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European Journal of Applied Sciences – Vol. 11, No. 1
Publication Date: February 25, 2023
DOI:10.14738/aivp.111.14126.
Manheimer, W. (2023). Sustainable Energy, the Climate Industrial Complex, and Windmills. European Journal of Applied
Sciences, Vol - 11(1). 649-665.
Services for Science and Education – United Kingdom
Sustainable Energy, the Climate Industrial Complex,
and Windmills
Wallace Manheimer
Retired from the US Naval Research Laboratory
Abstract
This article makes the case that 1: A reasonable approach to economically and
environmentally viable sustainable energy, an approach that is able to sustain
modern civilization now and in the future, is a continued use of fossil fuel, followed
by a gradual change to nuclear power first fueled by mined uranium, and then later
on by breeding nuclear fuel; 2: While the climate always has changed and always
will, there is no climate crisis; and 3: Windmills, solar panels and batteries alone
are not viable power sources for a modern civilization. They are neither
economically, nor environmentally viable.
INTRODUCTION
This manuscript was originally submitted to the American Journal of Physics (AJP) when the
journal solicited me and surely many others to contribute to a special issue Teaching about the
environment, sustainability, and climate change. Perusing the journal web site on its editorial
policy, one finds the following statement:
Where significant controversy exists on a subject, ..... AJP is usually not an appropriate venue.
Disagreements among experts should be settled within the research literature.
It is the AJP that decided on the special issue on this topic, and whether the journal likes it or
not, this is an enormously controversial issue. There is no way of avoiding this controversy in
any fair-minded media. In the popular press, one only has to read about the topic in the
Washington Post (I’ll call this side of the issue the believers) or the Wall Street Journal (the
skeptics). One would think that one was reading about totally separate issues.
These are two highly respectable, well-established American newspapers with excellent
reputations going back a century or more. The Washington Post’s has plenty of company in the
major media; the Wall Street Journal, unfortunately, does not. Hence, as much as one might
wish to, one cannot ignore the controversial nature of the topic that the AJP picked for their
special issue. Hopefully this journal will consider articles on the both the believers, and skeptics
side, although I am sure that the temptation to ignore the skeptics is very great, especially
considering the one-sided stance of the American Physical Society. Certainly, publishing articles
on both sides of a topic as unavoidably controversial as this, an issue which draws in top
scientific talent on both sides, is in the best scientific tradition. However, the editor rejected
the journal before even sending it to reviewers. Unfortunately, the AJP seems to be following
the American Physical Society in canceling all work which denies a nearly immediate onrushing
climate crisis.
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Needless to say, this manuscript is on the side of the skeptics. The evidence supporting the
skeptic’s side (well as the believers) is voluminous, there is no way a short article can do more
than scratch the surface. However, the AJP does recognize in its web site that:
Shorter manuscripts are generally more desirable than longer ones, and authors should
consider submitting longer derivations, additional applications, program scripts, and data
tables as supplementary material.
What the author hopes is that his two earlier works (1,2), published open access in the Journal
of Sustainable Development (JSD), and the numerous references cited within, can be considered
as supplementary material in the sense of the above quote. That journal is published by CCSE,
which on its web site claims:
The Canadian Center of Science and Education (CCSE) is a private for-profit organization
delivering support and services to educators and researchers in Canada and around the world.
Any claim made in this manuscript, without a specific citation can be safely assumed to be
backed up by Refs (1 and 2) and their references. Occasionally a paragraph or two is excerpted
from these references. It seems better not to have a (1) or a (2) citation splattered all over this
manuscript. However even these works, only scratch the surface, but scratch it much deeper
than can be done here.
To continue we use two quotes, the first by Richard Lindzen, probably the world’s leading
authority on geophysical fluid dynamics:
“What historians will definitely wonder about in future centuries is how deeply flawed logic,
obscured by shrewd and unrelenting propaganda, actually enabled a coalition of powerful
special interests to convince nearly everyone in the world that CO2 from human industry was
a dangerous, planet-destroying toxin. It will be remembered as the greatest mass delusion in
the history of the world- that CO2, the life of plants, was considered for a time to be a deadly
poison.”
The next (3,4) is by Bjorn Lomborg, the head of the think tank Copenhagen Consensus. For his
work, Lomborg was named one of TIME magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world.
He begins (4):
The tight relationship between the groups echoes the relationship among weapons makers,
researchers and the U.S. military during the Cold War. President Dwight Eisenhower famously
warned about the might of the "military-industrial complex," cautioning that "the potential for
the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist." He worried that "there is a
recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the
miraculous solution to all current difficulties."
