News

Wind, solar or nuclear: which is best for costs, electricity prices and the environment?

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I bought a new book by a famous environmentalist Dr. Michael Shellenberger. He used to be a huge advocate for renewable energy (wind and solar). The book is about why he changed his mind and now prefers nuclear power. He has a long pedigree of environmental activism. I agree with him, so I wanted to get the book to learn how to argue it. For you, I have a short video instead of the book.

Here’s a 17-minute TED talk that he did:

And an article from Quillette that has the full text of the talk.

Here’s the part I thought was the most interesting, where he explains the problems with solar and wind:

The first was around land use. Electricity from solar roofs costs about twice as much as electricity from solar farms, but solar and wind farms require huge amounts of land. That, along with the fact that solar and wind farms require long new transmissions lines, and are opposed by local communities and conservationists trying to preserve wildlife, particularly birds.

Another challenge was the intermittent nature of solar and wind energies. When the sun stops shining and the wind stops blowing, you have to quickly be able to ramp up another source of energy.

I was having a discussion with one of the software architects at my company, who LOVES wind power. I raised these objections with him, especially about the birds and the subsidies for wind and solar, and the higher electricity prices. His response was that he was confident that investing in the renewables would produce technological solutions to those problems.

Look what Schellenberger says, though:

What kills big, threatened, and endangered birds—birds that could go extinct—like hawks, eagles, owls, and condors, are wind turbines.

In fact, wind turbines are the most serious new threat to important bird species to emerge in decades.

[…]Solar farms have similarly large ecological impacts. Building a solar farm is a lot like building any other kind of farm. You have to clear the whole area of wildlife.

In order to build one of the biggest solar farms in California the developers hired biologists to pull threatened desert tortoises from their burrows, put them on the back of pickup trucks, transport them, and cage them in pens where many ended up dying.

[…][S]cientists recently warned that wind turbines are on the verge of making one species, the Hoary bat, a migratory bat species, go extinct.

More environmental impact:

You can make solar panels cheaper and wind turbines bigger, but you can’t make the sun shine more regularly or the wind blow more reliably. I came to understand the environmental implications of the physics of energy. In order to produce significant amounts of electricity from weak energy flows, you just have to spread them over enormous areas. In other words, the trouble with renewables isn’t fundamentally technical—it’s natural.

Higher costs:

Dealing with energy sources that are inherently unreliable, and require large amounts of land, comes at a high economic cost.

There’s been a lot of publicity about how solar panels and wind turbines have come down in cost. But those one-time cost savings from making them in big Chinese factories have been outweighed by the high cost of dealing with their unreliability.

There was a news article from the radically leftist UK Guardian recently that found that 40% of UK solar panels were manufactured by firms linked to Chinese slave labor.

Consumer electricity prices rise, disproportionately affecting the poor:

Consider California. Between 2011–17 the cost of solar panels declined about 75 percent, and yet our electricity prices rose five times more than they did in the rest of the U.S. It’s the same story in Germany, the world leader in solar and wind energy. Its electricity prices increased 50 percent between 2006–17, as it scaled up renewables.

The same thing happened in Canada, when they switched to renewables. According to a recent study, the province of Ontario saw a “21% increase in the overall average cost of power in the province over the period 2007-2013”.

Schellenberger likes nuclear energy:

Germany’s carbon emissions have been flat since 2009, despite an investment of $580 billion by 2025 in a renewables-heavy electrical grid, a 50 percent rise in electricity cost.

Meanwhile, France produces one-tenth the carbon emissions per unit of electricity as Germany and pays little more than half for its electricity. How? Through nuclear power.

Then, under pressure from Germany, France spent $33 billion on renewables, over the last decade. What was the result? A rise in the carbon intensity of its electricity supply, and higher electricity prices, too.

What about all the headlines about expensive nuclear and cheap solar and wind? They are largely an illusion resulting from the fact that 70 to 80 percent of the costs of building nuclear plants are up-front, whereas the costs given for solar and wind don’t include the high cost of transmission lines, new dams, or other forms of battery.

He talks a lot about whether nuclear power is safe, and what to do with the waste. I found it compelling. My architect friend didn’t ask me about that, but he did mention the cost of nuclear.

Here’s what I should have said (but didn’t):

All of the waste fuel from 45 years of the Swiss nuclear program can fit, in canisters, on a basketball court-like warehouse, where like all spent nuclear fuel, it has never hurt a fly.

