Over time, what resulted from these assessments was that we selected the following sources to provide commercial electricity: hydroelectric, coal, nuclear, natural gas, and oil. (Oil is by far the smallest source.)
Note that each of these current sources meet ALL of the above six essential criteria — and if they don’t (like oil recently becoming more expensive), then they get replaced, by other conventional sources that do.
As a result, today, and a hundred years from now, these sources can provide ALL of the electrical needs of our society — and continue to meet all six criteria.
So what’s the problem?
A new criteria has been recently added to the list of criteria: environmental impact — and the current number one environmental impact consideration is greenhouse gas emissions (e.g. CO2).
So why has this joined the Big Six? It is a direct result of the current debate on global warming. In response to intense political pressure, governments have acquiesced to these forces to make emissions an additional criterion.
Having government step in and mandate that utility companies change the principles that have been the foundation of our electrical supply system for a hundred years is disconcerting, transforming such a successful system based on a position that is not yet scientifically resolved.
Furthermore, this new criteria for electrical supply sources now has taken priority over all the other six. It has, as of late, become the ONLY benchmark of importance — the other six have essentially been put aside, and are now given only lip service.
In this unraveling of sensibility there is one final incredible insult to science: alternative sources of commercial electricity that claim to meet this new super-criteria (to make a consequential impact on CO2 reduction) don’t even have to prove that they actually do it!
Let's look at the environmental poster child: wind power, and examine each of the six time-tested criteria, then the new one...
Ihering Alcoforado on 23 Aug 10"The objective of this study is to: compile the available recent literature on ILUC emissions; compare these emissions with the assumed gains of biofuels; assess how ILUC changes the carbon balance of using biofuels; formulate policies to avoid these extra emissions associated with ILUC. Trends in land use, with and without biofuels All the studies on global agricultural markets reviewed predict that new arable land will be required to meet future global demand for food and feed. Although there will be increased productivity on current arable land (intensification), food and feed demand will probably grow faster, which means that mobilization of new land is likely to occur. Biofuels produced from crops (the current mainstream practice) will add extra demand for crops like wheat, rice, maize, rapeseed and palm oil. This will increase prices for these crops (as well as for land) and lead to two impacts: intensification of agricultural production and conversion of forests and grasslands to arable land. In this report we consider the issue of indirect land use change initiated by EU biofuels policy and seek to answer the following questions: What is the probability of biofuels policies initiating land use changes? What greenhouse gas emissions may result from indirect land use change, expressed as a factor in the mathematical relation given above? What technical measures can be applied and what policy measures adopted to limit or entirely mitigate indirect land use change and the associated greenhouse gas emissions? We first (Chapter 2) broadly discuss the mechanism of indirect land use change. We next discuss why there is a perception among stakeholders that there is a serious risk that EU biofuels policy will initiate indirect land use change (Chapter 3) and consider the figures cited by other studies as an indication of the magnitude the associated greenhouse gas emissions (Chapter 4). We then broadly consid
