Every silver lining has a cloud — or so we are told.

Climate analyst Jesse Ausubel is getting a lot of press with his new, controversial, deeply flawed study, “Renewable and nuclear heresies”–UPDATE: available here and you can also get the main points from this 2005 Canadian Nuclear Association talk and the accompanying PPT presentation.

He says ramping up renewables would lead to the “rape of nature.” His study concludes:

Renewables are not green. To reach the scale at which they would contribute importantly to meeting global energy demand, renewable sources of energy, such as wind, water and biomass, cause serious environmental harm. Measuring renewables in watts per square metre that each source could produce smashes these environmental idols. Nuclear energy is green. However, in order to grow, the nuclear industry must … form alliances with the methane industry to introduce more hydrogen into energy markets, and start making hydrogen itself…. Considered in watts per square metre, nuclear has astronomical advantages over its competitors.

Uh, no, no, and no. Jesse popularized the notion that the economy has been decarbonizing for many decades (see Figure 2 of the PPT). This has led him to make a bunch of serious mistakes.

First, he basically thinks decarbonizing is all but inevitable with some effort on our part (i.e. pushing nukes and hydrogen hard). But if you look closely at Figure 3, you’ll see that in the last few years we’ve been “recarbonizing” — coal use has been soaring while natural gas use has stalled. (Also, even Ausubel’s historical decarbonization was an essentially meaningless trend, since it did not stop absolute carbon levels from soaring dangerously in recent decades.)

Second, if decarbonization is all but inevitable, then global warming will mostly take care of itself. He doesn’t come out and say this, but his talk never discusses the threat of climate change, which is much more likely to rape nature than renewables.

Third, he thinks hydrogen is the inevitable future. In fact it is a dead end — the energy carrier of the future is electricity, hopefully with cellulosic ethanol. Sorry, Jesse, no one in their right mind would use nuclear power to make hydrogen, especially since fuel cells just convert the hydrogen back to electricity — wasting some 75% of the original electricity and requiring you to buy expensive electrolyzers, hydrogen infrastructure, and fuel cells.

His fourth mistake, the land analysis, which got all the recent attention — “Renewable energy projects will devour huge amounts of land, warns researcher” — is the most serious, I think.

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“Innovations in Energy” by Mark Fiore. Thank you to Earl for pointing this out.

A reader pointed me to a letter in the South China Morning Post, “Cold water on the warming debate” (subs. req’d). The writer, a senior research fellow of the HK Institute of Economics and Business, rehashes a number of mistaken argument I hear all too often:

Many people fail to knit together these two strands – climate change and the exhaustion of fossil fuels. If they did, they would see that the energy crisis, which is predicted as a result of the exhaustion of fossil fuel reserves, contains the seeds of the resolution of the global warming crisis. As fossil fuels become scarcer, their price is sure to rise. We see this already. Under market forces, this will accelerate substitution, largely towards nuclear energy. This will, in turn, redress the climatic concerns.

No. Conventional oil may be peaking, but the world has plenty of affordable coal, far more than is needed to destroy the climate (which is Hansen’s point). The climate problem is not self-resolving. Indeed, peak oil may drive us to liquid coal, a climate disaster. The article continues:

The timescales are, of course, unclear. The process may not be without some pain – with, for example, pollution persisting in some places and famine in others. But, at the end of the day, market forces are a more dependable mechanism than government diktat.

But why would market forces lead to reduced carbon dioxide emissions until carbon dioxide has a price? There’s more:

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This afternoon Senator Lieberman hosted a hearing within the EPW’s Subcommittee on Private Sector and Consumer Solutions to Global Warming and Wildlife Protection. The hearing was entitled “Economic and International Issues in Global Warming Policy” and for as broad as that could be, there were actually two pointed questions at hand:

Witnesses spoke within the context of existing proposals and tended to side with either Lieberman-Warner or Bingaman-Domenici. More specifically, witnesses discussed cost containment, aka price controls or a safety valve, and occasionally, how to treat international carbon markets.

I thought the most articulate and resonant witness was Blythe Masters, Managing Director of JP Morgan Securities. Masters explained that a cap and trade system would “unleash the forces of supply and demand.” Like other testimonies, Masters contended that the primary way to lower the cost of compliance with regulations is to expand options for offsetting emissions (in essence, increasing the supply).

For example, the Kyoto Protocol does not allow the preservation of forests to be considered an offset when really, deforestation is a major source of emissions.

In three words, Masters advocated a cap and trade system that is flexible, broad, and long-term. And in order to be effective, it should have no price control.

A price control or safety valve mechanism would “directly decrease capital investment in low carbon technologies,” Masters argued, in addition to disabling the cost competitiveness of carbon capture and sequestration. A few of my other favorite points of hers were:

• Neither the acid rain nor EU cap and trade programs have safety valves; and
• While baselines may be necessary to control prices, upper bounds are not.

Which leads me to point out Masters’ warning, which she emphasized by pausing, looking up, and shooting the glance of an all-knowing mother to her child – a safety valve is simply “inappropriate.”

Garth Edward, from Shell, echoed some her concerns. His play on words was that we cannot have both an emissions cap and a price cap; one of the two has to give. Unfortunately, I think there’s a longer history of money championing environmental interests than the other way around.

More from James Hansen’s email:

I was invited to go on stage at “Live Earth” at the Meadowlands, between Jon Bon Jovi and Smashing Pumpkins performances. I agreed to this, on the condition that I could bring my grandchildren, Sophie and Connor. I assumed it would be like last year when I appeared with Al Gore before a young audience, with a rather impromptu discussion of global warming. Bad assumption. When I asked “Where’s Al?”, I was told that I would be going out alone, and didn’t I have something to put on the teleprompter? Hmm.

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