This is certainly true of climate change. We are told that very expensive carbon regulations are
the only way to respond to global warming, despite ample evidence that this approach does not
pass a basic cost-benefit test. We must ask whether a "climate-industrial complex" is emerging,
pressing taxpayers to fork over money to please those who stand to gain.
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Manheimer, W. (2023). Sustainable Energy, the Climate Industrial Complex, and Windmills. European Journal of Applied Sciences, Vol - 11(1). 649-
665.
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.14738/aivp.111.14126
And concluding with:
The partnership among self-interested businesses, grandstanding politicians and alarmist
campaigners truly is an unholy alliance. The climate-industrial complex does not promote
discussion on how to overcome this challenge in a way that will be best for everybody. We
should not be surprised or impressed that those who stand to make a profit are among the
loudest calling for politicians to act.
Both claim that big money backs the climate change special interests. It is not easy to find the
total amount spent, on climate change research, propaganda, subsidies, ...., but there have been
published articles which, not only publish the amount, but do so very proudly (5,6). Reference
6 announces that in 2020 the world spent a total of $630B, but that this is not nearly enough.
In fact, it is only 10-15% of the needed amount to decarbonize the world power. In other words,
over say the 40 years it would take to accomplish such a transition, the world would need to
invest $200 TRILLION! There is certainly much more than enough money, now and in
prospect, to support a powerful coalition of special interests (Lindzen) or a climate industrial
complex (Lomborg).
This author now makes three points which he feels the believers must answer, and yet they
have not yet done so:
1. Carbon dioxide is necessary for life on this planet in just the same way that oxygen is.
CO2 is necessary for plants, oxygen for animals (obviously including humans). Without
CO2, there could be no plants, and without plants, there could be no animals. Hence what
do the believers think is the optimum level of atmospheric CO2 and why?
2. It is very easy to use the internet to find articles asserting that windmills and solar panels
are now, or will soon be cheaper than coal, gas or nuclear. If this is true, why is power
so much more expensive and so much less reliable in places that rely to a large extent
on wind and solar?
3. Proponents claim a very, very large cost ($200-300T) to transition to wind and solar
based carbon free energy. This paper, and many others, strongly believe it is not
possible, and if it were possible, doubts that the cost could be that low. Is it worth this
stupendous cost? Are there other things it would be better to spend $200T on?
Section II discusses the problem of obtaining sustainable energy for all the humans inhabiting
earth. Over the years, this author has put forward a plan for achieving sustainable energy via
what he calls fusion breeding. This is described in some detail in Reference 1, as well as in an
article in IJEAST (7). Like this ‘almost’ AJP article, I was originally solicited for this article by
the journal Fusion Science and Technology (FST), a publication of the American Nuclear Society
(ANS). It was eagerly accepted by 3 reviewers and the editor. However, the journal publisher
refused to publish it, most likely because the paper cast doubt on any sort of climate emergency.
I resubmitted it to IJEAST, and in an appendix, described my experience with FST it. Hence
fusion breeding takes up very little space in this article, except for this brief mention here and
in a few other places. Instead, this article concentrates on the other issues mentioned in the
AJP’s call for the special issue.
Section III briefly discussed the atmospheric effects making one skeptical of a rapidly onrushing
climate crisis. Section IV briefly discusses the inability of solar and wind to provide the
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necessary power. Section V presents conclusions. Finally, there is an appendix which briefly
introduces the CO2 coalition.
A BRIEF PRIMER ON SUSTAINABLE ENERGY
An excellent source of relevant data is the BP Energy Outlook [8], which is published every year.
Figure 1 is a plot of the energy use by region, end use sector, and fuel as a function of year, taken
from their 2019 issue. To the left of the vertical dashed line is the historical record, to the right,
BP’s extrapolations for the future.
Figure 1: Plot of energy use from BP Energy Outlook 2019. The vertical scale is in billions of
barrels of oil per year equivalent. To switch into more familiar units, 1 Btoe per year is about
one terawatt (TW).
At this point the world uses about 14 TW. As we can see from the middle graph, the power use
is very unequal. The 1.2 billion in the OECD countries use about 6 TW, or 5 kW per capita. The
other 6 billion people use ~8TW, or about 1.3kW per capita. How much longer will this be
acceptable?
Plagiarizing a bit from the American Declaration of Independence, the author holds this truth
to be self-evident, namely that it must be the goal of the world to bring the entire world up to
OECD standards, as soon as possible, say by mid-century. By midcentury, the world population
is expected to level off at ~ 10 billion, each of whom will demand a middle-class life style.
Bringing the world up to OECD standards would seem to necessitate 50 TW of world power.
However, energy efficiency (i.e. GDP per Watt) would be expected to improve as well (typically
0.5-1% per year) (9), so optimistically the number might be closer to 35-40TW. This means
that power must be added to the world power supply much faster than what BP predicts.
