United States
Kenneth D Kok retired
Chemistry, Nuclear Engineering, Business
To: Mr. John Kerry, Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, You do not know who I am, so I will give you a bit of information. I have a BS degree in Chemistry, and MS degrees in Business and Nuclear Engineering. I had a career of 45 years in R&D and management. I served as the chair of both the ASME Nuclear Engineering Division and the ASME Energy Committee. I have published over 25 peer reviewed Technical Papers and edited two editions of the Nuclear Engineering Handbook. I am not an environmental engineer or scientist, but I do have broad experience with energy systems and radiation. In today’s news we are constantly reading about climate change and global warming being caused by carbon dioxide. This attribution involves a misunderstanding about how heat radiated from the earth interacts with the gases in the upper atmosphere. The carbon dioxide in the upper atmosphere is saturated so that adding more carbon dioxide will have little or no effect. This saturation can be demonstrated using a flashlight and standard 20 lb. paper used in your printer. Use a single sheet of paper to cover the light beam, then add additional sheets until the light beam is totally blocked. Once you cannot see the light through the stack of paper, adding more paper has no impact. So, it is with the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and we are at a point where additional carbon dioxide has little or no impact. The immediate concern is related to the banning of fossil fuels and the impact on the energy that will be required if we are to deal with the real environmental changes required to deal with the changing climate. Energy will be required no matter if we are dealing with global warming or cooling. We need fossil fuels, nuclear fission, and renewable energy to support our reliable electric energy supply. In the US, the electric grid has a reliability of more than 99 percent. This reliability cannot be obtained by depending on solar and wind powered electricity production. The transportation system is and will continue to be dependent on fossil fuels. Electrification of the transportation system will require large additions to electricity production and the availability will have to be reliable. Leaders around the world are focused on one nonsolution to the challenges of climate change, that is the reduction of carbon dioxide, as a single way to address climate change. They will lose because carbon dioxide is not the problem. It is time to shift the focus to potential problems which we can address.