Profile of a Company That Funds the Famous Anti-nuke Amory Lovins: Chevron.

[NNadir]

So many dangerous fossil fuel companies, so little time. It's tough to explore all of "heckuva job" Amory Lovins friends, not that his pals at BP (like his pals at the now defunct Enron) need any further introduction from me. They've made quite a name for themselves.

And if anyone wants to know how I know who Amory's friends are, well they can just go to his website. (I've added a few bolds from my last post: Someone pointed me to Anglo-American, and boy, that one will be fun...but today let's talk about Chevron.) Is Chevron Texaco a friend of Amory's? Let's ask Amory himself:

http://www.rmi.org/rmi/Amory+B.+Lovins">Famous Anti-nuke Amory Lovins describes his revenue sources:

Mr. Lovins’s other clients have included Accenture, Allstate, AMD, Anglo American, Anheuser-Busch, Bank of America, Baxter, Borg-Warner, BP, HP Bulmer, Carrier, Chevron, Ciba-Geigy, CLSA, ConocoPhillips, Corning, Dow, Equitable, GM, HP, Invensys, Lockheed Martin, Mitsubishi, Monsanto, Motorola, Norsk Hydro, Petrobras, Prudential, Rio Tinto, Royal Dutch/Shell, Shearson Lehman Amex, STMicroelectronics, Sun Oil, Suncor, Texas Instruments, UBS, Unilever, Westinghouse, Xerox, major developers, and over 100 energy utilities. His public-sector clients have included the OECD, the UN, and RFF; the Australian, Canadian, Dutch, German, and Italian governments; 13 states; Congress, and the U.S. Energy and Defense Departments.

We've been hearing on this website all kinds of stuff about tritium, mostly from people who don't know shit from shinola about tritium, which they assume, with not a shred of justification is a serious health hazard.

Actually, one can calculate the likely health consequences of all the tritium on earth, since concentrations of its levels have been continuously measured for more than half a century, and have been rapidly falling since 1963, which as luck would have it, is just about the time that the nuclear industry began to expand to the world's largest, by far, source of climate change gas free primary energy.

I have discussed this point elsewhere, showing that the likely number of deaths connected with tritium, among the six billion people on this planet, is probably in the neighborhood of 13, as opposed to several thousand in 1963: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/1/1/17162/29083">Profile of Radioactive Substance Associated With Nuclear Power: Tritium

This is easily handled with direct calculation, but if you can't do calculations because you know no science, you just post scare stories while working to expand carcinogenic coal/oil/gas/biomass schemes that actually kill more than one million people each year.

I have also discussed why tritium levels were so much higher in 1963 than they are now: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/3/15/708477/-Every-Cloud-Has-A-Silver-Lining,-Even-Mushroom-Clouds:-Cs-137-and-Watching-the-Soil-Die.">Every Cloud Has A Silver Lining, Even Mushroom Clouds: Cs-137 and Watching the Soil Die.

But we were talking about cancer, um, I mean, Chevron, a company that funds the dangerous fossil fuel green washer and anti-science freak Amory Lovins.

Well cancer and Chevron-Texaco or um, http://chevrontoxico.com/news-and-multimedia/2008/0220-chevrons-human-rights-record.html">Chevron-Toxico um, certainly isn't cancer free, is it? As I pointed out in another thread recently, the carcinogenicity of particulates, including those released by refining operations, diesel fuel burning, gasoline burning, kerosene burning and um, wood burning, isn't exactly mysterious: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=115x246578">A Mechanistic Review of Carcinogenic, Mutagenic, Cardiotoxic Air Pollution Particulates.

Even when it was being deliberately dumped into the atmosphere in nuclear weapons test of the kinds described in my links, all the tritium on earth couldn't kill as many people in a year as particulates kill in two or three days.

And then there's um, Amory Lovins' pals at Chevron-Texaco.