By contrast, solar panels require 17 times more materials in the form of cement, glass, concrete, and steel than do nuclear plants, and create over 200 times more waste.

We tend to think of solar panels as clean, but the truth is that there is no plan anywhere to deal with solar panels at the end of their 20 to 25 year lifespan.

I did send him the lecture and the article after, though.

If you think this is an interesting topic, why not share the TED talk and the article with your friends? Some people vote Democrat just for renewable energy. I don’t like Democrat policies, so I have to be equipped to know how to respond to anything that anyone might like about them. Christian conservatives like me who care about things like abortion, marriage, religious liberty, etc. have to become experts at education policy, health care policy, energy policy, foreign policy, etc. I have to be able to debate anyone about any policy.

News

What kind of man is Olympic athlete Lolo Jones trying to date for marriage?

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I was watching the latest episode of Better Bachelor and saw that this 38-year-old athlete named Lolo Jones was complaining about how hard it was for her to find a husband. Apparently, she’s been trying very hard to get married all along, and has not had any success. Let’s take a look at her Instagram page and Twitter page, then her previous boyfriend, and see what she’s doing wrong.

So, here’s her Instagram. She claims to be a Christian, but it’s a constant stream of glamorous pictures of herself, many featuring swimwear or workout apparel. Her Twitter feed is more of the same. Lots of inconsequential things about herself. What she had for breakfast. When she got up from sleeping. That she prefers voice notes to texts. What video games she likes. Etc. The only mention of God I saw is when God helped her win a gold medal. Because that’s what God’s priority was in the world that day – her happiness. Is that what the Bible teaches – that it’s God job is to make his human pets happy? That seems to be a popular view among the books that Christian women are reading today. But is that what Jesus was telling us about God with his life?

Anyway, why aren’t marriage-minded men interested in her?

What marriage-minded men are looking for

So, I have a list of questions that I use when evaluating women for wife and mother roles. I’m trying to see whether the woman is capable of making a marriage to me achieve the goals that God has for his world and his creatures. Right now, the primary threats to God’s view of the world and us that I see are atheism, feminism and socialism. (I’m open to adding or subtracting from this list)

I’m looking for capabilities like these in a wife:

  • demonstrate the existence of God objectively using philosophical arguments and scientific evidence
  • demonstrate the truth about who Jesus was and his resurrection using historical evidence
  • answer philosophical, scientific and historical objections to the Christian worldview
  • explain why other major religions and ideologies are false
  • understand and defend the Bible’s teachings about moral issues (chastity, abortion, divorce, etc.) using philosophical arguments and/or scientific evidence
  • explain her Christian role models and what they have done for Christ and his Kingdom that makes you admire them
  • explain what your goal is for your children, and what you intend to do to achieve those goals
  • explain male and female roles in marriage, what you have done to prepare to perform your roles, and how you evaluate marriage candidates for performance of their roles

So, looking at her Instagram and Twitter, I don’t see anything relevant to a Christian marriage enterprise there. Bikini photos and tweets about silly personal details are unrelated to the Christian marriage enterprise. Even when she promotes virginity, she talks about herself, which is not rationally persuasive to anyone else, since it’s just her subjective opinion. The right way to persuade people that the Bible is correct about sex and sexuality, (and I’ve been doing that for 12 years on this blog), is by appealing to evidence, such as the evidence from research papers.

Lolo Jones So Good Looking
Lolo Jones “He’s So Good Looking”

What is she looking for in a man?

Lots of Christian women like to talk about their desire for marriage, but their actions are not focused on choosing men who demonstrate ability to perform husband and father roles, e.g. – defending truth, providing, charitable giving, chastity, sobriety, romantic love, selflessness, mentoring, etc. What about Lolo?

Consider Lolo’s comments about a man she is impressed by:

Double Agents rookie Nam has been described as “hot” (by Wes), “a physical specimen” (Jay) and “built like a statue” (Kam). But what does his partner, fellow newbie Lolo Jones, think of the Ultimate Beastmaster competitor?

“My teammate’s kind of growing on me. I don’t know if it’s because I’ve seen him come out of the shower a few times, but I’m really liking this chemistry we have,” the Olympian stated during this week’s Challenge episode. “He’s so good-looking.”

[…]Lolo (wants) him to pursue her (since she’s the lady), but he hasn’t.

“I’m throwing everything out his way, but he’s just stoic,” she admitted in a confessional.

