You might think this is an Onion-style parody of a column by a right-wing think tanker:
But it’s no joke. It’s the headline of a Forbes column by Ferrara, who works for the Heartland Institute, the kind of climate-change denialist organization that argues that it isn’t happening, but even if it was, hottin’ up the planet is a good thing, and that used to feature this video on its environment home page (go ahead—click it!):
Declaring something “hip” pretty much means it is no such thing, although come to think of it, I could see “Prosperity is Hip, And Raises Living Standards” (comma included!) T-shirts selling at Brooklyn Flea or some such.
Anyway, the deeper problem is imagining that it’s a deep insight that prosperity raises living standards, which is also a by definition kind of thing. This is the kind of gaffe you make when you believe that your political opposites, Democrats, whom Ferrara calls “static thinking Marxists and their fellow travelers,” are opposed to the very idea of prosperity—a position that few politicians or their constituents actually hold.
The rest of the column isn’t much better, naturally.
Stephen Moore op-eds tend to be poorly reasoned critic bait, but seriously misquoting Stephen Moore op-eds takes the hack factor up a couple of notches: Ferrara writes this (emphasis mine):
(Moore) writes regarding the oil and gas boomtown of Williston, North Dakota, “New homes are popping up at breakneck speed. McDonald’s is offering workers $36 an hour plus a signing bonus.”
But Moore actually wrote this:
New homes are popping up at breakneck speed. McDonald’s is offering workers $18 an hour plus a “signing bonus.”
I know this only because that $36 an hour figure was ridiculous on its face, so I looked up the quote. Any half-awake editor should have caught that one. And l have caught the idea that it’s wrong to suggest that an energy boom can transform the entire 310 million-population United States like it has 700,000-population North Dakota.
Of course, Ferrara is no stranger to hacked-out Wall Street Journal op-eds. Recall the disingenuous, error-riddled column he wrote with Newt Gingrich (not coincidentally, I’m sure, praised in this Forbes piece) a year ago on Obama, the Bush tax cuts, and the economy, which I criticized here.
And there are plenty of other misleading aspects in this “Prosperity Is Hip” column.
— The old corporate income tax rates (“virtually the highest in the industrialized world”) red herring, which obscures the fact that U.S. corporate taxes as a percentage of GDP are well below the average OECD rate and that our overall tax rates are lower than China, Brazil, Germany, India, Australia, etc.—hardly a bunch of stagnating countries.
— Another GOP/Fox News talking point, trying to tie the rising price of gas to Obama’s policies, despite the fact that they’re determined almost entirely by external forces:
In fact, the price of gasoline was $1.83 when Obama entered office.
— A bogus shot at Yurp:
The living standards of the poor in America today are equivalent to the living standards of the middle class 40 years ago, if not the middle class in Europe today.
— And high-school civics paper political advice:
And this is why economic growth and prosperity for all is the most cool, hip vision possible.
If the Republican candidates can project that vision this year, they will deliver Obama and the Democrats a more sweeping, shocking, shellacking than in 2010.
Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, and Rick Santorum: Standard bearers of Cool.
This piece is quite the specimen.
LOL...
So now that Obama is Prez... Gas prices are governed by "external forces"... Nothing a poor Democrat can do... Nothing to see here people... Just deal with it. Move on...
But in 2008, when Bush was in office (and while Ryan was trying as hard as he could to get him out of office)... Ryan sang a much different tune telling us that "Democrats in Congress are about to propose a series of measures to ease gas prices"....
Just the latest example of Thimbilistic Chittumism passing itself off as "professional journalism".
#1 Posted by padikiller, CJR on Mon 19 Mar 2012 at 09:12 PM
Yes the prices are set by external factors (global instability, oil speculators, and BRIC demand (though this time it's not demand related due to global (especially Europe) recession causing reduced demand) and yes there are things the president can do about it:
http://money.cnn.com/2011/06/24/news/international/oil_obama/index.htm
But, of course, then and now, conservatives fight the government using the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to bust speculators.
http://www.balloon-juice.com/2012/03/19/two-faced-gas-face/
They want to use speculative pressure to push "Drill here, drill now" idiocy. You know what would push down oil prices? Not using oil. Using the government's "captive supply" is another way to bring down commodity prices. If Cargill can do it with beef, the public can do it with oil.
#2 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Mon 19 Mar 2012 at 11:48 PM
However, no matter what Obama does, fox news will put all the blame on the democrat and condemn all actions taken to fix America's problems, just as fox took all the blame off bush in 2007 and hid all of America's problems until the global economic crash.
http://mediamatters.org/blog/201203050007
Fox isn't a news organization, it's a cheerleading squad.
#3 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Mon 19 Mar 2012 at 11:51 PM
And yeah, speaking of Heartland, their problems aren't limited to math. Has anyone heard that OMG they got tricked by a tricky trickster who got their dox and violated all that is decent and freedom loving?
And this was after they ran around celebrating the one/ones who hacked into climate researchers' systems and spread their chats around, making him/them freedom lovers and representative of all that's decent?
Well that contradiction, I guess, wasn't hypocritical enough.
http://www.desmogblog.com/heartland-double-standard-institute-tried-scam-greenpeace-internal-documents
"A Heartland Institute front man* phoned a Greenpeace activist and lied about his identity in an effort to get her to turn over UN climate conference documents to which he had no legitimate access. Heartland senior fellow James Taylor then boasted about the scam in a press release decrying what he described as Greenpeace's preferential access to UN information.