Between 1964 and 1992, Chevron dumped about 18.5 billion gallons of oil laced water near the Ecuadoran town of Lago Agrio, the headwaters of the Amazon river basin. To accomplish this wonderful bit of business, Chevron simply paid bribes, something that Chevron says it's opponents are doing: http://www.chevron.com/news/press/release/?id=2009-09-07

Chevron is also suing a documentary maker to get control of his films.

Another strategy is to ask for a change of venue away from Ecuador, where Lago Agrio actually is:

http://www.law.com/jsp/cc/PubArticleCC.jsp?id=1202434043627

An account of the entire case is available from the Independent in the UK:

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/green-living/who-will-pay-for-amazons-chernobyl-1863284.html">Who will pay for Amazon's 'Chernobyl'?

But it's the earnest Pablo Fajardo, a 37-year-old Ecuadorian lawyer representing 30,000 local and indigenous Ecuadorians known as Los Afectados (the affected ones), who emerges as the real star. One of 10 children born to a poor family on the Ecuadorian coast, Fajardo moved to the nearby oil town of Shushufindi near Lago Agrio aged 14. A labourer turned human rights activist turned lawyer, the Chevron battle is his first case.

Fresh-faced and dressed in shorts, white T-shirt and trainers, he welcomes me into his small office in Lago Agrio, where piles of neatly stacked and numbered A4 envelopes fill a floor-to-ceiling shelving unit covering the whole of one wall.

He smiles wryly at the paper mountain: "We now have around 80,000 soil and water samples from the affected areas – more than any other trial in the world. At least 50,000 of those results were produced by Chevron's own scientists or technicians and most reveal illegally high levels of toxic chemicals and crude."

Chevron, which took over Texaco nine years after its operations in Ecuador were taken over by Petroecuador, denies responsibility for the damage. A Chevron spokesperson said: "Regrettably, Crude has only scratched the surface of the Ecuador story – it is long on emotion but short on fact. We recognise that the people of the Oriente face legitimate health concerns. Where we part company with the film-maker is about responsibility. The health issues in the Oriente are not related to Texaco Petroleum's former operations."

In 1998 Texaco were granted release from liability by the Ecuadorian government, having spent $40bn on, "remediation work". This settlement protects Chevron from any future government claims but does not protect it from other third-party claims.

The claimants consider the clean-up work performed by Texaco to be unsatisfactory, and cleaned only a small fraction of the hundreds of abandoned waste pits which Texaco had created, without touching the polluted groundwater, rivers and soil. For each oil well drilled, two to five accompanying waste pits were dug directly into the ground to dump the toxic sludge of drilling muds, waste oil and chemical-laced "produced waters" that come out of the ground when drilling for oil.

While waste pits might be standard practice, leaving them open, unlined and then abandoning them untreated certainly isn't. The clean-up deal struck between a Texaco lawyer and the Ecuadorian government is widely interpreted as an implicit admission that the concession area was unacceptably polluted.

Personal testimonies from locals allege that "remediation" sometimes involved little more than shoving soil over the toxic pits, a measure US consulting lawyer for the plaintiffs, Steven Donziger, has likened to "curing skin cancer with make-up".

Fajardo said: "Imagine a family living next to one of the waste pits Chevron has promised is clean. This family trusts the company and starts growing crops and digging wells for drinking water but in reality virtually nothing has been done. It's a huge problem."

Later that afternoon I'm taken on what Fajardo wryly dubs the "toxi-tour" – a visit to several of the nearby pits around Lago Agrio with Donald Moncayo Jimenez, one of the group leaders for the afectados. Jimenez digs down into one of the waste pits close to the Lago-2 oil well using a long metal pole. After only a metre or so below the surface, the soil changes unequivocally to crude.

I now turn this thread over to indignant anti-nukes who will make insipid (but revealing) comments about how Amory Lovins is one of the world's great environmentalists.

[jpak]

1. BOOOooo - Amory Lovins IS one the world's greatest environmentalists

solar will save us

yup!