If you click through to that article, you’ll see her postive reaction to how “good-looking” this man is. She bends her head forward, and lifts up both arms in excitement. She’s not excited by (or respectful of) marriage-related capabilities or willingness to commit. She’s not raving about a man’s chastity or his sobriety or his theology or his apologetics ability or his mentoring of other Christians or his charitable giving. She’s excited by his height and his appearance.

Her last boyfriend was apparently a basketball player. He’s 7 years younger than she is, 6’7″ tall, and he can really put a basketball into the basketball hoop. But is that relevant for making a marriage that impacts the world for Christ and His Kingdom? Not at all. What a man does in marriage is teach people (church, university, workplace, etc.) about the truth of God’s existence, his character and his interaction with his creatures in history. Men are equipped to be persuasive with reason and evidence when discussing behaviors that cause harm to children, like abortion, divorce, promiscuity, same-sex parenting, etc.  Men are equipped to defend the policies that promote marriage and family, like low tax rates, limited government, the rule of law, etc. Men invest in other Christians, partnering with them to promote Christian truths and Christian convictions to those who don’t accept them. And men know how to help and support their wives as they do their mothering and ministry.

Serious Christian men do not marry women who don’t understand the importance and value of marriage-related capabilities and achievements.

1 Samuel 16:7
1 Samuel 16:7

It’s very important for conservative marriage activists like Mark Regnerus, Brad Wilcox, Greg Stanton, pious pastors, etc. to understand that for Christian men there is more to being a wife and mother than holding a Bible, attending church and singing in the choir. I am a man who has the marriage character and the marriage ability. I can pull the trigger on a commitment – I’m equipped to do that, and do it well. But I want my marriage to fight against atheism, feminism and socialism. Lolo Jones is fit and attractive. She is not equipped for a Christian marriage.

Polemics

What are the historical arguments for the empty tomb narrative?

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I wanted to go over this article by William Lane Craig which includes a discussion of the empty tomb, along with the other minimal facts that support the resurrection.

The word resurrection means bodily resurrection

The concept of resurrection in use among the first converts to Christianity was a Jewish concept of resurrection. And that concept of resurrection is unequivocally in favor of a bodily resurrection. The body (soma) that went into the grave is the body (soma) that came out.

Craig explains what this means with respect to the fast start of Christian belief:

For a first century Jew the idea that a man might be raised from the dead while his body remained in the tomb was simply a contradiction in terms. In the words of E. E. Ellis, “It is very unlikely that the earliest Palestinian Christians could conceive of any distinction between resurrection and physical, ‘grave emptying’ resurrection. To them an anastasis without an empty grave would have been about as meaningful as a square circle.”

And:

Even if the disciples had believed in the resurrection of Jesus, it is doubtful they would have generated any following. So long as the body was interred in the tomb, a Christian movement founded on belief in the resurrection of the dead man would have been an impossible folly.

It’s significant that the belief in the resurrection started off in the city where the tomb was located. Anyone, such as the Romans or Jewish high priests, who wanted to nip the movement in the bud could easily have produced the body to end it all. They did not do so, because they could not do so, although they had every reason to do so.

There are multiple early, eyewitness sources for the empty tomb

Paul’s early creed from 1 Corinthians 15:3-7, dated to within 5 years of the crucifixion, implies the empty tomb.

Craig writes:

In the formula cited by Paul the expression “he was raised” following the phrase “he was buried” implies the empty tomb. A first century Jew could not think otherwise. As E. L. Bode observes, the notion of the occurrence of a spiritual resurrection while the body remained in the tomb is a peculiarity of modern theology. For the Jews it was the remains of the man in the tomb which were raised; hence, they carefully preserved the bones of the dead in ossuaries until the eschatological resurrection. There can be no doubt that both Paul and the early Christian formula he cites pre-suppose the existence of the empty tomb.

The dating of the resurrection as having occurred “on the third day” implies the empty tomb. The date specified for the resurrection would have been the date that the tomb was discovered to be empty.

The phrase “on the third day” probably points to the discovery of the empty tomb. Very briefly summarized, the point is that since no one actually witnessed the resurrection of Jesus, how did Christians come to date it “on the third day?” The most probable answer is that they did so because this was the day of the discovery of the empty tomb by Jesus’ women followers. Hence, the resurrection itself came to be dated on that day. Thus, in the old Christian formula quoted by Paul we have extremely early evidence for the existence of Jesus’ empty tomb.