Now, in a belated act of optimism, Greenpeace's Cindy Baxter has written a letter to Heartland (attached below) requesting an explanation for the double standard. Baxter is asking, in effect, why Heartland thinks it's completely okay for them to misrepresent themselves, repeatedly, and to celebrate the misrepresentations of others who are attacking climate scientists, but then gets all righteous when someone suckers them into handing over their entire budget and fundraising policy for 2012...
At the time, Baxter brushed off the incident as nothing more than you would expect from an organization that exists to take money from tobacco firms and oil moguls and then misrepresent the health risks of smoking and the science of climate change.
But lately, Baxter has grown annoyed by the double standard. Heartland, which naively emailed the whole briefing package for its January Board of Directors meeting to a complete stranger (which turned out to be the climate scientist Peter Gleick), has been apoplectic about Gleick's trickiness in seducing them into performing that St. Valentine's Day Striptease (the documents were all released on February 14). Heartland President Joe Bast (who must still be trembling at the knowledge that his job is on the line, for the incompetence of his security measures if not for getting caught playing board members against one another), has said that in claiming in an email to be a Heartland board member, Gleick had committed a "crime" that was unforgiveable.
Yet Heartland holds itself to no such standard. In addition to the Taylor misrepresentation above, Heartland also financed a disingenuous climate video in 2008 called Unstoppable Solar Cycles: The Real Story of Greenland. In the process of shooting that work of fiction, the film crew had misrepresented itself and the ultimate purpose of the film to its subjects in Greenland, including one Rie Oldenburg, curator of the Narsaq Museum. Oldenburg said the Heartlanders told her the film was about Greenland history and made no mention at all that it was an attack on climate science that was being prepared for distribution to school children in America.
Joe Bast also thought it was perfectly acceptable - in fact a public service - when someone broke into the East Anglia University Climatic Research Unit and stole thousands of personal emails, thereafter cherrypicking and distributing out-of-context quotes in an effort to attack the credibility of the correspondents."
Click the desmog link for the links. What a bunch of jokers.
#4 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Tue 20 Mar 2012 at 12:07 AM
Hardly, Padi,
That was a roundup of the day's business papers that we did way back when, and I was paraphrasing what the WSJ wrote.
Political decisions, of course, can have effects on gas prices --over the medium to long term. Point is, the current rise in gas prices under way right now isn't something Obama has much to do with.
Thimbles, very interesting on Heartland. I hadn't read that anywhere.
#5 Posted by Ryan Chittum, CJR on Tue 20 Mar 2012 at 12:31 AM
It's interesting. If you go into the history of right wing think tanks, you'll find a lot less thinking and a lot more activism and shilling for a particular party or policy, whether you're a historian from the outside who has seen the rot from the beginning:
http://us-intellectual-history.blogspot.com/2012/03/historicizing-conservative-think-tank.html
"conservative think tanks and their intellectuals were instrumental in undermining an understanding of policy making as a “data driven” endeavor and replacing it with a narrative much more amenable to conservative political activism. Such a narrative relied instead on understanding politics and policy making through discourses of “the market” and “ideological diversity.”..
One of the primary problems conservative think tanks had to overcome in the mid-twentieth century (to the extent that they existed then) was the idea that they were mouthpieces for capital—that they contained “rentellectuals” who would say anything as long as they were paid enough. When AEI emerged in 1943 as the “American Enterprise Association” there existed a deep suspicion of any organization that spoke on behalf of big business...
This dominant understanding of liberal technocratic expertise meant that groups funded by wealthy donors (such as AEI) would have trouble inserting themselves into policy discussions, given that they were immediately deemed too biased by their corporate funders to come up with “scientific” solutions...
Here we see Baroody positioning the conservative think tank as a counter to academia, liberal think tanks such as the Brookings Institution, and foundations such as the Ford Foundation, arguing that because liberal technocrats in these organizations had planned policy without the conservative counterpoint, the nation now had the problems that it did.
Thus, what I’m arguing here is that in the late sixties and seventies, conservative think tanks were in the process of creating a new discourse of public policy to replace and discredit the liberal technocratic ideal. In essence, the new framework was situated around the idea of intellectual and political combat with liberal ideas—a “marketplace of ideas” where the highest value was to have a “diversity of opinion.”"
Or whether your an insider who became aware of the rot late:
http://www.forbes.com/2010/04/15/think-tanks-david-frum-politics-opinions-columnists-bruce-bartlett.html
"The blurring of the lines between policy research and political advocacy at Washington think tanks took another step shortly after the Frum affair became public when Heritage announced the establishment of an explicitly political arm called Heritage Action for America. As Heritage President Ed Feulner explained in a Wall Street Journal op-ed on April 12, the new organization will be free from the legal limits on partisan political activity imposed on nonprofits and able to spend as much money as it would like to support or defeat legislation through lobbying, advertising and other methods that go well beyond the think tank's usual stock-in-trade.
With the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision having loosened the restraints on corporate political activity, it's likely that we will see other think tanks adopt the Heritage model as they did in the 1970s. The problem is that the pressure on researchers to conform to partisan political objectives is going to become even more intense, and if they are going to be expected to function as de facto lobbyists they are going to expect to be paid like lobbyists, which will ratchet up pressure to raise money from those with a purely bottom-line perspective. I fear that honesty and truth will get more and more los
#6 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Tue 20 Mar 2012 at 03:16 AM
Aw man. I was way (make that a bit) under 600 words :(.
Oh well, there's enough there about how the conservative think tanks are evolving, centralizing, staying more on message / less on principle, getting more activisty and lobbyisty to chew on. Sorry for loading up the space.
