Interview with Thomas Friedman (2 of 2)

It is incredible… you talk about innovation, growth, competition and a pristine ecology which are noble and essential goals for Mankind and society into the 21st Century, yet you ignore the lessons of history: is a “perfect storm” on the scale of devastation of the Haiti earthquake a key to progress? Was Krakatoa exploding on August 17, 1888 killing millions of people and starving millions more during the next decade until volcanic ash settled out of the global atmosphere allowing a return to normal growing seasons a key to progress. Was the plague at the end of the Roman Empire where dead people were piled up, dumped into the Mediterranean sea by the boat load, and “hand buried” in mass graves (no perfect storm “construction pay loaders available during that “perfect storm”)… was that a key to progress and prosperity and a “green” ecology? Was bombing Europe, Nagasaki and Hiroshima during WWII the “perfect storm” solution to completely reconstructed and modernized “green” European and Japanese societies since WWII? Has the current global economic and social crisis that is based on diminishing supplies of increasingly more expensive energy done anything to improve the standard of living for anybody… especially America, if I can focus on my own children and neighbors first.
Tax and constrict is slavery… if life is so much better in Europe, China, Japan, Brazil, Venezuela, Brazil, Cuba, Mexico or Brazil to name only a few of your favorite examples… why are you pontificating here at home instead of taking yourself into those “green acres”? Why do all people in the world by the vast majority of numbers want to come to America? Why do all the African Americans, Mexican Americans, illegal aliens, and legal aliens keep milking the American cow and slicing the American pie… working their butts off to send money to their families in their “green” paradise nations of origin… why is there no backlog of exit visa applications and one way tickets out of America.
Freedom, independence, opportunity… and even a free lunch. The pilgrims had a socialist, Utopian compact where everybody would share the wealth of their colony… and they starved for two years until John Smith changed the rules allowing individuals to keep the fruits of their labor. There have always been freeloaders and Utopian pundits telling everyone you need “more” entitlements and how things”should” be… you are selling “Flat, Hot and Crowded” stupid books at personal gain, dismissing your Copenhagen carbon footprints as you jet all across the globe… and you do nothing to establish new technology (Energy Beam Dish Satellite Boiler Technology) to simply replace dirty carbon fuel and dirty nuclear power boilers at every power plant on Earth (except water powered turbines generating electricity).
Every one of your “green” technologies is a “drop in the bucket” primitive, localized and globally inconsequential technology… every “green” technology accounts for less than 15% of global output without any supporting research, and probably less than 5% with research documentation.
Space Solar Power Satellite Technology… Energy Beam Satellites, Dish powered boilers that simply replace fossil fuel and nuclear power boiler technology at “500,000 utility households” per satellite… this makes a global impact… effectively “overnight”.
Complain, criticize, bitch and bicker… your myopic blindness that 21st Century Society is a “Space Age” Society with Innovative “Super-Industrial” Revolution Technology to solve ALL economic and social problems as it is humanly possible to solve with “unlimited Zero Emissions” electricity at the cheapest per unit price in history… do you speak English… has there been a mutation in human survival where a dominant “ostrich gene” has the entire intellectual human community burying your heads in the sand with your plumed butts ready for a huge “perfect storm” butt whipping of taxation, contraction, slavery and destructio

Many influential analysts, like Tom Friedman (and Dr. Steven Chu), suggest that the only way to make substantive progress in forwarding Green solutions is to tilt the energy playing field with a tax or fee on carbon.
What is not simultaneously explained is that such action would injure the continued efficient functioning of technical economies currently based on burning fossil fuels. There is a real practical cost to tilting the energy playing field and making politically popular but technically inadequate renewable energy systems economically equal to fossil (or nuclear) fuels. More than 85% of economic activity in the US is driven currently by use of fossil fuels.

Pricing up the cost of the dominant energy sectors will have real economic impacts. If there were renewable technologies that were close in cost to fossil fuels which we could quickly scale and deploy we could attempt to transition to them. There is no evidence that any such renewable energy technology exits or will exist for decades.

