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Will Nuclear and Biotech Save Us From Global Warming?

By cgfi | January 11, 2008

By:  Dennis T. Avery

 

Nuclear power and genetically engineered rice are set to help rescue the world from global warming. This isn’t really what anti-tech activists had in mind when they launched the campaign against fossil fuels, hoping to restrict our current lifestyles.

The British government has just announced that it will encourage a new generation of nuclear power plants to “supply unlimited amounts of electricity to the national grid,” to offset its declining energy harvests from North Sea oil and gas.

Meanwhile, a California genetic research firm is collaborating with a Chinese province to create UN-approved “carbon offsets,” by encouraging Chinese farmers to plant a new genetically engineered rice variety. The biotech rice needs only half the normal amount of nitrogen fertilizer to produce the same yield, and thus emits far less nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas 300 times as potent as CO2. 

Britain’s sudden move to expand nuclear power represents a major shift from the Labor government’s 2003 stance that nuclear power was “an unattractive option” for its energy future. Since then, oil prices have hit record highs and Middle East Islamic turmoil has further increased the importance of “energy independence.”  Nor has any more attractive energy option than nuclear come forward.

Britain thus joins France (80 percent of its electricity nuclear), Finland (building a new nuclear plant), Germany (Chancellor Merkel says she will not decommission her nuclear plants after all), and Eastern Europe (building several nuclear facilities) as pro-nuclear powers. China and India are planning and building dozens of nuclear facilities.

NRG Energy of Texas has filed for two new U.S. nuclear plants to come on line in 2014, reportedly the first of a new wave of American nuclear expansion.

The biotech rice might be as important to our Greenhouse future as the nuclear power. The International Rice Research Institute estimates that rice production around the world adds 100 million tons of CO2 equivalents per year because only about half of the nitrogen fertilizer applied to rice is absorbed by the plants. Much of the rest passes into the air as nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse agent.

Arcadia Bioscience’s new rice plants would cut nitrogen fertilizer use by 50–60 percent without reducing rice yields. The new technology would also sharply reduce the amounts of natural gas needed by fertilizer makers to capture natural nitrogen from the air.

Cutting greenhouse gas emissions through American lifestyle changes, in contrast, would probably require at least a two-thirds cut in U.S. energy use. The Marshall Institute suggests that a couple could achieve their share of such a greenhouse cut if they 1) gave up driving any car;  2) moved to a smaller home heated with natural gas (in increasingly short supply) rather than coal or oil; 3) set their thermostat 10 degrees lower in winter and 10 degrees higher in summer;  4) replaced their windows with energy-efficient types; 5) refused to fly; and 6) reduced their electric bills to half the current U.S. family average. Driving, flying, reading after dark and home freezers would put their emissions footprint far beyond any greenhouse limits. Obviously, a few Americans could or would comply.

Any massive shift to such lean lifestyles, however unlikely, would doom the suburbs, and require us to recreate the “tenements” that crowded our cities 100 years ago. Even then, most industrial production would have to be banned because of greenhouse emissions. Even imported manufactures would have to pay “energy taxes” on the CO2 used in their production. 

On the other hand, the earth’s net warming since 1940 is 0.2 degrees C, and there is a 95 percent correlation between our temperatures and sunspots, not with CO2.

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