Hot Air and Cold Cash

More solar slows society’s carbon dioxide emissions growth. More solar now lessens the carbon burden later. It’s hot air to argue otherwise, no matter how you try to spin it.

Rhetorical ridiculosities form the beating heart of today’s discourse. If you can’t make the other side a good straw man or two, you deserve no soapbox today. If you can’t make whole cloth out of half truths, yada yada. I never could do that, which is why no one reads much from me. I shoot straight or not at all. Alex provokes me to shoot.

A modern electric grid is largely fed by fossil fuels, returning carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from which it came millions of years ago. Carbon dioxide is a pollutant (what isn’t?), but one we didn’t worry much about until the past few decades, which is why we allow it to reenter the atmosphere via the “dilute and disperse” method of waste management. Before the Clean Air and Clean Water acts, we did a lot of dilute and disperse waste handling, which works fine even today if the pollutants are not too toxic or remain quite dilute… but they seldom remain so for the long term. Dilute and disperse is a big favorite of business because it means the public broadly pays any costs of waste management, while the polluters themselves pay little or nothing to get rid of their waste.

That may seem a digression, but it’s far from it. It’s at the very heart of our entire history of environmental costs and controls, and of Apple’s alleged fraud. Large cities of prior centuries had terrible public health costs from the dilute and disperse method of human sewage handling. When public costs get too high, something gets done about it (canals! send the shit downriver to someone else! yay!), until someone else gets too much of other people’s shit, and eventually we (the lucky) get sewage treatment plants or decent septic systems, and we stop thinking about shit all the time.

With coal we have had the same problems, right from the beginning. The first big coal pollution problems were ash and other particulates clogging the public air, which was a problem acute enough to be killing people. So large coal burning factories eventually were forced to spend money on capturing their ash, moving from dilute and disperse to “capture and contain” or at least capture and dump somewhere else (back to dilute and disperse again). But it spared the local public some pain, with costs on the backs of the polluters until they could raise prices and pass the costs back onto the public again.

Then we realized slowly that coal burning has other issues, less visible ones from the chemicals (besides carbon) inside coal. Coal holds lots of trace elements like sulfur and mercury, which don’t seem so bad (that’s why we say there’s only traces of them in a lump of coal) until someone is burning thousands of tons of coal all the time, making the air toxic to breathe from the sheer volume of trace elements released. Lethally toxic on some days, when there’s no wind and an inversion to keep the smoky mess close to ground. So back to the drawing boards, and political lobbyists and and and gradually Industry ponies up and foots more of the bill of waste management (finer particulate controls, sulfur scrubbers, and more), letting the public fight the next issue. These things continue today, of course. Mercury levels in particular continue to rise in freshwater ecosystems all across the U.S. to the point where most freshwater fish are too toxic to eat (what? I’m not a child or a pregnant woman! I can eat my trout!), and this mercury is very clearly and pointedly associated with the burning of coal to feed our electric grid, but there is little hue and cry (it’s not like we have to eat trout to survive these days) so for mercury at least, dilute and disperse is still good enough.

Oh wait, we’re not talking about pollution here are we? We’re talking about how terrible it is, how bankrupt it is that Apple says it’s trying to be greener than thou? How dare they! Trying to hide behind smoke (coal smoke!) and mirrors (solar mirrors?) the fact that they are on the grid.

No wait, yes we are talking about pollution here. The first, best reason to reduce reliance on fossil fuel usage is… pollutants. Carbon dioxide, in this case, but also the aforementioned mercury and a host of others not detailed here. Despite Alex’s rhetorical shouting, Apple’s scheme does, in fact, reduce net pollution from fossil fuel burning in this segment of the electric grid compared to the alternative of not being alternative at all. How does it really work?

The electric grid grows as economies and populations demand growth, largely by adding new fossil fuel burning power plants. Coal has been the fuel of choice for decades, but lately natural gas burning plants have picked up the slack. Electric companies are in this business for the business, which means growth… the bills you pay have fees for the actual cost of the energy from today’s power plants, but also include fees for the growth and expansion of the grid which has to take place as we move into the future. Yes, yes, we’re using more energy efficient appliances and lighting (good) but we’re still growing and using more of them than ever before, so the grid usage goes up and up, and we keep on needing new plants.

But here’s where your grandchildren and greatgrandchildren come into the picture. Because by adding solar to the mix in North Carolina, and wherever they do this, we buy a little bit of breathing room for our descendents. At this point, scientists all know that we can’t stop global warming in its tracks; at best we can slow down our rate of greenhouse gas emissions so that future generations don’t have quite so big a problem to deal with as they might, say if we (1) say we don’t give a fuck about grandkids and just burn as much oil as we can, or (1) argue that the costs of doing something/anything about global warming are just too darn high, that we daren’t risk our fragile economy on some mambypamby so-called scientists “theories”… because 1 = 1, there’s just no difference in the outcome of these two rationales.

Every aliquot of electricity that would have come from fossil fuels, but instead comes from a renewable source is carbon dioxide deferred from entering the atmosphere. It’s that simple, I’m sorry I took ten paragraphs to get around to writing it. Oh, and of course it’s not that simple, I know that it takes electricity and primary materials to make the cells and shipping costs from China to get your solar panels in place, but once they’re there and collecting photons… they are working to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, and mercury emissions, and cadmium and other lovelies.

And the electric grids benefit, too. Why didn’t you mention this Alex? Grids need to add new power plants NOT because more electricity is needed overall, but because we need more electricity at peak hours, usually the middle of the day. Modern society is all about the daytime, so electricity usage peaks in the heat of the summer day when we’re all using our internets and air conditioning both our homes and our office buildings and microwaving popcorn too. Luckily, electricity generated from solar panels and passed into the grid just happens to coincide with this peak… meaning that a well conceived plan of supplementing a grid with solar power could help delay adding that next fossil fuel power plant by months, or years. Even without a way to economically store any excess solar capacity (you only need batteries if you want off the grid altogether).

So in one narrow sense, Alex, you’re completely right; Apple isn’t off the grid, they’re still using fossil fuels. But they have contributed materially to lessen the impact of fossil fuels in the region, by some measures in comparable amount to the electricity that they use in the new data center. And by doing so publicly, they raise awareness that more can be done, and it can make economic sense not just for large companies but for individual homeowners as well (solar costs keep coming down).

I’ll say it again for emphasis… More solar slows society’s carbon dioxide emissions growth. More solar now lessens the carbon burden later. It’s hot air to argue otherwise, no matter how you try to spin it.