; some mid-career, moving up the political ranks; others capping their careers after decades of professional contribution in the private sector. At any one time, the super-majority are new to the field – music teachers, physicists, chemists, advertising executives, coal miners, mayors, city managers, Wall Street money dealers, Main Street shopkeepers.

“But their diversity pales compared to their commonality: a nail-biting realization that their legal obligation – to establish and enforce performance standards in these critical industries – will demand every available ounce of intellect, savvy, humility, grit, and courage.”

Scott Hempling, “Preside or Lead? The Attributes and Actions of Effective Regulators,” National Regulatory Research Institute, 8730 Georgia Ave., Suite 210, Silver Spring, MD 20910.

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Freeman Dyson, Still Brilliant After All These Years

Will NRG Hit the DOE Jackpot?

Can Steven Chu Lobby?

Book Review: Scott Hempling on Regulators

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