The contrast between two op-eds—one at the New York Times, the other at the Wall Street Journal—invites attention especially when considered in light of the alarm conveyed at Science Progress, where physicist and Climate Progress blogger Joe Romm begins a posting this way:
A new report by PricewaterhouseCoopers finds humanity has its foot on the accelerator as we head toward a cliff. The only hope is very rapid deployment of carbon-free technology starting ASAP.
The Times op-ed 'Solar panels for every home' comes from David Crane, president of the energy company NRG, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr, a senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council and president of Waterkeeper Alliance. They frame their argument with superstorm Sandy:
Solar photovoltaic technology can significantly reduce our reliance on fossil fuels and our dependence on the grid. Electricity-producing photovoltaic panels installed on houses, on the roofs of warehouses and big box stores and over parking lots can be wired so that they deliver power when the grid fails.
Asserting that solar-panel costs have plummeted, they ask why there's not 'more of a push for this clean, affordable, safe and inexhaustible source of electricity.' They answer that utility companies oppose it and that the red tape is too burdensome. They adduce the example of Germany, where financial and convenience costs are low and where, they say, more than a million roofs host solar panels. A US transition to renewable power, they assert, 'could create millions of domestic jobs and power in this country with American resourcefulness, initiative and entrepreneurial energy while taking a substantial bite out of the nation's emissions of greenhouse gases.'
From a few days later, the subhead on the WSJ piece 'Harvard needs remedial energy math' comes close to directly contradicting Crane and Kennedy. It makes a global energy assertion: 'Wind and solar power cannot possibly meet the world's growing need for more electricity.'
The op-ed's author, Robert Bryce, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, attacks the efforts of Bill McKibben's organization 350.org to persuade students nationwide that 'investing in and using fossil fuels is so wrong it should be seen as the equivalent of support for apartheid.' The headline's Harvard mention refers to an undergraduate referendum calling for fossil fuel divestment by that university's endowment.
Bryce condemns the McKibben campaign's math:
* 'The absurdity of the calls for a 'fossil free' future can be illustrated by looking exclusively at the explosive growth in the world's demand for electricity, the commodity that separates rich countries from the poor ones.'
* 'Just to keep pace with demand growth, the wind industry will need to cover a land area of some 48,000 square miles with wind turbines per year, an area about the size of North Carolina.'
* 'Just to keep pace with the growth in global electricity demand, the world would have to install about 23 times as much solar-energy capacity as now exists in Germany, and it would have to do so year after year.'
At the end, Bryce sums up: 'Harvard is among America's most prestigious schools. But it is apparent that the students who voted in favor of the divestiture proposal—and presumably to rid the world of fossil fuels—didn't, ahem, do the math.'
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. 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.
