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We have a bunch of stuff on fossil fuels and how they will save the world. WSJ Weekend Essay is first.
The environmental movement has advanced three arguments in recent years for giving up fossil fuels: (1) that we will soon run out of them anyway; (2) that alternative sources of energy will price them out of the marketplace; and (3) that we cannot afford the climate consequences of burning them.
These days, not one of the three arguments is looking very healthy. In fact, a more realistic assessment of our energy and environmental situation suggests that, for decades to come, we will continue to rely overwhelmingly on the fossil fuels that have contributed so dramatically to the world’s prosperity and progress.
In 2013, about 87% of the energy that the world consumed came from fossil fuels, a figure that—remarkably—was unchanged from 10 years before. This roughly divides into three categories of fuel and three categories of use: oil used mainly for transport, gas used mainly for heating, and coal used mainly for electricity.
Over this period, the overall volume of fossil-fuel consumption has increased dramatically, but with an encouraging environmental trend: a diminishing amount of carbon-dioxide emissions per unit of energy produced. The biggest contribution to decarbonizing the energy system has been the switch from high-carbon coal to lower-carbon gas in electricity generation.
On a global level, renewable energy sources such as wind and solar have contributed hardly at all to the drop in carbon emissions, and their modest growth has merely made up for a decline in the fortunes of zero-carbon nuclear energy. …
… Although the world has certainly warmed since the 19th century, the rate of warming has been slow and erratic. There has been no increase in the frequency or severity of storms or droughts, no acceleration of sea-level rise. Arctic sea ice has decreased, but Antarctic sea ice has increased. At the same time, scientists are agreed that the extra carbon dioxide in the air has contributed to an improvement in crop yields and a roughly 14% increase in the amount of all types of green vegetation on the planet since 1980.
That carbon-dioxide emissions should cause warming is not a new idea. In 1938, the British scientist Guy Callender thought that he could already detect warming as a result of carbon-dioxide emissions. He reckoned, however, that this was “likely to prove beneficial to mankind” by shifting northward the climate where cultivation was possible.
Only in the 1970s and 1980s did scientists begin to say that the mild warming expected as a direct result of burning fossil fuels—roughly a degree Celsius per doubling of carbon-dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere—might be greatly amplified by water vapor and result in dangerous warming of two to four degrees a century or more. That “feedback” assumption of high “sensitivity” remains in virtually all of the mathematical models used to this day by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC.
And yet it is increasingly possible that it is wrong. As Patrick Michaels of the libertarian Cato Institute has written, since 2000, 14 peer-reviewed papers, published by 42 authors, many of whom are key contributors to the reports of the IPCC, have concluded that climate sensitivity is low because net feedbacks are modest. They arrive at this conclusion based on observed temperature changes, ocean-heat uptake and the balance between warming and cooling emissions (mainly sulfate aerosols). On average, they find sensitivity to be 40% lower than the models on which the IPCC relies. …
… We should encourage the switch from coal to gas in the generation of electricity, provide incentives for energy efficiency, get nuclear power back on track and keep developing solar power and electricity storage. We should also invest in research on ways to absorb carbon dioxide from the air, by fertilizing the ocean or fixing it through carbon capture and storage. Those measures all make sense. And there is every reason to promote open-ended research to find some unexpected new energy technology.
The one thing that will not work is the one thing that the environmental movement insists upon: subsidizing wealthy crony capitalists to build low-density, low-output, capital-intensive, land-hungry renewable energy schemes, while telling the poor to give up the dream of getting richer through fossil fuels.
Also from the Wall Street Journal we learn a new wave of fracked oil is held in reserve by producers and will hit the market when prices stabilize.
The ocean of oil from U.S. shale drove crude prices back toward six-year lows Friday, and American energy companies say they are poised to unleash a further flood that would keep prices from returning to lofty levels for a long time.
The International Energy Agency reinforced the prospect of a prolonged slump in energy prices Friday, saying U.S. oil output was surprisingly strong in February and rapidly filling all available storage tanks. The Paris-based energy watchdog said this could lead to another sharp drop in crude prices, which fell by about 50% late last year.
