From an article in Scientific American.

“If we are serious about tackling emissions and climate change, no climate-neutral source should be ignored,” argues Staffan Qvist, a physicist at Uppsala University, who led the effort to develop this nuclear plan. “The mantra ‘nuclear can’t be done quickly enough to tackle climate change’ is one of the most pervasive in the debate today and mostly just taken as true, while the data prove the exact opposite.”

The report claims that nuclear power could replace all fossil-fuel electricity generation within thirty years.

I personally would rather see how some newer designs work, both in terms of safety and cost, before advocating a lot of nuclear power plant construction.

From a discouraging piece by David Rotman in Technology Review:

as Robert C. Armstrong, director of the MIT Energy Initiative and one of the authors of the report, puts it: “Even if you give away the [photovoltaic] materials for free, you still couldn’t produce electricity as cheaply as with coal or natural gas.”

Read the whole thing.

The NBER Digest summarizes a paper by Stephen Holland and others.

Using data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the Energy Information Administration, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and other sources, the authors analyze energy use and emissions over a three-year period, from 2007 through 2009. They track energy production and consumption by the hour of the day within different regions. They conclude that on net, in the western United States and in Texas, driving PEVs would result in lower carbon-dioxide emissions than driving fuel-efficient hybrid cars. But in other regions, such as the upper Midwest, where the fuel mix for electricity generation is more heavily tilted toward coal, the charging of PEV batteries during the recommended hours of midnight to 4 AM could result in more emissions than those associated with the average car now on the road. “Underlying this result is a fundamental tension between load management of electricity and achieving environmental goals,” the authors conclude. “The hours when electricity is the least expensive to produce tend to be the hours with the greatest emissions.”

In addition, the fact that electric cars are subsidized suggests to me that their production uses more resources than that of ordinary cars. That probably includes more energy.

Do markets price cars efficiently, given that emissions are an externality? Of course not. But that does not mean the regulators and subsidizers know enough to make matters better.

Shawn Regan writes,

Last year, riding the buzz over dying bees, the Obama administration announced the creation of a pollinator-health task force to develop a “federal strategy” to promote honeybees and other pollinators. Last month the task force unveiled its long-awaited plan, the National Strategy to Promote the Health of Honey Bees and Other Pollinators. The plan aims to reduce honeybee-colony losses to “sustainable” levels and create 7 million acres of pollinator-friendly habitat. It also calls for more than $82 million in federal funding to address pollinator health.

But here’s something you probably haven’t heard: There are more honeybee colonies in the United States today than there were when colony collapse disorder began in 2006. In fact, according to data released in March by the Department of Agriculture, U.S. honeybee-colony numbers are now at a 20-year high. And those colonies are producing plenty of honey. U.S. honey production is also at a 10-year high.

He goes on to describe how market forces cause beekeepers to enhance the bee population, in spite of other forces that cause decline.

Note that the title of this post is supposed to be (bee?) a pun.

Jesse Ausubel writes,

Agriculture has always been the greatest raper of nature, stripping and simplifying and regimenting it, and reducing acreage left. Then, in America, in about 1940 acreage and yield decoupled. Since about 1940 American farmers have quintupled corn while using the same or even less land. Corn matters because it towers over other crops, totaling more tons than wheat, soy, rice, and potatoes together

The title of this post contains a redundancy. Capitalism is inherently sustainable, relentlessly producing more human satisfaction using fewer resources. What environmentalists call “sustainability” ought to be called primitivism, producing less human satisfaction using more resources. Read Ausubel’s entire piece.

The executive summary says, in part,

to increase the contribution of solar energy to long-term climate change mitigation, we strongly recommend that a large fraction of federal resources available for solar research and development focus on environmentally benign, emerging thin-fi lm technologies that are based on Earth-abundant materials. The recent shift of federal dollars for solar R&D away from fundamental research of this sort to focus on near-term cost reductions in c-Si technology should be reversed.

Interesting, since there has been such a strong MIT connection at the Department of Energy in recent years.

Although at a high level the report is favorable toward government support for solar energy, in terms of specifics it is often highly critical. My guess is that the outlook for improvement is poor. The beneficiaries of the current inefficient system of subsidies know who they are. There is probably little or no benefit to politicians to be had from following the recommendations of the report. Still, it looks like a great report to have out there.