The Oregon State Court of Appeals invalidated rules written by the state Environmental Quality Commission for implementing the state’s Climate Protection Program. The state legislation creating this program required the EQC to explain “Any alternatives the commission considered and the reasons that the alternatives were not pursued.” In response, the agency claimed that it “considered many alternatives” but didn’t describe a single one or explain why it was rejected.
Smokey, the Antiplanner dog, checks out the environmental quality of an Oregon stream.
This is entirely typical of government planning today. I’ve reviewed many plans that didn’t bother to identify and evaluate any alternatives because planners were so certain they knew what was right and anything else was wrong. What is atypical is that a state court has enforced the law requiring identification and evaluation of alternatives.
A lot of environmental groups intervened in this court case and disappointingly they all defended the EQC’s failure to identify and evaluate alternatives. These groups include the Natural Resources Defense Council, Environmental Defense Fund, Northwest Environmental Defense Center, Oregon Environmental Council, and several more. The climate crisis is so serious, they seem to be saying, that we don’t have time to consider alternatives. We just need to force people to do what we know is right without worrying about whether it is cost-effective, or effective at all, not to mention whether it will impose harsh economic impacts on people.
The leading challenger to the rules was Northwest Natural Gas, Oregon’s main natural gas distributor. The United States is one of the few countries in the world to see a decline in greenhouse gas emissions, and the main reason for that decline is the substitution of natural gas for coal and other fossil fuels. Burning coal emits 96 kilograms of carbon dioxide for every million BTUs of energy it produces, while natural gas emits only 53. So it is sadly ironic that natural gas has become the target of a lot of climate activism.
Natural gas, which is mostly methane, is a by-product of oil production. If there is no market for natural gas, oil producers simply release it into the atmosphere. By capturing it and burning it as fuel, it is converted to carbon dioxide, which has a smaller greenhouse effect than methane. Thus, using natural gas for home heating, stoves, and other purposes may actually reduce the greenhouse effect. But the Oregon Environmental Quality Commission didn’t consider such a possibility and neither did the environmental groups that supported it.
As Lewis & Clark Law School Professor Jack Bogdanski comments, “With friends like the bureaucrats in Salem, Earth doesn’t need enemies.” The same could be said of the environmental groups who intervened in this case. Unfortunately, the probable result of this case is that the next time the Oregon legislature passes a draconian law to fix a real or imaginary problem, it will skip any requirement to consider alternatives.
I was once closely associated with the Natural Resources Defense Council and Oregon Environmental Council, and occasionally worked with the Environmental Defense Fund, Northwest Environmental Defense Center, and some of the other intervenors as well. These and other groups often challenged federal and state agencies for not considering a wide range of alternatives in their various plans. I guess it is too much to expect that they would be anything but hypocritical, demanding rational planning of projects they oppose but supporting irrational planning of programs they support.
13% of global energy demand is electric, because converting to electric is expensive and not very efficient but it’s safe for running casual devices. 72% of the worlds energy is thermal based because it’s efficient to convert thermal energy into work without having to convert it to electricity. You convert to electricity you lose half to 2/3rds of the energy as waste heat. The carbon emissions from changing electric sources wont matter much since 75% of all GHG emissions come from non electric sources. The transition to renewables; means replacing thermal, chemical and mechanical power with several added steps, electric generation, electric voltage, transmission, and plug in. ALL these stages result in thermodynamic losses.
Natural gas heating is thermodynamically More efficient. Add on trigeneration, it’s order magnitude more efficient. A company called “EcoJet Engineering” developed a micro gas turbine generator and to illustrate how small they Are…….
https://theleadsouthaustralia.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/ecoJet-w-Coin-850×455.jpg
Era of micro gas turbine has come.