Extrapolating their graph to ~2050, they seem to say that power will increase by ~ 2TW per
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Manheimer, W. (2023). Sustainable Energy, the Climate Industrial Complex, and Windmills. European Journal of Applied Sciences, Vol - 11(1). 649-
665.
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.14738/aivp.111.14126
decade. However, to bring the world up to OECD standards by mid-century would necessitate
increasing it by ~ 7TW per decade. This, not climate change, is the true challenge the world
must face.
The developing world will use whatever fuel works best, and very likely at this time, that is coal.
The Chinese and Indians are very rapidly and enormously increasing their coal use today. China
today is by far the largest CO2 emitter in the world and they are still building coal fired power
plants at a rapid pace. India is doing everything it can to catch up. Soon Africa, the rest of Asia,
and Latin America will do the same. Nothing can stop this. In fact, the Unites States has
developed a new coal power plant called Ultra Super Critical. It burns at a higher temperature,
meaning its efficiency is now ~40% rather than the more traditional 33%. Also, it is clean, in
that the only effluents are CO2 and water vapor. All other pollutants are scrubbed out of the
plant discharge. Coal could now be clean. The first ultra-super critical plant is the John Turk
plant in Arkansas (10). Many more have since been built.
After 40 years of massive subsidies for solar and wind, the percentage of world power from
these two sources has moved up from zero % in 1980 to ~2% in 2021. Clearly with these
subsidies producing so small an effect, at the very least, we should be thinking seriously of
sustainable alternatives.
Whether your concern is exhausting fossil fuel (we will exhaust it in 1/3 the time at 40TW as at
14), or is worrying about CO2 in the atmosphere, or is knowing that solar and wind cannot do
the job; these lead to one and only one conclusion. Nuclear power must play an important role.
Let us think of increasing nuclear power by about a factor of 20 to ~ 20TW (i.e. ~7TWe)
worldwide by mid- century, reducing fossil fuel somewhat to ~10TW, so it will last at least as
long as current estimates. This obviously denies the fear that fossil fuel will be the cause of a
nearly immediate climate crisis. Finally, it proposes increasing hydro, solar and wind to 1-3
TW each. This would obviously require something of a crash program in expanding nuclear
power. There is every reason to think this possible technically, although perhaps not politically.
At least in the United States, regulations, lawsuits, protest marches, bureaucratic delays,
environmental impact statements done and redone numerous times, NIMBY (not in my back
yard), BANANA (build absolutely nothing anywhere near anything)... have all thrown sand in
the gears of nuclear power for decades. These could be the biggest problem it faces. Even if the
nuclear company is successful, typically 20 years are wasted as they strangle in bureaucratic
red tape and court cases, enormously increasing the price of nuclear power. Regulation reform
is the American, and perhaps the worldwide nuclear industry’s biggest battle right now.
Yet even if the nuclear industry solves this problem, it faces a much bigger problem on the
physics and technical side. Fissile 235U comprises only 0.7% of the uranium resource. Supplies
of mined 235U are limited, certainly much less than the reserve of fossil fuel. One rather
pessimistic estimate is that the energy resource about 60-300 Terawatt years (11). Other
estimates are higher, but no estimate is high enough, that if it were correct, there would be
enough uranium to sustainably supply the world’s thermal nuclear reactors with 20-30TW (i.e.
~6-10TWe).
Hence some sort of fuel breeding is necessary. Breeding brings into play the entire uranium
and thorium resource. To get an idea of the size of this resource, thermal nuclear reactors have
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been delivering about 300 GWe (900 GWth) for about 40 years. This means that in depleted
uranium alone, there is sufficient fuel for ~ 3 TWe for ~ 400 years! Nuclear fuel via breeding,
for all practical purposes, is inexhaustible and sustainable in the same sense as wind or solar.
There are certainly conventional approaches to breeding, including fast neutron reactors, and
thermal thorium reactors and these might certainly be routes to sustainable power. But the
options are few. This author has argued for more than 20 years that fusion should also be
considered as a breeding option; and has put forward plans, plans as detailed as any can be for
something decades in the future (1,7). This, then is the author’s vision of economical,
environmentally sustainable power.
SOME ELEMENTARY CLIMATE SCIENCE
The basic scientific quantity to calculate when considering the greenhouse effect, is what is
called the CO2 radiative forcing. To do so, one needs a start date and a final date (or equivalently
an initial CO2 concentration and a final concentration). One then calculates the added radiation
coming down to earth, in W/m2 from this added concentration. This is to be compared with the
maximum solar radiation striking the earth at high noon, about 1 kW/m2. The IPCC
(International panel on climate change) calculation from their Sixth Assessment report (12)
shows a radiation forcing of 1.75W/m2 from 1750 (CO2 at 280 ppm) to today (420). In a
corresponding, more detailed calculation (13), Wijngaarden and Happer (W&H) have
calculated a radiation forcing of 3 W/m2 arising from an increase in CO2 concentration from
400 to 800.
