Science and the media: 4 - 10 June

Steve Corneliussen’s topics this week:

• Wind and solar land-use requirements as calculated and discussed in a New York Times commentary
• Rush Limbaugh’s and other conservatives’ climate-politics backlash against Mitt Romney, as reported on the Washington Post‘s front page
• Recent Yucca Mountain geologic nuclear-waste repository technopolitics
• Starkly conflicting views on the imminent US switch to new-tech light bulbs

New York Times op-ed: enormous land use for solar or wind power

An 8 June New York Times op-ed highlights for the public an informal technocivic phenomenon often seen among physicists, engineers and others who muse about large-scale energy production: rough calculations of the enormous amounts of land that would be required for solar or wind.

For example, Chris Uhlik, Google’s engineering director, told in a recent unpublished talk about calculations showing that to scale up wind power for generating U.S. primary energy would require a footprint roughly the area of Nevada plus Arizona, and that to scale up solar would require an area equivalent to California.

In the Times op-ed , Robert Bryce of the Manhattan Institute begins by citing California’s self-imposed new “ambitious mandate” to obtain one-third of its electricity from renewables like sunlight and wind by 2020. “Twenty-nine states and the District of Columbia now have renewable electricity mandates,” Bryce adds—and there’s talk in Washington of a federal mandate.

Bryce continues:

Bryce offers a few paragraphs of back-of-an-envelope calculations for solar and wind under California’s mandate, notes that the Nature Conservancy has coined the term energy sprawl to describe such land requirements, and tosses in a few numbers illustrating “the massive quantities of steel required for wind projects.” No matter how “you crunch the numbers,” Bryce writes, “the takeaway is the same: the amount of steel needed to generate a given amount of electricity from a wind turbine is greater by several orders of magnitude” than for natural gas.

Bryce ends by citing environmentalists’ “small is beautiful” dictum. If we are to take that principle to heart “while also reducing the rate of growth of greenhouse gas emissions,” he declares, “we must exploit the low-carbon energy sources—natural gas and, yes, nuclear—that have smaller footprints.”

Washington Post front: Romney vs. fellow Republicans on climate science

Above the fold on the 9 June Washington Post front page appears the headline “Romney in hot seat on warming—Views on climate change put presidential candidate at odds with GOP base.”

The article elaborates on implications from something reported online by CBS News and others: “Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney broke with many in his party on Friday when he said he believes humans have contributed to global warming.” In New Hampshire, Romney reportedly said, “I believe the world is getting warmer, and I believe that humans have contributed.”

The Post piece emphasizes polling numbers that highlight the left-right divide on human-caused climate disruption. It observes that the “putative Republican presidential front-runner, eager to prove his conservative bona fides, could easily have said what he knew many in his party’s base wanted to hear,” but instead “stuck to the position he has held for many years.”

A “conservative backlash” has ensued, the article reports, citing the Club for Growth, the blog Conservatives4Palin.com, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and Rush Limbaugh. From a transcript at rushlimbaugh.com, here’s some of what Limbaugh told his national radio audience:

CBS’s online report charges that Republican candidates Newt Gingrich, John Huntsman and Tim Pawlenty have “shift[ed] on climate change issues.”

Yucca Mountain science and politics, cont.

As of the morning of 9 June, the Yucca Mountain geologic repository for nuclear waste was back in the news at the Washington Post, though not at the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times.

The 8 June Post carried an editorial with the headline (in the paper version) “Radioactive politics: What happened to an administration that was going to be guided by science?”

Guided by science? Is Yucca Mountain about science as clearly as, say, evolution is about science? Robert Alvarez, a former Clinton administration energy official, doesn’t think so. The 9 June Post, at the foot of the editorial column on the left-hand side of the opinion spread, carried a “Taking Exception” box containing Alvarez’s letter with the headline “Politics has always outranked science at Yucca Mountain.”

Richard M. Jones of the American Institute of Physics explained the recent background in some detail in the 7 June issue of “FYI: The AIP Bulletin of Science Policy News.” It carried the headline “New Developments in Yucca Mountain Controversy.” Jones reported on Capitol Hill discussions and a 76-page report from the Government Accountability Office.

That GAO report begins, “DOE decided to terminate the Yucca Mountain repository program because, according to DOE officials, it is not a workable option and there are better solutions that can achieve a broader national consensus. DOE did not cite technical or safety issues.” It’s that second sentence that caused the Post to headline its editorial with an assertion that Yucca Mountain is about science.