:rofl:

[Kolesar]

2. Flame bait...eom

[Go2Peace]

3. Another CRUSADE post. Nuclear good, solar, wind, etc not so good.

When you start to see someone acting like they are on a crusade to rid the world of dissention, you often find out they are fighting their own inner demons.

So why is someone, who meets with Nuclear Lobbiests, so vehement and anti most every alternative except Nuclear? Maybe because that is their *job*?

From NNadir's diary. This was in 2007. Surely the nuclear representatives have had more contact with Mr Nadir. Of course, he never mentions it further.

"Last week, on Friday, I traveled to Washington and I met with a few representatives of the nuclear industry. Nice guys, by the way. They bought me lunch. I made a point of not ordering the cheapest thing on the menu by the way and it was a nice restaurant. The nuclear industry gave me a wonderful golf shirt and several very nice trade show trinkets. The night before I met with the nuclear industry I sat and talked with Rod Adams, who is a nuclear entrepreneur. You can hear almost everything I said to Rod Adams by the way on the internet, except for our opening discussions about Glenn Seaborg. (I asked him to delete that part because of my mumbling.)
"

Mr Nadir completely surrounds himself with commercial nuclear industry representatives and spokesmen, it seems odd for someone who is so heavily aligned with the nuclear corporate industry to be calling out someone else who also likes to hobnob and work through corporate venues promoting alternative energy and conservation.

[Javaman]

4. Very good find!

wow, so nnadir is just another corporate stooge. Why am I not surprised?

[Name removed]

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[NNadir]

5. We'll just chalk this up to bad reading comprehension and typical anti-nuke

making stuff up.

I have openly travelled to NEI offices - and stated as much. I'm not on some kind of secret mission.

I also said what they gave me, a golf shirt and lunch and a nice trade show trinket.

It's not like I've been paid hundreds of thousands of dollar per year - or in fact, any cash - to hold my views, unlike Amory Lovins who is paid hundreds of thousands of dollars per year by dangerous fossil fuel companies, the one's anti-nukes couldn't care less about.

We are still left with the anti-nuke contention that the only reason that someone could possibly do anything is for money. The existence of such a contention helps obviate my contention that anti-nukes have a very low moral order.

For the record, Rod Adams is a friend of mine. I contacted him through his website, because after years and years and years and years of private study of nuclear energy in paper based libraries, he was one of the first writers on nuclear energy I encountered on the internet.

He is a very fine person. I have met him, and have been interviewed by him on his radio show.

I also have met David Bradish at the NEI, a fine very bright young man and Eric McErlain, another great guy. I shook hands with Scott Pederson.

So what?

The NEI is funded by power companies. To the extent they support nuclear energy, they're my kind of guys, to the extent they have dangerous coal and dangerous coal facilities, I oppose them.

Now if the nuclear industry were to offer me a job, I would take it if it paid more than my current job, because I would consider working in the nuclear industry an ethical undertaking. I would not take a job with any of Amory Lovins "friends," with the possible exception of Westinghouse, because I hate dangerous fossil fuels.

I am not "completely surrounded" with nuclear spokesman. God knows I'm not Amory Lovins and I don't surround myself with corporate types.

This might come as a surprise to the anti-nukes who clearly do not think, but what I think comes from my private knowledge and private research.

I think the people who met me during my one visit to the NEI were impressed by my knowledge, and certainly didn't try to tell me anything.

I note that you don't explain whether you've been to the dangerous fossil fuel funded RMI offices, the ones in the shopping center no where near a walkable community.

Most anti-nukes are not paid off, I think. The vast majority of them are simply uneducated and thoughtless, immoral, indifferent, lazy and more than a little stupid.