The report sent oil prices tumbling around the world, with the global benchmark Brent crude falling $2.41 to $54.67 a barrel. The U.S. benchmark West Texas Intermediate lost $2.21 to settle at $44.84, less than 40 cents above a six-year low it reached in late January. Last summer, both traded well above $100.
It was only last month that the IEA said a price recovery seemed inevitable because the U.S. production boom was likely to cool. Instead, “U.S. supply so far shows precious little sign of slowing down,” the agency said Friday. “Quite to the contrary, it continues to defy expectations.”
Independent shale-oil producers have slashed their planned 2015 spending on drilling by $50 billion, compared with last year’s, but have promised to increase production by focusing on their best oil fields. Total U.S. crude oil production hit a high of 9.4 million barrels a day in the week ended March 6, according to federal data.
Now many are adopting a new strategy that will allow them to pump even more crude as soon as oil prices begin to rise. They are drilling wells but holding off on hydraulic fracturing, or forcing in water and chemicals to free oil from shale formations. The delay in the start of fracking lets companies store oil in the ground in a way that enables them to tap it unusually quickly if they wish—and flood the market again. …
Walter Issacson writes on innovation.
… Some of those advances seem almost trivial, but progress comes not only in great leaps but also from hundreds of small steps. Take for example punch cards, like those Babbage saw on [weaving] looms and proposed incorporating into his Analytical Engine. Perfecting the use of punch cards for computers came about because Herman Hollerith, an employee of the U.S. Census Bureau, was appalled that it took close to eight years to manually tabulate the 1880 census. He resolved to automate the 1890 count.
Drawing on the way that railway conductors punched holes in various places on a ticket in order to indicate the traits of each passenger (gender, approximate height, age, hair color), Hollerith devised punch cards with twelve rows and twenty-four columns that recorded the salient facts about each person in the census. The cards were then slipped between a grid of mercury cups and a set of spring-loaded pins, which created an electric circuit wherever there was a hole. The machine could tabulate not only the raw totals but also combinations of traits, such as the number of married males or foreign-born females. Using Hollerith’s tabulators, the 1890 census was completed in one year rather than eight. It was the first major use of electrical circuits to process information, and the company that Hollerith founded became in 1924, after a series of mergers and acquisitions, the International Business Machines Corporation, or IBM.
One way to look at innovation is as the accumulation of hundreds of small advances, such as counters and punch-card readers. At places like IBM, which specialize in daily improvements made by teams of engineers, this is the preferred way to understand how innovation really happens. Some of the most important technologies of our era, such as the fracking techniques developed over the past six decades for extracting natural gas, came about because of countless small innovations as well as a few breakthrough leaps. …
Steve Hayward posts on the closing of SweetBriarCollege.
Along with the OU expulsions, the big story in higher education over the last week or so is the surprise announcement that Sweet Briar College will be closing its doors at the end of this academic year. Although the college as an endowment somewhere near $90 million, declining enrollment at the all-womens’ college has led the trustees to conclude that there is no future for a single-sex school out in rural Virginia. Sweet Briar’s fate is being heralded as a harbinger of the coming collapse of the “higher education bubble” (Glenn ReynoldsTM), especially small liberal arts colleges, which wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing.
But there is an amazing failure of imagination here—rooted in the institutional liberalism pervasive in higher ed—and a terrific opportunity for an educational entrepreneur.
One of the claims about why the college has no future is that its location is too remote from the attractions of urban civilization necessary for today’s students. Excuse me, but has anyone around Sweet Briar ever heard of Hillsdale College, which is much more remote than Sweet Briar, and yet thrives for the simple reason that it is self-consciously different (that is, conservative) from other liberal arts colleges.
So what if Sweet Briar had decided that instead of trying to compete head-to-head with Smith and Wellesley, they self-consciously set out to be the anti-Smith and anti-Wellesley? I have little doubt that a women’s college that advertised its deliberate rejection of the gender politics of “mainstream” womens’ educational institutions would have no shortage of applicants for admission.
This would have required an act of imagination on the part of Sweet Briar’s president, James F. Jones, Jr., and the trustees. But of course Jones is your typical mediocre liberal. …