Ps. I don't buy Moore's figures either. I've seen mcdonalds advertise in boom town conditions and what they've offered is a couple of bucks higher than minimum + benefits. Unless Moore, who plays loose with the facts at times himself, is including benefit value as if it were salary, it doesn't pass the smell test.
And look, we can verify this stuff on the net:
http://mobile.mcstate.com/4707/employment
http://www.indeed.com/m/jobs?q=McDonald%27s&l=North+Dakota
$9.00 an hour. Thirty six bucks an hour, what a bunch of jokers!
#7 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Tue 20 Mar 2012 at 03:38 AM
Ryan wrote: "Political decisions, of course, can have effects on gas prices --over the medium to long term. Point is, the current rise in gas prices under way right now isn't something Obama has much to do with. Point is, the current rise in gas prices under way right now isn't something Obama has much to do with."
padikiller responds: Says who? (Besides you and your leftist brethren)?
Cause the President certainly doesn't think so, all of a sudden. He's out there in a stone cold, poll-driven panic, opening up the taps on our tiny strategic reserve, revisiting the Keystone debacle, etc, doing everything he thinks he can to shave pennies at the pump.
Yeah, now that Obama is in office, the MSM (most of which spent most of Bush's second term criticizing him for gas prices, is tripping over itself to hold Obama blameless for them
Killing oil pipelines doesn't affect oil prices in Chittumland. Neither does stopping offshore drilling... Or failing to deal with Middle East unrest... Or ignoring Iran....
Yeah, there's nothing a poor, hapless Obama can do, right?
While you jumped on Fox over its biased stance on the matter, you ignore the overwhelming biased coverage the other way. To wit, simply contrast these two CNN stories:
FIRST a story from June, 2008 demanding action from Bush to lower gas prices:
“A lot of Americans are concerned about our economy,” Bush said. “I can understand why. Gasoline prices are high, energy prices are high. I do remind them that we have put a stimulus package forward that is expected to help boost the economy. And of course, we’ll be monitoring the situation.”
Americans are looking for more action, though, than monitoring the situation.
THEN read this CNN piece from last year:
President Barack Obama confronted two political realities this week:
– Rising gas prices are bad for a politician’s poll numbers
– There is almost nothing a politician can do about it, at least in the short run.
#8 Posted by padikiller, CJR on Tue 20 Mar 2012 at 06:49 AM
Padi, did you actually read that CNN story, or just the pull quote on all the right-wing blogs?
CNN did not, of course, "demand" anything from Bush. The reporter, Ed Henry, simply noted that Americans wanted lower gas prices. Polls from the time show that about 75% regarded gas prices as a serious problem for their household. It's quite a bit lower now.
The reason that the idea that the president can't do all that much about near-term gas prices is so widely spread now is that the administration have been pounding on it in a way that the Bush administration never did. The Bushies wanted people to see new development as a quick fix because they wanted support for opening up ANWR and other potentially rich fields.
The reason the Obamans are highlighting the new leases is that they know a lot of people still don't understand that new oil hitting the market a decade from now won't actually drive down prices tomorrow, so they want to be seen as doing something.
It ain't a conspiracy, kid; it's just politics, and the current administration is handling it better than the last one even though this president doesn't rub reporters' heads and give them pet names and mackerels to make them bark in unison like seals the way the last one did.
#9 Posted by Weldon Berger, CJR on Tue 20 Mar 2012 at 11:54 AM
Again, it's not a demand problem:
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/02/21/139521/once-again-speculators-behind.html
It's a problem with the usual people:
""These people are not there to be heroes. They are there to make money. It's our fault because we are allowing them to do that," said Gheit. "Obviously these people are very strong, and the financial lobby is the strongest of any single lobby. I've been in this business 30 years, and I can tell you I think this is smoke and mirrors."
Obama doesn't like confronting these assh*les. Why? Because they are such delicate little flowers.
http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/magazine/101726/obama-wall-street-donors-campaign-finance-tax
"For all the brashness and bravado that goes with their world, it seems the managers are oddly insecure about their purpose. For years, “most people in the financial service sector were viewed with enormous, out-of-the-box respect and adulation,” says Daley. “These guys were on pedestals, and now that pedestal’s gone, and now, in a lot of people’s minds, the industry doesn’t have that glow, and that bothers them, and now they join that with the president and his theoretically bashing the wealthy. They’ve got to blame somebody, and they blame him because he is representative of that group of people who ‘aren’t us.’” Former Official B told me, “Whether it’s [former Fed Chairman Paul] Volcker saying there’s been no financial innovation worth a shit since the ATM or the president saying his thing, they’re hypersensitive.” Former House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank was more scathing: “They don’t just want us to represent their interest, they want to be told that what they do is very good. They want to be honored for what they do for society. And Obama has hurt their feelings."
What a bunch of wussies. These your pals, Padi? Must be awful tough hearing how awful life has been for your friends by the poolside.
Tell us how you manage to work with that hurtful "fat cat" label, the president once said, flying around. Do you break out in choruses of "Swing low, sweet chariot" between martinis? Assh*les.
