Recently, the Daily State News carried two Opinion essays that indirectly denied the importance of climate change by arguing against efforts to fight climate change.
Both the article, “More options necessary to meet electric demands” by Kenneth J. Reuter Jr., and the article, “Consequences to banning greenhouse gases” by David R. Legates, have lines of thinking that are incomplete, wrong and dangerous.
Below is my paraphrase of Reuter Jr’s. six points. Following each point is my counterpoint. He said: (1.) Let’s not have mandates because that means shoving stuff down our throats. I say: The tragedy of this line of thinking is that history shows that profits get a higher priority by companies than safety. If, for example, the safety mandates for passenger ships were in place sooner, many more people would have survived the sinking of the Titanic. (2.) He said solar and wind energy sources cannot supply constant energy like coal and gas power plants do. I say that many power grids have already added massive amounts of battery storage for that contingency. (3.) He said let’s badmouth China since it uses a lot of dirty coal. But I say the article titled, “Renewable energy capacity worldwide by country 2022” on the statista.com website shows China with three times more renewable energy than the USA. (4.) He said gas can have much less emissions than coal if we use a “combined-cycle” design. But I say neither was the cost stated nor was it stated where these plants exist and how well they work; and, after all, why not just go straight to zero-emissions generation? (5.) He said offshore wind is too expensive. But I say all the internet searches I did on costs ended with links to the worldwide continuing of and expanding of the choice of wind for both onshore and offshore sites, as well as links to the development of newer and much cheaper wind systems. And (6.) he said we should go with advanced small modular nuclear generators. But NuScale, the most advanced of the small modular reactor companies and the only one with a design approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, announced Nov. 8 — more than two weeks before Reuter Jr’s. Opinion piece — total project cessation because of out-of-control increases in costs. In contrast, I have been following climate change adaptations as I see them appear in industrial-specialized media and compare them to what is in the popular media. There is already a large amount of transformation in progress to get low- or no-emission energy in a lot of today’s business operations.
Legates’ essay was worse. He presented a story to diminish the danger of increasing temperatures because of greenhouse gases. He did this by ignoring the growing amount of climate change damage we are already getting and telling us that something bad (i.e. too much carbon dioxide in our air) is really good (because it is plant food). But he ignored the fact that the higher temperatures (especially above 110-120 degrees) will start killing plant growth. Just do your own internet search on this keyword string: “Why does high temperature decrease photosynthesis?” Legates’ story was more about bolstering his anti-government and anti-mandate politics with a contrived “dog-ate-my-homework” argument using cherry-picked information.
Arthur E. Sowers
Harbeson
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