The news from the just concluded G-8 Summit in Italy may mean the wind has been taken out of the sails of the Obama push for a Climate Change bill pending in Congress.  On Friday the Senate is scheduled to take up its version of the narrowly House passed Waxman-Markey bill. 

As reported by the New York Times, the G-8 vacillated because of disputes between developed countries and developing ones over who bears the greater burden of possible CO2 reduction.

Negotiators for the world’s 17 leading polluters dropped a proposal to cut global greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent by midcentury, and emissions from the most advanced economies by 80 percent. But both the G-8 and the developing countries agreed to set a goal of stopping world temperatures from rising by more than 2 degrees Celsius from preindustrial levels.

Satellite data indicate that world average temperatures have been flat for more than a decade , suggesting that man made warming may be less significant than originally thought.  If that is a possibility then linking CO2 suppression to real climate warming makes a lot of sense.   Arbitrary CO2 reduction, on the other hand, may be a draconian expense for no real gain. 

The AP report on these G-8 declarations noted:

However, the two goals will not be included in a declaration from a broader group that includes poor and developing nations that are wary about the potential impact of such reductions on emerging economies.  Administration officials said they were hopeful of bringing along the developing nations in coming months.

Opponents say such sharp reductions in carbon emissions would hamper businesses and industries.

The Department of Energy in 2008 completed a study for the Bush White House that showed if industrialized countries slashed their emissions by 80 percent, that would require developing countries to cut their future emissions by 65 percent to meet the worldwide target.

In a post," Is Waxman-Markey a ‘Clean’ Energy Act?" one of the authors noted the economic cost benefit implications of these non-binding G-8 declarations:

Your utility costs will increase each year until 2050 when we may get an 80 percent reduction in carbon dioxide levels for less than a 0.05 degree Celsius drop in average temperatures at a cost of over $7.4 trillion according to a Heritage Foundation Study cited by Investors Business Daily.

Further, an internal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) report, surfaced by the Competitive Enterprise Institute indicated that: “Given the downward trend in temperatures since 1998 (which some think will continue until at least 2030), there is no particular reason to rush into decisions based on a scientific hypothesis that does not appear to explain most of the available data.” The Heritage Foundation Study notes that human activity generates less than 3.4% of carbon dioxide which in turn accounts for less than 3.6 % of all greenhouse gases, the bugaboo of global warming. Moreover, there will not be a net gain in employment from the greening of America, quite the reverse; millions of jobs will be diminished.

In the wake of these G-8 declarations, both the Obama Administration and the Senate managers of the “Christmas treed” climate change legislation will be hard pressed to justify its rapid passage. 

But there was a parallel development here in the US by one of the big advocates of renewable energy, T. Boone Pickens, fabled oil speculator and wind farm advocate. Pickens announced scaling back his ambitious plan for a giant wind farm in the Texas panhandle for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is tough financing.

Note this New York Times Business Day report:

Mr. Pickens’s situation is of particular interest because he has spent much of the last year advocating an energy plan that includes increasing to 20 percent the amount of the nation’s electricity that is supplied by wind power. In his vision, that would free up natural gas now used to generate power so that it could be used in cars, reducing the nation’s dependence on foreign oil. (Currently, wind accounts for just 1 percent of the nation’s electricity.)

For the huge wind farm he had planned in Texas, Mr. Pickens had already ordered 687 large wind turbines from General Electric, to be delivered starting in 2011. But transmission lines being built by the state were unlikely to reach the location he has leased until 2013, so he needed to put the turbines elsewhere. Mr. Pickens had once planned to build his own transmission lines, but difficulty in finding financing amid the credit crisis forced him to shelve that plan.

Possible locations for the 687 turbines include Wisconsin, Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas and Alberta, Canada, Mr. Pickens said. Collectively, at a capacity of 1,000 megawatts — about the size of a nuclear plant — his project would still amount to a substantial investment in wind power. He had planned his Panhandle wind farm at 4,000 megawatts.

A nuclear plant  typically  generates about a thousand megawatts of power running day and night. The new designs can generate more than 1,500 megawatts. So for  687  windmills to equate to a nuclear plant they would have to each produce 1-2 megawatts, continuously. Of course they can't produce power when the wind dies down, but forget that for the moment. A megawatt of power is a pretty big windmill. Now we've neglected the issue of continuous power, but let's ask about land use. How much land has to be dedicated to these  687  windmills? How much noise do they make? How many birds do they kill? Now we need at least another 100 nuclear plants, so that would be the equivalent of 70,000 of these large wind turbines. Further, you need backup power for still days.

Pickens is clearly wrong about wind mills. In fact he is cynical because he wants to receive some of the federal largesse that would come from the cap and tax proposal in the proposed climate change bills.  The targets declared by the G8 will not have any impact on Obama's energy plans. Rather, his proposal for cap and tax would generate more than enough money to make the windmill promoters like Pickens rich. GE and Pickens will love that. The rest of us will unfortunately have to pay hundreds of millions of dollars for inherently uneconomical renewable energy technologies.  

It is the opinion of these authors that the government should encourage investment in the most cost effective, domestic energy systems. This would mean nuclear electric power for the electrification of our transportation system. One obvious step the government could take would be to provide the facilities for reprocessing spent nuclear fuel, as it is done in France and Japan. They could also arrange secure lines of credit for the capital investment required. On the other hand, what our government has chosen to do is to tax all present forms of energy generation (remember solar and wind combined are less than 1%), and to use the hundreds of billions of dollars to be raised by the tax to fund inherently uneconomical technologies that cannot compete on an equal footing with existing energy systems. The decisions are being taken out of the market place and put into the hands of a few Washington insiders, and the US taxpayer will be left holding the bag. We need serious Congressional legislation , not the mish-mash  ‘Christmas tree’  give away that is the Waxman-Markey bill. As we have said, it is a failure aborning and loaded with billions of dollars in a feeding trough for special interests like Pickens and GE’s Inmelt.