#10 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Tue 20 Mar 2012 at 01:08 PM
A leakier version of the delicate flowers of wallstreet story:
http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/magazine/101726/obama-wall-street-donors-campaign-finance-tax?passthru=OTk3NzY3OGMyN2FiY2MyMGJhNmUyMmEyNmYyOWI3NTI
"Last July, a Rutgers business professor spotted Asness dining with Republican Representative Paul Ryan at Bistro Bis on Capitol Hill. The professor, Susan Feinberg, couldn’t resist going over to their table and asking Ryan how he could reconcile ordering two $350 bottles of Pinot Noir at a time when he was proposing to slash safety-net spending. Ryan mumbled a response—“Is that how much it was?”—but Asness tore into Feinberg, capping his rant with a “fuck her.” “He seemed genuinely pissed off,” Feinberg told me. “He started keying up the rhetoric—‘You go and tell your liberal friends ... .’ Doing that thing where you point your finger really hard.”"
Swing low, sweet chariot.
Meanwhile:
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/03/08/141243/obama-orders-oil-speculation-task.html
A growing number of former regulators, lawmakers and financial analysts blame excessive speculation for driving up energy prices. They aren't alleging fraud, however. What the speculators are doing is perfectly legal.
The problem is that financial speculators now make up 65 percent or more of the purchasers of contracts for the future delivery of oil. Historically speculators controlled only about 30 percent of such contracts. They're making big profits and driving up oil prices by bidding up contract prices, riding the market's "fear premium" about possible Persian Gulf violence over Iran and inflating it.
Analysts from Wall Street, Washington lawmakers and consumer groups are calling for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to impose limits on how many such contracts any purchaser can buy in order to curb speculation, but financial lobbies have tied up the CFTC's effort in federal court. Obama has never mentioned any need for the CFTC to act, to the growing frustration of many Democrats in Congress...
Just days earlier, McClatchy asked in a March 1 report what the task force had done over the past 10 months; the answer was, very little. Administration sources who spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to say such embarrasing truths acknowledged that the working group had met only five times last year, three of those soon after the April 21 formation of the inter-agency task force. The working group now has met seven times in all, the Justice Department said Thursday...
A Justice Department official, demanding anonymity in order to speak freely, said Thursday that Attorney General Holder has directed the full Oil and Gas Price Fraud Working Group to meet Friday."
Oh look out wallstreet. Obama and Holder are promising to crack down on this problem sometime in the future, just like they did last year.
Dirty rotten socialists. Grrr.
#11 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Tue 20 Mar 2012 at 03:03 PM
@Weldon: You need to read the story again.
What part of "Americans are looking for more action, though, than monitoring the situation" do you not comprehend?
CNN is making it clear that Bush was expected to do something about gas prices.
Here's a challenge to you lefties... Find me just THREE mainstream news stories from before the 2008 election that state that there's nothing a President can do about gas prices.
Then get back to me about this crap you guys are dishing out.
#12 Posted by padikiller, CJR on Tue 20 Mar 2012 at 03:10 PM
You know, if I considered Fox News a news agency this would be easy.
As it is, still easy.
http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2006/10/the_oil_conspiracy.html
"So, was this engineered by Henry Paulson and Goldman Sachs? It's doubtful, although Goldman hasn't done much to dispel questions. The bank hasn't offered a good reason as to why it decided to reduce the overall weighting of gasoline in the index this summer. Still, the company is hardly a Republican redoubt. There are likely as many Kerry supporters as Bush supporters in the firm's upper ranks. And if Goldman was trying to manipulate the market for political reasons, it certainly picked an awfully transparent way of doing it. It publicly announced the contours of the changes in advance and gave investors and traders time to plot strategies surrounding the move.
More broadly, though, commodity markets have shown themselves to be beyond the control of presidents, the Saudis, or even Henry Paulson and Goldman Sachs. The world is an increasingly connected, complicated, and volatile place, which makes the prices for commodities that fuel the global economy dependent on a growing range of factors. At root, gasoline is getting cheaper largely because the thing you need to make it—crude oil—has been getting cheaper. And Goldman actually slightly increased the weighting of crude oil in the overall index this summer...
So, the recent fall in energy prices is almost certainly not a Bush conspiracy, just a bit of electoral good luck."
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16315117
"Why have oil prices risen so steeply? Is there a single reason?
There are many reasons, analysts say, ranging from a weak dollar to tensions between the U.S. and Iran. At the heart of the problem, though, is the fact that global demand is currently outstripping global supply. Countries such as China and India are thirsty for oil to fuel their economic growth, yet the world's oil-producing regions are producing less oil. In Nigeria, tensions in the Niger Delta region have curtailed production by nearly a million barrels a day. Fears of war between the U.S. and Iran, one of the world's biggest oil producers, have driven up prices further. And some of the world's major oil fields — the Cantarell Field in Mexico, for instance — are yielding disappointing amounts of crude oil this year, for geological, not geopolitical reasons.
Can't some oil-rich nations simply start producing more oil and bring prices down?
Not necessarily. Most of the world's oil producers are already working at full capacity, pumping every barrel of oil they can. Only one country in the world, Saudi Arabia, has excess production capacity — and no one but the Saudis knows exactly how much excess capacity.
What about tapping into new oil reserves?
That's always a possibility, but it's not clear where the most promising reserves lie — and some regions, such as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, are environmentally sensitive. In any event, it takes many years before a newly discovered oil field can begin producing crude."
Again, lots of people don't want to blame the banks and hedge fund speculators for pump and dump activities. Conservatives want to blame the prices on a lack of extraction and want to support lifting restrictions on drilling. That WILL NOT solve the problem. That won't make a difference in supply for decades.
The only way to bring down prices is to reduce consumption through less dependent technology and to regulate the market place so that speculators like the Kochs don't create artificial supply shortages. ECON 101.
#13 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Tue 20 Mar 2012 at 04:19 PM
LOL!
This one is just too funny.