[Name removed]

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[jpak]

10. Wow - you actually shook hands with Scott Pederson!!1111

:wow:























:rofl:

[kristopher]

12. Why do the disciples of the the Church of Uranium try to discredit Amory Lovins?

Lovins has successfully dedicated his life to improving our environmental footprint when it comes to energy usage. As can be seen in the OP he works with corporations seeking to find ways to energy efficiency in their operations. Jared Diamond also believes that solutions to our current problems are best pursued by finding the incentives within the market that move corporations to act in ways that are positive environmentally rather than negative.

Lovins became prominent in the 70s with a thesis that looked at the cultural and social impacts of centralized thermal generation such as coal and nuclear power. His work (link below) is blamed by members of those who worship at the Throne of Uranus for the lack of support ended the first Bandwagon market for building of nuclear power plants in the 70s.



Now that the Church of Uranium is trying exploit climate change to achieve a Revival they are again focused on Lovins.
This is the link to download his 77 Foreign Policy paper: http://www.rmi.org/rmi/Library/E77-01_EnergyStrategyRoadNotTaken

And these are for two of his more recent writing:

http://www.rmi.org/rmi/Library/E08-01_NuclearIllusion


http://www.rmi.org/rmi/Library/E09-01_NuclearPowerClimateFixOrFolly


This a a selection from another of his open access writings on nuclear power. It is followed by an analysis by Stanford professor Mark Jacobson of the available and workable solutions to climate change, energy security and air pollution mortality. It shows that independent of Lovins' perspective on distributed generation vs central thermal generation, nuclear power is still a third rate choice for meeting our AGW, energy security and air pollution mortality needs.

Public discussions of nuclear power, and a surprising number of articles in peer-reviewed
journals, are increasingly based on four notions unfounded in fact or logic: that

1. variable renewable sources of electricity (windpower and photovoltaics) can provide little
or no reliable electricity because they are not “baseload”—able to run all the time;
2. those renewable sources require such enormous amounts of land, hundreds of times more
than nuclear power does, that they’re environmentally unacceptable;
3. all options, including nuclear power, are needed to combat climate change; and
4. nuclear power’s economics matter little because governments must use it anyway to
protect the climate.

For specificity, this review of these four notions focuses on the nuclear chapter of Stewart
Brand’s 2009 book Whole Earth Discipline, which encapsulates similar views widely expressed
and cross-cited by organizations and individuals advocating expansion of nuclear power. It’s
therefore timely to subject them to closer scrutiny than they have received in most public media.

This review relies chiefly on five papers, which I gave Brand over the past few years but on
which he has been unwilling to engage in substantive discussion. They document6 why
expanding nuclear power is uneconomic, is unnecessary, is not undergoing the claimed
renaissance in the global marketplace (because it fails the basic test of cost-effectiveness ever
more robustly), and, most importantly, will reduce and retard climate protection. That’s
because—the empirical cost and installation data show—new nuclear power is so costly and
slow that, based on empirical U.S. market data, it will save about 2–20 times less carbon per
dollar, and about 20–40 times less carbon per year, than investing instead in the market
winners—efficient use of electricity and what The Economist calls “micropower,”...


The “baseload” myth

Brand rejects the most important and successful renewable sources of electricity for one key
reason stated on p. 80 and p. 101. On p. 80, he quotes novelist and author Gwyneth Cravens’s
definition of “baseload” power as “the minimum amount of proven, consistent, around-the-clock,
rain-or-shine power that utilities must supply to meet the demands of their millions of
customers.”21 (Thus it describes a pattern of aggregated customer demand.) Two sentences
later, he asserts: “So far comes from only three sources: fossil fuels, hydro, and
nuclear.” Two paragraphs later, he explains this dramatic leap from a description of demand to a
restriction of supply: “Wind and solar, desirable as they are, aren’t part of baseload because they
are intermittent—productive only when the wind blows or the sun shines. If some sort of massive
energy storage is devised, then they can participate in baseload; without it, they remain
supplemental, usually to gas-fired plants.”