Two things are apparent from these two calculations. First of all, the effect of additional CO2 on
the radiation forcing is not linear, but has a much weaker dependence of radiation forcing on
concentration due to saturation of the absorption lines. That is as concentration increases, a
larger and larger portion of what they reradiate, is also locally reabsorbed. Secondly, and
perhaps even more amazing, the believer’s calculation (IPCC) and the skeptic’s (W&H) are not
very different. The differences are not with the basic science, but how the results are
interpreted. IPCC sees calamity, W&H see a slight effect on temperature, perhaps an increase
of a degree or two centigrade.
If the world keeps using fossil fuel at 10 TW, as it does today, this adds about 2 ppm of CO2 to
the atmosphere per year. In other words it would take 200 years to double the CO2
concentration to 800 ppm and increase the temperature by a degree or two. However long
before that, the world hopefully will make a transition to nuclear power.
Let us look at the actual space based temperature (14) from 1979 (335 ppm) to today (415) as
shown in Figure (2)
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Manheimer, W. (2023). Sustainable Energy, the Climate Industrial Complex, and Windmills. European Journal of Applied Sciences, Vol - 11(1). 649-
665.
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.14738/aivp.111.14126
Figure (2) the space based temperature measurement from 1979 to today, along with a line
through it drawn by the author, estimating the average over the many random cycles. It
shows a temperature increase of ~ 0.6oC.
In the time of the measurement of Fig (2), the radiation forcing would be ~ 1W/m2 (that is
[80/140]x1.75), or about 0.1% of the solar radiation. The simplest theory would predict that
this forcing would give rise to a 0.1% increase in temperature on the Kelvin scale, or about
0.3oC. The actual increase seems to be about double this. However there are many other
meteorological effects which would give have at least as great an impact on the earths
temperature as this. In any case, the increased radiation forcing from additional CO2 today
hardly seems to indicate any need to panic.
The question then is given the calculations of radiation forcing and the results of the space
based measurements, why is there a panic? Most likely the answer is that numerical
simulations of the climate indicate there will be a calamity. There have been a large number of
simulations over a 40 year period, all of which predict runaway heating.
However by now, one can compare the simulations with reality. This is shown in Figure (3) in
a graph that John Christy has presented in congressional testimony (15). Christy is one of the
people who measure and archive the space based temperature. The fact that he has presented
the graph in sworn congressional testimony means, to this author, that he was very, very careful
in amassing the data.
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Manheimer, W. (2023). Sustainable Energy, the Climate Industrial Complex, and Windmills. European Journal of Applied Sciences, Vol - 11(1). 649-
665.
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.14738/aivp.111.14126
Figure (4): The smaller blue triangles are the limits of northernmost forest 4000 years ago
during the Holocene climate optimum; and the larger red triangles, today. Clearly the Holocene
climate was sufficiently warmer than today, so that the forests could exist ~ 200 miles further
north. Redrawn from Figure 46 of Lamb (19).
This is hardly the only evidence of warmer periods than today. During the Roman Climate
Optimum, the Romans established vineyards all over England right up to Hadrian’s wall. These
were established millenia before hybrid cold weather resistant grapes were developed,
indicating a much warmer climate than today. A thousand years ago in the Midieval Warm
Period, the Vikings established outposts in Greenland, and grew Barley there. In 2012, modern
explorers found some of this Barley and established that it is indeed ~1000 years old. In all of
these warm and cold periods, CO2 was about constant at ~280ppm. The climate industrial
complex conveniently ignores this solid evidence that with or without CO2 enhancement in the
atmosphere, the earth’s temperature has varied considerably over the period of human
civilization. In the warm periods, civilization flourished; in the cold period it suffered greatly.
SOME DIFFICULTIES WITH SOLAR AND WIND POWER
There are many difficulties with wind and solar power, issues related to economics, wastage of
rare materials, unreliability, and environmental issues. These are all dealt with in 2 and
references therein, but in the limited space available here, we will discuss principally
environmental issues. While wind and solar are advertised as ‘clean energy’, actually when all
aspects of it are considered, they is not only ‘dirty energy’, but in fact are the ‘dirtiest energy’.
Virtually all of the laudatory writings on wind and solar list only the peak energy (actually
power); the solar power at high noon on a summer day, the wind power when the wind is at