China winning the energy race?

D107

Here's Thomas Friedman's NY Times Column:



<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/opinion/10friedman.html">http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/opinion/10friedman.html</a>

Viess

China's Government

Sees the necessity in clean renewable energy. That's why the government is putting up billions of dollars into solving the problem. Not only is it in their national security interest its in their economic interest. As long as large corporations like Exxon Mobile and Coal producing entity's are running Washington we will follow China's lead. Nothing gets done in the Senate either because someone has been bought off or they don't believe there is a or is going to be an oil and gas shortage. Neither do they think global warming is real. While we bicker and diddle, China acts. IMHO

bill_105

Just over there

You would not believe the air pollution over there. Our biggest thoughts of the place was the pollution in the cities and how the rural people were just so friendly. It's just like Mexico, but real big.

Oh, there's where my gate valves come from!

The Wynn Macau is really dinky. And real strange. It ain't the Mirage.

archibald tuttle

news flash China has industry

Give me a break.



yeah that global warming is really gripping the US and the UK right now. I'm quaking (read shivering) in me boots.



global warming is yesterdays news. it's all over. nobody ever disputed that the atomosphere traps the suns heat, but it becomes reasonably clear that folks contending human contributions to the effect are variations around the trend, not the trend itself, aren't the sort who pour over records of german gas consumption during world war II insisting that the third reich couldn't have burned all those people.



now the people looking silly are the ones who have stifled scientific debate in this area while trying just what Friedman recommends, to place a price on carbon in America -- which of course is not at all what is happening in China.



They're bringing more coal capacity on line in a decade than we've

built in a century. Friedman downplays that and mentions their

efforts at efficient coal but not the fact that his liberal buddies wouldn't let us

build a coal plant if our lives depended on it, efficient or not.



there's nothing wrong with pioneering competing technologies, except that no one in the US wants to actually compete, they want subsidies and an IV from ratepayers wallets to build this crap.



Although we're not running out of oil and gas, nevermind coal, if the future price of energy economically favors adoption of newer technologies, we'll be able to lift them from the Chinese instead of the vice versa. I'm not talking necessarily about stealing real intellectual property (although that has certainly been part of the Chinese modus operandi), but the economic organization to capitalize on these technologies when, and only when, it becomes economically feasible. We don't have to be the ones to pioneer the non-economic adoption. China (and other developing countries) didn't have to invent cellphones in order to avoid hardwiring their entire country and save themselves all those standed costs. And they still could buy the cell equipment and compensate for a measure of the intellectual property and yet have a far more efficient outcome.



I have no fear whatsoever that should we find our currency upside down and ourselves unable to afford to buy these chinese energy goods-- a resonable concern -- that our main problem will not be China's success has somehow snuffed the flame of entrepenurial and engineering expertise in the United States, but overcoming the environmentalists' objections to actually mining the resources required and building the industrial facilites to manufacture them.



So the real news flash here is that a backwards totalitarian socialist regime embraces a degree of capitalism and becomes an industrial power, with plenty of social and ecological warts but basically an upward arc in the median standard of living.

That sounds good to me, not bad. The thing we could learn from this is to avoid  kneejerk socialism and anti-industrialism, not that we should all go into windmill manufacturing.

archibald tuttle

PS

you don't here mr. china does everything right crowing about this one, now do ya . . .



http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aE.x_r_l9NZE



it's good news by me but he's probably crying in his beer.

DanHolohan

Have you read

Tom Friedman's book, Hot, Flat and Crowded?

archibald tuttle

the world is flat

Dan,



I've read the World is Flat. I don't think Friedman lacks insight, but I think he is a prisoner of a lefist malthusian outlook. So this leads him to favor a 'state capitalism', a la china, in which the free market is so cabined by the prescriptions designed to acheive the social policy balance desired by the all knowing government that it is hard to tell which society is the totalitarian one. Thus, his insights about the benefits of globalism end up submerged by an unjustified pessimism about the living standards that globalism will provide.





Brian

Viess

We're Not Running out? Say what?