That widely heard claim is fallacious. The manifest need for some amount of steady, reliable
power is met by generating plants collectively, not individually. That is, reliability is a statistic-
al attribute of all the plants on the grid combined. If steady 24/7 operation or operation at any
desired moment were instead a required capability of each individual power plant, then the grid
couldn’t meet modern needs, because no kind of power plant is perfectly reliable. For example,
in the U.S. during 2003–07, coal capacity was shut down an average of 12.3% of the time (4.2%
without warning); nuclear, 10.6% (2.5%); gas-fired, 11.8% (2.8%). Worldwide through 2008,
nuclear units were unexpectedly unable to produce 6.4% of their energy output.26 This inherent
intermittency of nuclear and fossil-fueled power plants requires many different plants to back
each other up through the grid. This has been utility operators’ strategy for reliable supply
throughout the industry’s history. Every utility operator knows that power plants provide energy
to the grid, which serves load. The simplistic mental model of one plant serving one load is valid
only on a very small desert island. The standard remedy for failed plants is other interconnected
plants that are working—not “some sort of massive energy storage devised.”

Modern solar and wind power are more technically reliable than coal and nuclear plants; their
technical failure rates are typically around 1–2%. However, they are also variable resources
because their output depends on local weather, forecastable days in advance with fair accuracy
and an hour ahead with impressive precision. But their inherent variability can be managed by
proper resource choice, siting, and operation. Weather affects different renewable resources
differently; for example, storms are good for small hydro and often for windpower, while flat
calm weather is bad for them but good for solar power. Weather is also different in different
places: across a few hundred miles, windpower is scarcely correlated, so weather risks can be
diversified. A Stanford study found that properly interconnecting at least ten windfarms can
enable an average of one-third of their output to provide firm baseload power. Similarly, within
each of the three power pools from Texas to the Canadian border, combining uncorrelated
windfarm sites can reduce required wind capacity by more than half for the same firm output,
thereby yielding fewer needed turbines, far fewer zero-output hours, and easier integration.

A broader assessment of reliability tends not to favor nuclear power. Of all 132 U.S. nuclear
plants built—just over half of the 253 originally ordered—21% were permanently and
prematurely closed due to reliability or cost problems. Another 27% have completely failed for a
year or more at least once. The surviving U.S. nuclear plants have lately averaged ~90% of their
full-load full-time potential—a major improvement31 for which the industry deserves much
credit—but they are still not fully dependable. Even reliably-running nuclear plants must shut
down, on average, for ~39 days every ~17 months for refueling and maintenance. Unexpected
failures occur too, shutting down upwards of a billion watts in milliseconds, often for weeks to
months. Solar cells and windpower don’t fail so ungracefully.

Power plants can fail for reasons other than mechanical breakdown, and those reasons can affect
many plants at once. As France and Japan have learned to their cost, heavily nuclear-dependent
regions are particularly at risk because drought, earthquake, a serious safety problem, or a
terrorist incident could close many plants simultaneously. And nuclear power plants have a
unique further disadvantage: for neutron-physics reasons, they can’t quickly restart after an
emergency shutdown, such as occurs automatically in a grid power failure...

From Amory Lovins
Four Nuclear Myths: A Commentary on Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Discipline and on Similar Writings

Journal or Magazine Article, 2009

Available for download: http://www.rmi.org/rmi/Library/2009-09_FourNuclearMyths

Some nuclear-power advocates claim that wind and solar power can’t provide much if any reliable power because they’re not “baseload,” that they use too much land, that all energy options including new nuclear build are needed to combat climate change, and that nuclear power’s economics don’t matter because climate change will force governments to dictate energy choices and pay for whatever is necessary. None of these claims can withstand analytic scrutiny.