Thimbles, the first article you cite deal withs FALLING gas prices. It is entirely unsurprising to learn that Bush wasn't given credit for falling prices...
The second article you cited clearly claims that the Bush "administration has done things that have made the problem of oil prices worse."
So Bush got no credit for falling prices and loads of blame for rising prices... Thanks for making my case, Thimbo!
Here's a little extra credit assignment for you... Find me the NPR story that details the things the Obama administration has done to raise the price of oil.
Good luck with that!
#14 Posted by padikiller, CJR on Tue 20 Mar 2012 at 04:48 PM
Hey, If you want to think debunking a oil cabal conspiracy theory and that an NPR story detailing the limits of policy after starting a war in the oil rich middle east as anti-bush, go fer.
Bush was a horrible person and leader. It's a shame to the nation that he and his conscienceless cabinet aren't in jail.
But the fact is the press outside of fox were mild on president and vice president oilman as far as how they handled price spikes (and considering how they ignored them when Enron was price spiking California electricity, they really should have been less mild).
And the fact is there are things Obama can do to change the oil markets and conservatives support NONE of these things. They support things that won't work for decades, if ever.
So if it's a choice between one idiot who slow walks towards doing the right thing (breaking the speculators) and a bunch of idiots who want to speed walk into deep water drilling in the gulf of mexico so that BP can eventually sell American oil to China, then I'm going with the slow walker.
Is not the guy with half an answer better than the Inhofey-ingrates with no answers? Or do you actually believe in the idiot conservative talking point 'solutions'? Are you that much a fool?
#15 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Tue 20 Mar 2012 at 05:25 PM
CNN was reporting, accurately, that Americans expected Bush to do something about gas prices. What part of that don't you understand? It's not a demand from CNN, and the story itself makes clear that there aren't any short-term fixes. You still haven't read it, have you?
There are dozens upon dozens of stories between 2001 and 2008 about the limited power presidents and Congress have over short-term gas prices. These are just a few of the ones that popped up, and there are many, many more behind pay walls. Learn to use Google.
"In fact, the president can do very little to influence the price of oil, short of bringing influence to bear with OPEC, and especially Saudi Arabia."
Mother Jones Magazine, April 2004
"While Democrats' fault President Bush for the soaring price of gasoline, it is beyond the White House reach to directly influence prices in the short term."
CBS News, May 2004
"In the short run, experts say there's little politicians can do to bring down the price of gas."
CNN, May 2008
"Energy experts agree that almost everything that the president and Congress can do to increase gasoline supplies or trim demand would take years to implement. The few short-term options they have would do little to prevent the price of gasoline from reaching a national average of about $3.25 a gallon this summer."
Washington Post column in the Seattle Times, April 2006
"The truth is that despite the flurry of bills being debated on Capitol Hill, Congress cannot control the global price of oil nor offer real help for beleaguered American drivers now or in the near future, analysts say."
USA Today, June 2008
"But energy analysts say the problems underlying the price surge are so deep, and so tied to complex, far-ranging supply-and-demand issues, that neither the Bush nor the Kerry plan would likely provide relief for the foreseeable future. In essence, there may be little a president or Congress can do in the short term to lower energy prices, other than point the nation in the right direction with a payoff years away."
Chicago Tribune, August 2004
#16 Posted by Weldon Berger, CJR on Tue 20 Mar 2012 at 07:56 PM
Long term, if the president wanted to do something about energy prices, he would go out into the deserts with the army corps of engineers and build dozens of these things.
http://pda.physorg.com/news/2012-03-thermosolar-power-station-spain-night.html
And fund it with the proceeds of canceled oil subsidizes.
The tech isn't that complicated, it's the will that's lacking.
#17 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Wed 21 Mar 2012 at 12:27 AM
Long term, if the president wanted to do something about energy prices, he would go out into the deserts with the army corps of engineers and build dozens of these things
Wow, a 20MW plant that ONLY costs $340 million to build … what a deal. That works out to be 17,000$/KW (3-4 times the cost of a new Westinghouse AP1000) and with a capacity factor of 63% our electricity rates would only go up a few hundred percent if we made this approach a serious contributor to our power grid.
Let a thousand Solyndra’s bloom … the liberal’s answer to our energy needs.
#18 Posted by Mike H, CJR on Wed 21 Mar 2012 at 10:35 AM
I forget, how much does it cost to fuel a solar tower per year versus a nuclear plant?
And how much liability insurance does a solar tower require in comparasion to a nuclear plant?
And what's the life cycle again of a solar tower versus a nuclear plant?
And how do you dispose of the waste from a solar tower versus a nuclear plant?
So yeah, given that American deserts have a more constant climate than Spain and given that the net cost of such a project would be zero if it were funded through the elimination of subsidies and tax breaks and given the investment in projects like this would only further our expertise in building more projects like this and given that the high initial cost turns into a legacy cost of practically nothing, this will be our future.
Of course, that's assuming we decide to build one.
#19 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Wed 21 Mar 2012 at 01:04 PM
I forget, how much does it cost to fuel a solar tower per year versus a nuclear plant?
Fixed O&M costs for nuclear and solar respectively .11 $/kwh, .46 $/kwh
Fuel costs for nuclear and solar respectively .12 $/kwh, 0 $/kwh
Total operation costs for nuclear and solar respectively .23 $/kwh, .46 $/kwh.
PRIASE BE TO SCIENCE!!
And what's the life cycle again of a solar tower versus a nuclear plant?
Design life of nuclear and solar respectively: 40 years, 25 years.