A few quotes from atheist historians not from Dr. Craig’s article: (thanks to Eric of Ratio Christi OSU)

Michael Goulder (Atheist NT Prof. at Birmingham) “…it goes back at least to what Paul was taught when he was converted, a couple of years after the crucifixion.” [“The Baseless Fabric of a Vision,” in Gavin D’Costa, editor, Resurrection Reconsidered (Oxford, 1996), 48.]

Gerd Lüdemann (Atheist Prof of NT at Göttingen): “…the elements in the tradition are to be dated to the first two years after the crucifixion of Jesus…not later than three years… the formation of the appearance traditions mentioned in I Cor.15.3-8 falls into the time between 30 and 33 CE.” [The Resurrection of Jesus, trans. by Bowden (Fortress, 1994), 171-72.]

Robert Funk (Non-Christian scholar, founder of the Jesus Seminar): “…The conviction that Jesus had risen from the dead had already taken root by the time Paul was converted about 33 C.E. On the assumption that Jesus died about 30 C.E., the time for development was thus two or three years at most.” [Roy W. Hoover, and the Jesus Seminar, The Acts of Jesus, 466.]

The early pre-Markan burial narrative mentions the empty tomb. This source pre-dates Mark, the earliest gospel. The source has been dated by some scholars to the 40s. For example, the atheist scholar James Crossley dates Mark some time in the 40s. (See the debate below)

The empty tomb story is part of the pre-Markan passion story and is therefore very old. The empty tomb story was probably the end of Mark’s passion source. As Mark is the earliest of our gospels, this source is therefore itself quite old. In fact the commentator R. Pesch contends that it is an incredibly early source. He produces two lines of evidence for this conclusion:

(a) Paul’s account of the Last Supper in 1 Cor. 11:23-5 presupposes the Markan account. Since Paul’s own traditions are themselves very old, the Markan source must be yet older.

(b) The pre-Markan passion story never refers to the high priest by name. It is as when I say “The President is hosting a dinner at the White House” and everyone knows whom I am speaking of because it is the man currently in office. Similarly the pre-Markan passion story refers to the “high priest” as if he were still in power. Since Caiaphas held office from AD 18-37, this means at the latest the pre-Markan source must come from within seven years after Jesus’ death. This source thus goes back to within the first few years of the Jerusalem fellowship and is therefore an ancient and reliable source of historical information.

So we are dealing with very early sources for the empty tomb.

Lack of legendary embellishments

The empty tomb narrative in the gospels lacks legendary embellishments, unlike later 2nd century forgeries that originated outside of Jerusalem.

The eyewitness testimony of the women

This is the evidence that has been the most convincing to skeptics, and to me as well.

The tomb was probably discovered empty by women. To understand this point one has to recall two facts about the role of women in Jewish society.

(a) Woman occupied a low rung on the Jewish social ladder. This is evident in such rabbinic expressions as “Sooner let the words of the law be burnt than delivered to women” and “Happy is he whose children are male, but woe to him whose children are female.”

(b) The testimony of women was regarded as so worthless that they were not even permitted to serve as legal witnesses in a court of law. In light of these facts, how remarkable must it seem that it is women who are the discoverers of Jesus’ empty tomb. Any later legend would certainly have made the male disciples to discover the empty tomb. The fact that women, whose testimony was worthless, rather than men, are the chief witnesses to the empty tomb is most plausibly accounted for by the fact that, like it or not, they were the discoverers of the empty tomb and the gospels accurately record this.

The earliest response from the Jewish high priests assumes the empty tomb

This report from Matthew 28 fulfills the criteria of enemy attestation, although Matthew is not the earliest source we have. Oh, well.

In Matthew 28, we find the Christian attempt to refute the earliest Jewish polemic against the resurrection. That polemic asserted that the disciples stole away the body. The Christians responded to this by reciting the story of the guard at the tomb, and the polemic in turn charged that the guard fell asleep. Now the noteworthy feature of this whole dispute is not the historicity of the guards but rather the presupposition of both parties that the body was missing. The earliest Jewish response to the proclamation of the resurrection was an attempt to explain away the empty tomb. Thus, the evidence of the adversaries of the disciples provides evidence in support of the empty tomb.

Note how careful Craig is not to imply that the guard tradition is historical, because we can’t prove the guard as a “minimal fact”, since it doesn’t pass the standard historical criteria.

See it used in a debate

You can see the arguments made and defended from criticism in this debate with the atheist scholar James Crossley.

This my favorite resurrection debate.