Abstract here: http://www.rsc.org/publishing/journals/EE/article.asp?doi=b809990c

Full article for download here: http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/revsolglobwarmairpol.htm


Energy Environ. Sci., 2009, 2, 148 - 173, DOI: 10.1039/b809990c

Review of solutions to global warming, air pollution, and energy security

Mark Z. Jacobson

Abstract
This paper reviews and ranks major proposed energy-related solutions to global warming, air pollution mortality, and energy security while considering other impacts of the proposed solutions, such as on water supply, land use, wildlife, resource availability, thermal pollution, water chemical pollution, nuclear proliferation, and undernutrition.

Nine electric power sources and two liquid fuel options are considered. The electricity sources include solar-photovoltaics (PV), concentrated solar power (CSP), wind, geothermal, hydroelectric, wave, tidal, nuclear, and coal with carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology. The liquid fuel options include corn-ethanol (E85) and cellulosic-E85. To place the electric and liquid fuel sources on an equal footing, we examine their comparative abilities to address the problems mentioned by powering new-technology vehicles, including battery-electric vehicles (BEVs), hydrogen fuel cell vehicles (HFCVs), and flex-fuel vehicles run on E85.

Twelve combinations of energy source-vehicle type are considered. Upon ranking and weighting each combination with respect to each of 11 impact categories, four clear divisions of ranking, or tiers, emerge.

Tier 1 (highest-ranked) includes wind-BEVs and wind-HFCVs.
Tier 2 includes CSP-BEVs, geothermal-BEVs, PV-BEVs, tidal-BEVs, and wave-BEVs.
Tier 3 includes hydro-BEVs, nuclear-BEVs, and CCS-BEVs.
Tier 4 includes corn- and cellulosic-E85.

Wind-BEVs ranked first in seven out of 11 categories, including the two most important, mortality and climate damage reduction. Although HFCVs are much less efficient than BEVs, wind-HFCVs are still very clean and were ranked second among all combinations.

Tier 2 options provide significant benefits and are recommended.

Tier 3 options are less desirable. However, hydroelectricity, which was ranked ahead of coal-CCS and nuclear with respect to climate and health, is an excellent load balancer, thus recommended.

The Tier 4 combinations (cellulosic- and corn-E85) were ranked lowest overall and with respect to climate, air pollution, land use, wildlife damage, and chemical waste. Cellulosic-E85 ranked lower than corn-E85 overall, primarily due to its potentially larger land footprint based on new data and its higher upstream air pollution emissions than corn-E85.

Whereas cellulosic-E85 may cause the greatest average human mortality, nuclear-BEVs cause the greatest upper-limit mortality risk due to the expansion of plutonium separation and uranium enrichment in nuclear energy facilities worldwide. Wind-BEVs and CSP-BEVs cause the least mortality.

The footprint area of wind-BEVs is 2–6 orders of magnitude less than that of any other option. Because of their low footprint and pollution, wind-BEVs cause the least wildlife loss.

The largest consumer of water is corn-E85. The smallest are wind-, tidal-, and wave-BEVs.

The US could theoretically replace all 2007 onroad vehicles with BEVs powered by 73000–144000 5 MW wind turbines, less than the 300000 airplanes the US produced during World War II, reducing US CO2 by 32.5–32.7% and nearly eliminating 15000/yr vehicle-related air pollution deaths in 2020.

In sum, use of wind, CSP, geothermal, tidal, PV, wave, and hydro to provide electricity for BEVs and HFCVs and, by extension, electricity for the residential, industrial, and commercial sectors, will result in the most benefit among the options considered. The combination of these technologies should be advanced as a solution to global warming, air pollution, and energy security. Coal-CCS and nuclear offer less benefit thus represent an opportunity cost loss, and the biofuel options provide no certain benefit and the greatest negative impacts.

[Odin2005]

6. Lovins is a snake oil salesman.

[NNadir]

7. Well I don't know that its SNAKE oil, but he is definitely an oil salesman.

He's also a coal salesman. Wait till I cover how "heckuva job" Amory has a relationship with Anglo-American.

That's a great tale.

And then there's um, Rio Tinto.

[Kolesar]

11. Shades of Dick Cheney