PRIASE BE TO SCIENCE!!
And how do you dispose of the waste from a solar tower versus a nuclear plant?
Reprocessing of spent fuel, a mature technology in use all over the world excluding the US (thank you Jimmy Carter), costs roughly .06 $/kwh.
So even when we account for fuel costs, fixed O&M, and disposal, nuclear is far less expensive on the O&M side then solar thermal … and with capital construction costs less than 1/3rd.
PRIASE BE TO SCIENCE!!
Of course, that's assuming we decide to build one.
Blah … blah … blah ….
#20 Posted by Mike H, CJR on Wed 21 Mar 2012 at 02:34 PM
Is it too much to ask for you to document your claims? Of course it is, otherwise you'd have started long ago during the many times people have asked you.
But yeah, pretty figures you've got there. I guess nuclear is the way to go if compared to the method of solar generation you've picked.
Oh, but wait! That's not the method of solar generation I discussed! (honest mistake, I'm sure)
Let's look at the method discussed shall we:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_solar_power
"a 250 MW CSP station would have cost $600–1000 million to build. That works out to $0.12 to $0.18/kwh."
And the neat thing is that it's not like the us would have to ask Spain how they did theirs- the us invented it originally
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Two
Oh and what was that about liability insurance? I could of sworn that was a cost of nuclear left unaddressed. Funny you skipped over that.
Nice chatting with you again Mikey.
#21 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Wed 21 Mar 2012 at 03:55 PM
Oh this is fun. The Westinghouse AP1000's cost of construction is about 7 billion per reactor for a 1154 MW unit.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/23/business/energy-environment/nrc-clears-way-for-new-nuclear-plant-construction.html
The Ivanpah Solar facility cost is about, let's say 2.5 billion for 380MW of power
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanpah_Solar_Power_Facility
(I'm rounding down the output of solar and roundig up the cost, because I'm generous here)
To equal one reactor you'd need 3 solar towers. How much would that cost? About 7.6 billion.
What? What was that about 2 to 3 times the cost? Praised be to what, Mikey? I can't hear you...
#22 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Wed 21 Mar 2012 at 05:06 PM
All right Thimbles … since your mouth breathing has caused you to come down with a wicked case of the vapors, I’ll explain this in terms even a progressive can understand. There is nominal, or nameplate capacity, there is output and there is capacity factor. The capacity factor is the ratio of actual yearly output to nameplate output. A 250 MW CSP facility that costs $600–1000 million to build and operates at a 31% capacity factor (Ivanpah) doesn’t cost $0.12 to $0.18/kwh. The cost for the plant construction is 2400-4000 $/kw divided by the capacity factor gives us a real range of 7700-12900 $/kw for a “theoretical unit” and 17,000$/KW for our actual example in Spain.
Any of these costs are higher than nuclear and when O&M costs are taken into account, they are still significantly higher. I got all the O&M costs from the EIA (a slightly more reliable source than Wikipedia I might add), and they are all for concentrated solar thermal.
So grab a paper bag, take a few puffs, and chillax.
#23 Posted by Mike H, CJR on Wed 21 Mar 2012 at 06:12 PM
Man, when talking with you we really have to check the old figures.
AND WOULDN"T IT BE NICE IF YOU CITED YOURS, but whatever.
So yeah, I used an american 250 MW CSP plant to contrast the construction costs of your Westinghouse Nuclear Reactor, for which you still have no estimate of liability costs. You tell me the capacity ratio of solar sucks because solar can only operate at full capacity for 30% of the time (which is why you'd want to build it in a desert to mitigate that + the hours solar works at capacity coincide with the times peak power is drawn - during the day - so the capacity ratio doesn't matter as much as you think) and therefore the actual costs for capacity generation are tripled.
Fine, I'll play, but don't make soup out of the figures.
Ivanpah will cost about 2500M and generate about 380MW and have a 31% capacity ratio = $21222 per kw
Where's the bad assumption? Not every CSP design is going to have a 31% capacity ratio.
"But why is it so high Thimbles?"
Construction costs of experimental designs. There's no off the shelf to use here. Fabrication costs, part costs therefore are high. Build more plants and those costs drop,
So then you venture back to Spain. The Gemsolar plant generates 19.9MW of power. It cost 200M Euros to build.
That's about $266 million American, not 340. So let's do the calculation. 266M/19.9MW = $13367 per KW divided by .31..
Oh wait. Not every CSP plant has the same capacity ratio. What's the Gemasolar ratio.. Hmmmn.. Oh! Those libs at Forbes seem to know:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/tonyseba/2011/06/21/the-worlds-first-baseload-247-solar-power-plant/
75%. Oh yeah, those molten salts must affect the capacity factor if they allow a solar plant to work at night, doh! 60 to 75% are the claims I see.
So we have a value of $17823 per kw. Still, big difference between $17823/kw and $.18/kwh.
Wait.. Where's your hours?
It turns out when we run your calculation on your AP1000 $7000M (just for construction costs) / 1154MW reactor / .9 capacity factor we get $6740/kw.
So we're looking at a based on just the construction costs of AP1000 to Gemasolar of $.77/kwh to $2.03/kwh respectively.
And those cost for Gemasolar can only go down as production scales up.
Whereas with nuclear? "When is the true cost going to get assessed?" wonder those commies at Forbes:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2012/02/19/how-many-lives-does-nuclear-energy-have/
Solar towers? We can put them in a desert and not worry about them for half a century or more.