If you believe that,well I have an iceberg in Arizona I'd like to sell ya, lol. You don't have to believe in global warming to want clean renewable energy. Like I said before, in big cities like LA, Mexico City, Salt Lake City and Beijing breathing the air is a health hazard. If it wasn't for the EPA and certain environmental groups. We would be a real hot mess. Clean coal technology is a hoax, doesn't exist, period. There is a track record that shows what Brian's total capitalistic vision looks like. They're called SUPER FUND CLEAN UP SITES! Large corporations take their manufacturing business to China because of the lack of environmental cares or concern. China devalues the yen and the Chinese work for pennies on the dollar. I'm for free trade as long as it's fair trade. It ain't! Yes we are raising the standard of living for the Chinese but the flip side of that coin is a lowering of our standard of living. The trend now is to hire only part time workers, that keeps the company from paying overtime and doesn't require them to provide any health care. Middle class America has taken a beating for better than a decade now. If ya think unfettered capitalism is so great you have got another thing coming. Greed needs to be regulated period. We can grow and prosper but it needs to be done responsibly. IMHO, Viess.

DanHolohan

Thanks, Brian.

I suggest you read the book. It's about capitalism and this country surviving economically. Not what you're saying here. Seriously. Check it out and we'll talk more. 

archibald tuttle

as per usual you read more into my writing than is there

... I guess that's prosaic efficiency, although I haven't expressed most of the views you attribute to me, I don't shrink from any of them. But I think that you're primed to see folks who don't share your energy priorities as in denial.



We have plenty of oil not to mention coal. They find more deeper all the time not to mention that we have scads of it in the United States that we won't allow to be developed. And as the price does rise, because of the expense of extraction and because of deliberate constriction of supplies accomplished by environmentalists, the extraction of oil from tar sands becomes commercially viable and theres enough of that to last for hundreds of years.



This is neither an allegation that everything environmentalists have done is wrong -- although I do think a majority of it from the outright ban on DDT on is misguided, ultimately overdone and shot through with unintended consequences -- nor a statement that oil is infinite or self regenerating on human time scales. But we just are not running out of oil. And most of the new sources aren't in geopolitically sensitive areas, they're simply opposed by environmentalists without regard to the development of evey lighter footprints for extraction, like directional drilling, and the heavy regulation of such efforts in developed countries.



You're just plain wrong about clean coal.  I've been in coal plants in Australia built with fluidized bed technology burning the dirtiest coal more cleanly than older power plants burn hard low-sulfur coal. But power generators are not inclined to build such facilities in the united states to supplant the older, dirtier gen of coal plants we're running because they would strand enormous cost in this new infrastructure and could be held up by the CO2 bandits like Al Gore. 



So all the power plants where I live in the north east are now built with Natural Gas turbines and we don't have enough transmission capacity for the gas so the price of natural gas goes up and people put in coal stoves to save on their heating bills. Ya, that's really brilliant.



The environmentalists had a point when the Cuyahoga River was burning. Now they're not bent on clean industry , they are bent on no industry.



And they don't want anyone to share our standard of living. A decade ago, the Sierra Club narrowly defeated an effort to adopt an anti-immigrant platform as a way of keeping more people from gaining an American living standard. Now I have my own problems with the immigration system but that is mostly that we have failed to live up to the law which is supposed to require sponsorship of immigrants by stable residents and prevent immigrants from coming here and getting on welfare, but I'm glad to have anyone who wants to work for it, join our standard of living.



Yes, the Sierra Club proposal was narrowly defeated in a membership vote, but it was a narrow thing and arguably the vote was moved more by sensitivity to the leftist coalition that greens keep than by any admission on behalf of the Sierra Club that they wish to share the American lifestyle with the rest of the world.



Happily, living standards are going up in China, they're buying more cars, building more coal plants and yes, they have enoromous capital reserves that the government has directed at some alternative energy technologies. That doesn't mean that this is an economically efficient way for them to spend that capital, but China is not a free market and the government controls such allocations. But let's not pretend that the Chinese have adopted Tom Friedman's politics. They of course are smart enough not to be willing to make binding commitments to reduce their own CO2 emissions and they are now the largest emitter.



Now, I don't have any problem with this. This is political reasona and scientifically so.