When you tilt the energy playing field with taxes and fees the economic pie shrinks. Economic activity becomes less efficient, and the costs of everything made with or delivered to market with energy goes up. Having to devote more capital toward energy purchases leaves less capital available to stimulate economic growth.

This should be simultaneously explained at the same time the cognoscenti proclaim that the only way forward is to price up the cost of energy with a tax or fee.

Modest little men with little influence suggest that the only sustainable way you get real progress is to honestly reduce the cost of energy and expand the access of a greater number of Americans to cheap energy.

Nuclear energy is the only current form of energy that can be rapidly scaled to displace use of fossil fuels and simultaneously drive down the cost of energy. To do this on a scale that would actually result in replacing energy produced from fossil fuels within a decade would require some regulatory relief (A Regulatory FAST-TRACK program for new nuclear) and an investment in commercializing better and more manufacturable nuclear technology.

I respect your visionary idea of Solar Satellites in Space and am not immune to the conceptual attraction of producing large amounts of energy from space based platforms. Solar Energy is abundant in space (it is after all derived from one of the finest nuclear fusion reactors with one of the best operational safety records known to nuclear engineering) but it is not easy to inexpensively collect and transmit to earth the power derived from the sun. Rather than get in a computation debate with you which I think few readers would have patience to read I would rather point to a decade long study performed by NASA and DOE in the 1970s to explore the Solar Power Satellite which established that this approach was significantly more costly than terrestrial nuclear and coal [1]. The high cost of SPS (about 5X over coal and nuclear) has caused it to be sidelined for several decades.

It is expensive to launch building materials into space and it is genuinely challenging to assemble 10s of kilometer large rigid structures in near earth orbit (the DOE reference project for SPS was 5 kilometers x 10 kilometers and did not produce the power levels close to what you mention in your post – you are talking about truly enormous structures in space to produce and transmit to earth the mentioned high levels of power).SPS rectennas are not insignificant in ground footprint (13 kilometers x 10 kilometers) for a ground rectanna to receive microwave energy from the SPS system in space. Many such ground rectennas would need to be built to receive microwave power.

[1] DOE Final Proceedings of the Solar Power Satellite Program Review Report on investigation of SPS Conf-800491
http://www.nss.org/settlement/ssp/library/1981DOESPS-FinalProceedingsOfTheSolarPowerSatelliteProgramReview.pdf

Nuclear fission has safely been turning out approximately 20% of the nation’s electricity for 40 years. This amounts to over 4 terawatt-years of energy. Terrestrial Photo Voltaic produces approximately one tenth of one percent (0.1%) (DOE EIA 2007 numbers). To date no space generated Photo Voltaic has yet produced power that has been beamed to earth.

America could build substantially better nuclear power based on alternative Thorium nuclear fuel. When used in appropriate alternative reactors designed to burn it Thorium produces one hundredth the amount of nuclear waste [1]. America chose its existing Plutonium Fuel Cycle technology at the height of the cold war in the mid-1950s for the combined needs of weapons and power generation. Thorium is unsuitable for weapons manufacture but is excellent for power generation in Molten Salt Reactors.
[1] Le Brun, C., “Impact of the MSBR concept technology on long lived radio toxicity and
proliferation resistance”, Technical Meeting on Fissile Material Management Strategies for
Sustainable Nuclear Energy, Vienna 2005
http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/04/14/97/PDF/document_IAEA.pdf

Dr. Edward Teller, the founding director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, wrote a final paper one month before his death regarding the problems posed by running out of oil and gas supplies and the environmental problems that are due to greenhouse gases wherein he suggested the use of the energy available in the resource thorium, which is much more plentiful than the conventional nuclear fuel uranium. Dr. Teller’s proposes in his final paper to use Molten Salt Thorium Reactors to achieve energy independence while securing a sustainable abundant source of significantly less polluting nuclear energy.
http://www.geocities.com/rmoir2003/moir_teller.pdf