There are “reasonable things to do if Yucca is permanently dead,” wrote the Post‘s editors, after offering a brief recap of past developments leading to the Obama administration’s effort to kill the project. The editors continued:

Alvarez’s “Taking Exception” letter declares, “Fierce opposition to disposal sites in the states where most of the nation’s 104 reactors are located resulted in a choice that had more to do with political convenience than scientific merit.” The letter concludes:

Jones at AIP concluded, “The controversy will continue, playing out at the [Nuclear Regulatory Commission], in the courts, and in Congress.”

The light-bulb wars

“When it comes to making light,” wrote Andrew Rice in the 5 June Sunday magazine of the New York Times, “libertarians and aesthetes are joined in an unlikely alliance.” That alliance opposes environmentalists and the federal law that will soon ban the sale of energy-wasting, Thomas Edison-style, incandescent light bulbs, which emit light of a quality that many people prefer. Rice’s article and recent Wall Street Journal articles, taken together, offer an anecdotal snapshot of the current state of the light-bulb wars.

The Times piece summarized the entrepreneurially motivated applied physics that has been underway thanks to what many conservatives condemn as deplorable federal intrusion into the market. “Over the past few years,” Rice began, “in conditions of strict secrecy, a multinational team of scientists has been making a mighty effort to change the light bulb.” He described how “some of the industry’s most brilliant minds are plumbing the mysteries of light on an atomic level, working to devise the bulb of the future.” They’re developing LED technology to overcome objections to the compact fluorescent and other bulbs that meet the new federal requirements. To fill America’s billions of light sockets in this new way, Rice wrote, “represents not just a technological challenge but also an opportunity the industry hasn’t encountered since Edison first flipped a switch.”

Rice retold the story of Edisonian light-bulb technology and explained a bit of the engineering, and the perceptual esthetics, of bulb radiation. He cited the view of a scientist named Roland Haitz “that just as computer chips were becoming exponentially more powerful,” LEDs are “getting brighter and cheaper at a predictable rate"—a proposition that, according to Rice, is now known as Haitz’s Law. Rice analyzed the marketing challenges that will arise if that law holds true. He cited the federal government’s $10 million L Prize, designed to encourage bulb innovation. The phaseout will initially send people toward toward hybrid halogen bulbs, which he called “a transitional product that only barely meets the new regulations,” and toward compact fluorescents. But the industry is well aware that people dislike these alternatives—which is why, he wrote, there’s so much R&D, and why there’s an L Prize.

Meanwhile a Wall Street Journal article covered some of the same ground, complete with an illustration comparing and differentiating traditional incandescent bulbs, halogen-incandescents, compact fluorescents and LEDs. The article focused in large part on the industry’s coming marketing challenges, and closed this way:

That closing led to one of the two letters that the WSJ published in response. “It would have been more accurate,” the letter said, if the reporter had used the word government instead of the word industry, given that “the government is the driving force behind the ‘us versus them’ battles: low-flow toilets that don’t work well, shower heads you have to ‘fix’ and, soon, a smart grid that won’t let you have electricity when you want it.” The letter continued: “As every day goes by there is more ‘force’ and less ‘freedom.’ It just goes on and on. Don’t laugh at the hoarders of light bulbs. In the face of the enemy, it’s the only choice.”

Battles? Enemy? Well, these are the light-bulb wars—as the second letter showed too. It offered bitter terseness in recycling a gun-rights bumper-sticker slogan. In its entirety, the WSJ’s second letter said: “To adapt Charlton Heston: They can pry the last incandescent light bulb out of my cold, dead hands.”

A few days later, the editors who selected and printed that pair of letters offered a fusillade of their own: the editorial “The Light Bulb Police: Americans deserve their choice of illumination.” The editorial showed no awareness of the LED developments, maybe because the WSJ’s usual sharp awareness of the power of entrepreneurial innovation lessens when the government has intruded. It lamented, without full accuracy, that “we will all be required to buy compact fluorescent lights.” Then came sarcasm:

The editorial closed by criticizing Republicans for insufficient opposition: “If Republicans can’t understand the appeal of sparing Americans from the light bulb police, what are they good for?”

Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for “Science and the media.” He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.