Nuclear? People worry. Maybe shit doesn't often happen, but it doesn't need to happen often to create a global headache lasting generations. I'd pay the premium for peace of mind since the technology exists, America already owns it, and the price can only go down.
The same just cannot be said for nuclear.
#24 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Wed 21 Mar 2012 at 11:15 PM
Since you didn't cite your Solar vs Nuclear figures, but suggested I look them up on the EIA, here they are:
http://www.eia.gov/oiaf/beck_plantcosts/pdf/updatedplantcosts.pdf
See Table 2-5:
Capital Cost of Construction: Solar Thermal $4,692/kw Nuclear $5,339/kw
Fixed O&M per year: Solar Thermal $64/kwy Nuclear $88/kwy
Variable O&M per hour: Solar Thermal $0/kwh Nuclear $2.04/kwh
At any rate, my point was that the US has areas of land that lend themselves to solar exploitation and there is simple in principle tech America can use.
In other areas of the world, nuclear may be the best alternative available:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/mar/21/pro-nuclear-japan-fukushima
and so those areas will have to be held responsible for maintaining their plants throughly and securely while disposing their waste in a open and safe manner.
But other places, which have areas with tappable climates, should be looking at it, because, long term, it is the cleanest and best way to go.
#25 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Thu 22 Mar 2012 at 02:57 AM
Since you didn't cite your Solar vs Nuclear figures, but suggested I look them up on the EIA, here they are:
No, there they aren’t. Here are the levelized costs I referenced above. Levelized being the key word.
Construction costs of experimental designs. There's no off the shelf to use here. Fabrication costs, part costs therefore are high. Build more plants and those costs drop,
Not really. You see, these are fabricated items, not manufactured items. When it comes to power plants, there are no off the shelf components for any of them. Each item is built off a common frame and custom finished to the exact specifications of the end user. Be it gas turbines, transformers, boiler feed pumps, cooling towers, burners, etcetera. While there are some economics of scale to these kinds of systems, they are very limited. Building 100 of them as opposed to half a dozen really doesn’t drive the price down as much as you would think.
So then you venture back to Spain. The Gemsolar plant generates 19.9MW of power. It cost 200M Euros to build. That's about $266 million American, not 340. So let's do the calculation. 266M/19.9MW = $13367 per KW divided by .31.
The NREL says it cost 230 million Euro. The date of the release was 10/24/2011 and the exchange rate was 1.39 on that date, so the cost in USD is $319.7million and 15,985 $/kw. Levelize that against a 75% cf and we have 21,313$/kw. Once again, outrageously expensive.
75%. Oh yeah, those molten salts must affect the capacity factor if they allow a solar plant to work at night, doh! 60 to 75% are the claims I see.
Those molten salt systems is why it cost so much more to build Gemsolar then Ivanpah. You get higher dispatch capacity but at a much greater capital cost. Its really that simple.
So yeah, I used an american 250 MW CSP plant to contrast the construction costs of your Westinghouse Nuclear Reactor, for which you still have no estimate of liability costs.
The reason there are no reliable liability costs is because there has not been one US nuclear accident that has cost lives , damaged property, or cost the taxpayers a dime. TMI, the worst incident in US history cost about $1billion and GPU and Met Ed picked up the entire tab.
Methinks you have been swilling too much of Joe Romm’s Kool Aid.
#26 Posted by Mike H, CJR on Thu 22 Mar 2012 at 05:46 PM
"No, there they aren’t. Here are the levelized costs I referenced above. Levelized being the key word."
Awesome! A cited figure! Miracles can happen!
So yeah, they got some high figures for solar based on them 2008 estimates. And the variable O&M costs for natural gas? Wow.
I suspect it's bit out of date and a bit out of line. I don't see how you get a fixed O&M cost for Solar thermal to Nuclear of 21.8 to 11.7 per MWHR on one table and 64.00 to 88.75 per KWYR on the other.
"Not really. You see, these are fabricated items, not manufactured items. When it comes to power plants, there are no off the shelf components for any of them. Each item is built off a common frame and custom finished to the exact specifications of the end user. Be it gas turbines, transformers, boiler feed pumps, cooling towers, burners, etcetera. While there are some economics of scale to these kinds of systems, they are very limited. Building 100 of them as opposed to half a dozen really doesn’t drive the price down as much as you would think."
This was an experimental plant that consists of 2,650 heliostats which contain about thirty five rectangles of reflective material. Are you telling me that solar plant construction of this type cannot benefit from materials advances and an economy of scale production?
Did you really think that cell phones would still cost 4000 bucks back when they were experimental?
"The NREL says it cost 230 million Euro. The date of the release was 10/24/2011 and the exchange rate was 1.39 on that date, so the cost in USD is $319.7million and 15,985 $/kw. Levelize that against a 75% cf and we have 21,313$/kw. Once again, outrageously expensive."
The project was financed with 171M euro on January 30, 2009.
http://www.sener.ae/press-releases/en?id=cw4982e6574eb13
Based on the exchange rate, that equates to 227 million American.
I assume the other 59 million Euros were an initial investment, you'd have to have a 1.57 exchange rate to make your 319 claim, never mind 340.
Which would be significant if you assumed every plant was going to cost the same as the initial.
As it happened, this plant, though experimental, came in under schedule and on budget.
In February 2009, construction began. In May 2011, it began making power.
Why? The concept is simple (mirrors + sun = power) and there's no risks (solar plant + earthquake = mirror recalibration)
Nuclear is complex, it's hard to get the design right:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/21/business/energy-environment/21nuke.html
and risk of failure is not a viable option.
