Obama's Green Snake Oil

"We need more than the same old empty promises," President Obama declared on Monday. He therefore offered new empty promises, most conspicuously a vow to create "a new energy economy that puts millions of our citizens to work."

As he did during his campaign, Obama presented his plan to ameliorate global warming as a way of stimulating the economy, with the first steps -- money for weatherizing buildings, boosting alternative energy production and improving power transmission -- incorporated into his American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan. Thus he continues to ignore the enormous cost of dramatically reducing carbon dioxide emissions, falsely portraying the economic burden as a boon.

Obama still officially intends to "help create five million new jobs by strategically investing $150 billion over the next 10 years to catalyze private efforts to build a clean energy future." Exactly where that projection comes from is a mystery.

The Apollo Group, a coalition of environmentalists and labor unions that has influenced the president's thinking in this area, also talks about creating 5 million "green-collar jobs" during the next decade, although it puts the cost to taxpayers at $500 billion, more than three times Obama's figure. But maybe we should not get too hung up on this estimate or the basis for it.

"Honestly," the Apollo Alliance's co-director told The Wall Street Journal right after the election, "it's just to inspire people." In that case, why not say 10 million jobs over five years, or 20 million over two?

It's not as if anyone will ever be held to account for these wild promises. Since there's no agreement about what constitutes a "green-collar job," who's to say whether the goal has been met?

Given the malleability of the concept and the fancifulness of the numbers, politicians' faith in Obama's green snake oil is touching. "For us to support what needs to be done in addressing global warming," Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., recently told The New York Times, "we need to demonstrate that, in fact, jobs are created."

Stabenow, whose state is heavily dependent on coal, is rightly concerned about the economic impact of Obama's cap-and-trade plan for reducing carbon dioxide emissions, which will sharply increase the cost of fossil-fuel energy. But she is mistaken if she thinks that "green jobs" can compensate for the economic pain that plan must inflict in order to work.

To see the fallacy here, consider this: If Obama could snap his fingers and make global warming disappear tomorrow, should he do it? By his logic, no, because then we'd lose all those wonderful green jobs that will help pull us out of the recession.

The justification for a cap-and-trade system (or a carbon tax, which likewise aims to shift the economy away from fossil fuels by making them more expensive) lies not in the jobs it will "create," which will be more than balanced by the jobs it will destroy or forestall, but in the bad consequences it will prevent. Obama alluded to those in his speech, saying, "the long-term threat of climate change could result in violent conflict, terrible storms, shrinking coastlines and irreversible catastrophe."

To know whether Obama's cap-and-trade proposal makes sense, we need to know how likely those outcomes are and how costly they would be. We also need to know how likely it is that his plan actually would prevent the dire results of which he warns and, crucially, at what cost.

Critics such as Bjorn Lomborg, author of "Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming," argue that adapting to climate change is much more cost-effective than trying to prevent it, an effort they say is unlikely to have any measurable impact. Presumably Obama thinks these skeptics are wrong. I'd like to hear why.

But that would require the president to be more candid about the sacrifices demanded by his plan to create "the new energy economy." It is difficult to perform a cost-benefit analysis if you refuse to admit there's a cost.

If the nascent obama regime is SERIOUS about clean energy, they would promote a technology called "Plasma arc trash reduction", a process by which ALL forms of trash are reduced to their constituent atomic structure, then the heat generated by this process is used to drive electric power generation. The primary products of this process are "syngas", a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen, both of which are excellent fuels that may be used to drive the generation of electric power, and a silica slag which contains practically all other components of whatever went into the trash stream.

The volume of the slag that comes off is about a quarter to a tenth of the volume of the original trash, and it may be mined for various metallic content, as it is a higher grade of ore than is most of the material that is hauled up out of the ground by various mining operations all over the world. It may be hot-formed into building blocks, and depending on how it is cooled (rapid quench or slow radiant cooling), it forms various grades of igneous stone. Or it may be crushed as aggregate for concrete or for road building purposes.

The temperature of the plasma torch is about 30,000˚ F., about three times the temperature of the sun's surface. The syngas generated is about 2,200˚ F., and is passed over a heat exchanger to generate superheated steam, in the process of cooling it. Once cooled, the stream of hydrogen and carbon monoxide may be separated, yielding up pure hydrogen which may be used to power a fuel cell, or burned directly in the presence of oxygen to yield a very hot flame, which may be used to further produce power through the medium of superheated steam. Carbon monoxide itself is an excellent fuel which when combined with oxygen, forms carbon dioxide, a safe, NON-POLLUTING fraction of our atmosphere, and one that is vital for the photosynthesis of oxygen and carbohydrates in green growing plants. The carbon dioxide may also be captured, cooled and compressed into either liquid CO2, or allowed to become "dry ice", an intensely cold and solid form of CO2, and an important industrial product.

The hydrogen, of course, when combined with oxygen, becomes water vapor.

Empty out our land fills and turn those blighted acres back into "greenfields", divert all the existing and continuing waste stream into electric power, reduce need for and dependence on fossil fuels, assure a continuous supply of building materials that will prove to be the equal of our current supplies, and provide a way of reclaiming metallic elements otherwise lost when merely dumped in a hole in the ground. And not only the land fills, the sewage sludge that is now dumped there could go through this plasma arc, with the decomposed fecal matter adding its bit to the "syngas", and simultaneously extracting all the dreaded metals like cadmium and mercury from circulation in the soil and groundwater.

I don't see a downside. Most elegant solution.

It has been estimated that perhaps fewer than a dozen of these processing units could both clean up all the existing waste dumps, and the current waste stream, for a municipality the size of New York City, and generate enough electricity to keep it lit and industry-capable, without tapping into outside sources.

There is a place to spend the funds for infrastructure that does NOT have to be only for the roads and bridges. This is infrastructure that actually IMPROVES our environment. And generates a number of useful by-products, not the least of which is relatively cheap electric power.

And carbon-neutral to boot. NO fossil fuels are used once the cycle is started.

Can't get greener than that.

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