(This point was made on the Freedom for Fission blog.)

Also, the video clip of David Cameron ilustrates disinformative slight-of-hand. Big surprise. Perhaps he does admit it elsewhere, but although there was the usual mantra of how people will feel empowered, will save money and so on by distributed electricity production, the fact remains that it’s quite expensive to implement — especially when retrofiting existing structures. We won’t even consider discussing what you do when the sun is not shining or wind not blowing… He makes a further assertion that many office towers in NYC were not touched at all in the August 2003 blackout. Not so! US environmental regulations (mostly air pollution restrictions) generally make it difficult and complicated to install ones own generation capacity. (Not to mention permit requirements by state and local agencies.) Thus, the only such electricity normally produced in American office towers is of the “emergency” variety. That’s usually only enough to run one (1) elevator per bank, very limited lighting, true life safety systems, and little more. The age of many such buildings is also a significant complication, bringing us back to the challenge (and high expense) of retrofitting new systems into existing structures,… and big generators take a lot of space, maintenance, fuel, permitting, exhaust and air intake provisions, isolation for vibration, and substantial recordkeeping. Sure, I’m thinking diesel or natural gas generation, but the eco-alternatives call for some kind of storage (batteries) for when the wind does not blow and the sun does not shine. I find it hard to imagine where the necessary photovoltaic panels would be placed on a 60-story office building full of computers, HVAC systems, etc., in Lower Manhattan, that would get the sunlight needed on even the best days, for enough of the day, to run the building. I’m not sure we’re there, yet.

As for homeowners, well, I rather doubt most can afford to retrofit with home solar and/or wind systems (assuming they would work in any given part of the country), and I’d much rather NOT pay the government or my regular utility to administer a program through which I effectively borrow the money to install such a system. Talk about lose-lose deals…

I expect that if we had 2,000,000,000USD, we could mount a pretty good campaign and influence lots of politicians.

thanks for the analysis, keep up that good work. As always, I find this blog to be thought provoking and informative. Maybe I’m just a BAD person. But if som where’s my cheque from Exxon?

Disclaimer: I don’t work in the Oil industry.

As H. L. Menken cynically noted so long ago “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

Whether you believe AGW to be real or imaginary is not relevant to the issue of money. There is no doubt that practical politics considers man-made climate change a ‘hobgoblin’ in need of government attention, which is synonomus with government money.

Since research scientists and universities thrive on government grant money, they are more than willing to focus their attentions on anything the government deems important. Governments will pay as long as AGW is viewed as a threat, and since climate change is complex, and no one knows for sure that a man-made crisis is out of the question, scientist see no harm in writing phrases that continue to feed the goose laying the golden eggs. Afterall, if you don’t imply that your work is critical to understanding man-made climate change (whether it is or is not), someone else will and take your grant money.

The net result is that there is a huge incentive in the research community to churn out work that does not openly conflict with the notion of a potential AGW crisis, even if the actual data does not support the theory. Conclusions can always include speculations that further research (funding) would likely show support of the AGW crisis!

Greenpeace may have spread around a couple of billion dollars of influence over the last ten years, but governments spend at least twice that every year to study human induced climate change. If the human impact was proven to be minor tomorrow, govenment research grants would drop 95% by the day after tomorrow!

While individual scientists will always defend the ultimate goal of science to understand the world around us, the community-at-large will not readily suffer those speaking scientific truth if it results in a gross reduction in funding! Thus, the seemingly large support of the AGW crisis theory in the scientific community is more a product of symmantics than logical argument; scientific culture than scientific truth!

It seems like these impartial climatologists have an interest in the game after all. (Or else!)

Very well done!