Which means these things will take a decade or so to get generating and cost hundreds of millions just getting things done like the foundations.
If you want safe power now, if you want cheap power in future, you go big on solar plants like Gemasolar when you've got the climate to do so.
#27 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Thu 22 Mar 2012 at 11:07 PM
Looks like the Obama administration has been getting it's toes wet.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/toddwoody/2011/05/19/obama-administration-grants-737-million-for-a-247-solar-power-plant/
I didn't think you could scale up efficiently to 110MW for 737 million due to the particulates in the air affecting the outer perimeter heliostats (I thought making small 20 to 50MW plants in clusters would be a more efficient use of reflective area)
Anyways, we'll see when it's operational, which it's projected to be in 2013.
http://www.solarreserve.com/what-we-do/csp-projects/crescent-dunes/
At the cost above, assuming the costs hold steady, it's in AP1000 territory.
#28 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Fri 23 Mar 2012 at 12:12 AM
According to this:
http://cleantechnica.com/2012/02/10/worlds-largest-concentrating-solar-power-plant-hits-milestone/
"Funding is a key issue for Crescent Dunes. SolarReserve raised $260 million in private equity and $737 in loan guarantees from the Department of Energy. Electricity from the plant is projected to cost 13.5 cents per kilowatt-hour and will rise one percent per year during the 25-year [Power Purchase Agreement]."
So about a billion for 110MW with a 75% capacity factor and a 2 year construction time.
$9063MW/.75 = $12085
$1.38kwh compared to the AP1000's $.77kwh (minimum construction costs, not including cost of generation and the cost of the unknown duration between project initiation and completion/generation)?
That is not a bad bargain.
#29 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Fri 23 Mar 2012 at 01:59 AM
Came across another interesting article on clean technica.
http://cleantechnica.com/2012/03/02/solar-energy-myths-lomborg/
"Lomborg makes the claim that Germany’s increase in solar PV is going to result in a massive spike in electricity bills. First of all, we’ve written on the documented evidence that solar PV reduces electricity bills, since it produces the most electricity at peak demand when baseload power is already stretched and producing new electricity costs the most... utility companies’ inability to charge more than a pretty penny for peak electricity (since homes are now providing it themselves) might very well be hurting their profits...Solar power is already cheaper than fossil fuels and nuclear. Solar’s levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) may not be, and if that’s the only thing that matters to Lomborg, his claim that solar is more expensive than coal, natural gas, or nuclear, might be right. However, if you look at a couple of important factors, solar is already cheaper... if you take the true cost of all energy sources into account (including health costs not included in the LCOE), solar is already cost-competitive (and subsidies to support solar adjust for failures in the market that leave out those important externalities). Furthermore, if people actually evaluated the price of solar based on the true lifespan of solar power systems [30-50 years, depending on the tech], the situation gets even better...the important but often overlooked point here is that it takes years to get a new coal or nuclear power plant up and running. So, by the time you had a new plant up and running, the electricity from it would already be more expensive than the projected price of solar at that time"
So it's not just me saying it.
#30 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Fri 23 Mar 2012 at 02:24 PM
Damn, Thimbles ... way to own face.
#31 Posted by Sam L, CJR on Sat 24 Mar 2012 at 01:32 PM
Well, it's not all sunshine on the solar development front. Big solar can get hamstrung by project size as easily as really big nuclear:
http://cleantechnica.com/2011/12/19/bigger-subsidies-make-bigger-solar-a-bad-bet/
"So far, the federal Department of Energy has provided loan guarantees to 16 large-scale solar power plants. The benefits for the California Solar Ranch (and likely other federally-backed large solar projects) also include lower interest rates (3.5% rather than 7%). No comparable subsidy exists for small-scale solar, despite there being many times more solar electricity coming off distributed solar projects (20 megawatts and smaller) than large solar plants. The irony is that these large loan guarantees typically back large corporations with deep pockets like NRG, whereas small-scale solar projects are frequently financed without comparable federal largess by individual homeowners or small businesses...
There’s also the question of speed. A small-scale solar project can be operational in months, but the California Solar Ranch has been in development since mid-2008. Another large-scale solar project, the 280-megawatt Mojave Solar concentrating solar thermal power plant, has been in development for 5 years (as with most concentrating solar thermal power plants, it takes much longer to develop). For perspective, the U.S. has installed 1,600 megawatts of smaller-scale solar over the past three years; the Germans have installed 12,000 megawatts."
But when done right these projects have incredible potential. The molten salt tech that enables the capacity factor may well become obsolete if we find a way to make vanadium battery tech inexpensive and energy dense. In which case solar energy projects become incredibly cheap.
And it seems we're starting to see signs of that now.
http://www.evwind.es/noticias.php?id_not=16152
"Torresol Energy plans to invest up to USD 5 billion in the short term to build concentrating solar thermal power plants in the Middle East, Spain and the US...
Enrique Sendagorta said the company was aiming to add about 6,000 megawatts (MW) of capacity over the next three years and that one of concentrated solar energy the plants could be built in Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates."
5 billion? For 6000MW? That's 6 AP1000's for less than the price of 1? :0
Now we don't know whether those are gemasolar type plants with the 75% capacity factor or the Valle parabolic trough type plants with the capacity factor of 41% or a mix. But if it can be pulled off, wow.
$2033/KW or $.23/kwhr based on worst capacity factor estimate.
Wow.
It looks like the Middle East is making a play to stay the world's energy exporter in solar. They'll have the capacity ready for when the transmission and storage tech catches up.
#32 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Sun 25 Mar 2012 at 03:10 PM