There is a very reasonable scientific hypothesis that we're headed into a 20 ot 30 year mini ice-age driven by the Multi-decadal oscillation, and further that this MDO accounts for the majority of the warmer temperatures that we have experienced for the last 30 years and accounted for the cold spell before that from the late 40s to the 70s that helped the Russians defeat the Germans in World War II. That would be the same cold spell that lead James Hansen to claim at that time that human industrial emissions were cooling the globe -- he who is now in forefront of the scaremongers promoting anthropogenic global warming.



These people just don't like human industry. I think that is evident. Their science is outcome driven to create scares and they conspire to keep any competing views out of the juried literature. Calling this out does not say that I favor the balance of industrial controls in China, or don't recognize that there is human behavior that degrades the environment and that economic incentives around commons elements must be carefully structured. More often than not this can be thoughtfully done in a way that allows markets to find efficient solutions to such degradation.



But because that is possible doesn't mean that false bogeymen like CO2 should be economically regulated as Thomas Friedman favors.



Best regards,

capitalistic visionary

archibald tuttle

I'll take you up on that Dan

Dan,



I'm going to DC on a plane on Thursday so I'll see if I can get a copy from the library. I dont' find Friedman unreadable, and I think he has useful insights. But a lot of his editorials that I have read take his insights and twist them to promote some lefist ideal of zero sum reasoning social justice which I think will make us worse off not better as a country.



The one that started this thread is a typical example. Whether it would be forward thinking to invest in alternative energy, to promote CO2 regulation as a necessity has to really make someone stop an wonder about how right he could possibly be about other things. If you're hoping that folks will see China investing in these technologies and try to gain a competitive foothold in those markets, well you don't need CO2 regulation for that.



And whether people do it now or in 30 or 300 years is really an economic question and I don't buy that we will be 'behind' or find it impossible to manufacture and employ such technologies simply because we are less inclined to have government mandated early adoption.



So you can certainly say that i"m reading his book with a chip on my shoulder. I call it my brain. Folks who disagree will explain that it is expletive on a shingle. But I gave the World is Flat a chance and I'll got the mile for any ancient steamhead.



Brian

DanHolohan

Good deal.

C'mon back when you're done and we'll talk more. Thanks. 

k_2

re

Hansen was not a ice age guy, he has been on about global warming since the 70's



I don't happen to agree with him, but check your sources.

Hollis

DVD

You might be interested in the DVD called "HOME".

Its about the planet and pollution and somewhat depressing (except it has tons of fantastic shots of the planet, the good,bad  and ugly) Mostly beautiful and entertaining but if you elect to rent/watch it, do see it through to the end for the whole message.



However as the great Philosopher, Paul Simon.. sez,.."A man hears what he want to hear and disregards the rest"

 

Oh the reason for THIS post here is that it has some great scenes of China and some cities that were fishing villages 40 years ago and now rival the skylines of Manhattan.

archibald tuttle

mea culpa

k



Hansen was on the edges of the global cooling thing with some scientific work he did being employed by Rasool and Schneider (now a big warmer) in there seminal silliness on global cooling in the early 70s.  But I thought I had an separate quote from Hansen on Sulfur Dioxide particles and cooling at the time. Given that my filing system fails me, I must retract, there is too much real and documentable nonsense being spewed presently by Hansen for me to botch the story based on a quote I am sure I saw but can't produce -- and certainly given Hansen's role in promoting AGW and as a periforeal actor in the climategate scandal there are plenty of folks who would go out of their way to discredit him -- that simply isn't necessary. . .  In this light , is possible I can't confirm the quote because it was incorrectly attributed when I saw it.



On the other hand, the other JH, Obama's climate Czar John Holdren, was right in the middle of it the environmental scares of the 70s writing on global cooling with Paul Ehrlich and Anne Ehrlich, who contended with Lester Brown for the title of Malthusians in Chief.



Brian



PS -- Hollis --

I can only say that I was 100% in the bag for every bit of environmental demagoguery  delivered during the 1970s. Even if a man hears what he wants to hear, it doesn't mean he can't ultimately march to the tune of a different drummer.