A Guest Post by Islandboy
The EIA released the latest edition of their Electric Power Monthly on November 26th, with data for September 2019. The table above shows the percentage contribution of the main fuel sources to two decimal places for the last two months and the year 2019 to date.
The Table immediately above shows the absolute amounts of electricity generated in gigawatt-hours by the main sources for the last two months and the year to date. In September, the absolute amount of electricity generated decreased as is usually the case between August and September. Coal and Natural Gas between them, fueled 65.87% of US electricity generation in September. The contribution of zero carbon and carbon neutral sources increased from 31.68% in August to 33.25% in September.
The 150,742 GWh generated by Natural Gas in September 2019 is the seventh highest amount ever generated by NG, down from the record 176,454 GWh, set in the previous month, August 2019. The only months that have seen more electricity generated by Natural Gas are the months of July and August in 2016, 2018 and this year 2019. The percentage contribution from Natural Gas in September at 41.95% is the third highest ever from that source behind the previous two months July and August 2019.
The graph below shows the absolute monthly production from the various sources since January 2013, as well as the total amount generated (right axis).
The chart below shows the total monthly generation at utility scale facilities by year versus the contribution from solar. The left hand scale is for the total generation, while the right hand scale is for solar output and has been deliberately set to exaggerate the solar output as a means of assessing it’s potential to make a meaningful contribution to the midsummer peak. In September 2019 the estimated total output from solar at 9,948 GWh, was 2.8 times what it was four years ago in September 2015.
The chart below shows the total monthly generation at utility scale facilities by year versus the combined contribution from wind and solar. The left hand scale is for the total generation, while the right hand scale is for combined wind and solar output and has been deliberately set to exaggerate the combined output of solar and wind as a means of assessing the potential of the combination to make a meaningful contribution to the year round total.
The chart below shows the percentage contributions of the various sources to the capacity additions up to September 2019. In September Wind contributed 63.92% of new capacity, with 25.18% of new capacity coming from Solar and Natural Gas contributing 9.7%. Batteries contributed 0.99% with Other Waste Biomass contributing the remaining 0.21%. The entire 77 MW of new Natural Gas fueled capacity came from a single plant at the new Freeport LNG Development L.P. facility, a new LNG export facility in Freeport Texas, which exported it’s first shipment of LNG recently. Natural Gas, Solar and Wind made up 98.8% of new capacity in September. Natural gas and renewables have made up more than 95% of capacity added each month since at least January 2017.
In September 2019 the total added capacity reported was 799.1 MW, compared to the 1584.2 MW added in September 2018.
The chart below shows the monthly capacity retirements up to September 2019. In September, the largest share of retirements reported was a result of the closure of the infamous, 45 year old, 802.8 MW Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania. Four units amounting to 100 MW were retired at the Nucla coal plant in Colorado and five units powered by Landfill Gas were retired, three in Pennsylvania and two in New Jersey. A 40 MW Natural Gas Fired Combustion Turbine was also retired in California by AltaGas Pomona Energy Inc. A 67 MW steam turbine driven generator, fueled by Petroleum Coke was retired by Kimberly-Clark Corp in Pennsylvania and two steam turbine driven units fueled with Wood/Wood Waste Biomass, amounting to 89.3 MW were retired by Mobile Energy Services LLC in Alabama.
The total amount of retirements reported was 1111.5 MW compared to the 1032.8 MW reported in September 2018.
Below is a chart for monthly net additions/retirements showing the data up to September 2019, followed by a chart showing the net additions/retirements year to date.
Below is a table of the top ten states in order of coal consumption for electricity production for September 2019 and the year before for comparison.
IslandBoy
Do you have a chart similar to the last one that shows an increase in the use of natural gas as coal decreases.
No but, the data is in
2.11.A Consumption of Natural Gas for Electricity Generation by State by Sector and below is what the table looks like.
It’s interesting how much natural gas is being retired. It looks like more natural gas than nuclear was retired in the US in 2019.
I think it is the switch to more efficient combined cycle plants. These plants boil a lot less water per unit energy output. So another way to look at the picture is to say that w are moving towards boiling less water.
As a result coal, nuclear and single cycle gas are the losers, and the winners are combined cycle gas, wind and solar. There could be two explanations for this: First, plants that need lots of water are less flexible, because they need more time to heat up. Second, handling all that water is a burden on the system, both in terms of efficiency and in terms of extra system complexity.
By this logic, if someone comes up with a way to use coal or nuclear with less water, they might bounce back.
CC probably won’t work for coal because even fine coal dust would tear up the turbines.
All current nuclear designs need lots of water — in fact two sets, one internal and one external — so the small reactor push seems unlikely to solve the industry’s problems.
Bit of reality to go with your morning coffee. This report is from the UK, but I see the same pattern here except here we must add new pickup trucks to the equation.
RISE OF SUVS ‘MAKES MOCKERY’ OF ELECTRIC CAR PUSH
“Over the past four years, there have been 1.8 million SUV sales, compared to a total of 47,000 for battery electric vehicles (BEV). In 2018, SUVs accounted for 21.2% of new car sales, up from 13.5% three years earlier. “Assuming the majority of these SUVs will be on UK roads for at least a decade, it is estimated the extra cumulative emissions to total around 8.2 million tons of CO2.” All-electric vehicles still represent only a fraction of total car sales. The UKERC said they remained at less than 1% of new car sales in 2019.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-50713616
US AUTO SALES RISE AS SUVS, TRUCKS DOMINATE
As for the US: “Automakers have been helped by a shift by U.S. consumers away from traditional passenger cars towards larger, more comfortable SUVs and trucks, which tend to be more profitable for producers. Sport utility vehicles contributed about 35 percent of Ford’s total U.S. sales volumes in October, up from 31.6 percent a year ago.”
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/01/fiat-chrysler-us-october-sales-rise-15point7percent.html
However, if you want to pick cherries, we have Norway:
EVs CAPTURE 58.4-PERCENT MARKET SHARE IN NORWAY IN MARCH
“Getting the public to embrace electrification is not a one-size-fits-all solution. Some countries are far more willing to jump on the EV bandwagon than others. Norway is helping lead this charge, and the latest sales figures from the Scandinavian country continue to impress. Proper EVs held a 31.2-percent market share in Norway in 2018, rising from 20.8 percent in 2017, numbers that are far ahead of any other nation.”
Of course, Norway, which is Western Europe’s largest producer of gas and oil, offers a serious complement of incentives to help its citizens make the move to zero-emission vehicles.
https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/electric-vehicle-majority-market-share-norway-march/
There’s also this:
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/25/global-car-sales-expected-to-slide-by-3point1-million-this-year-in-biggest-drop-since-recession.html
Sales are down by 3 m units this year.
MY calculation is this: There are about a billion cars on the road, and they survive 14 years on average. So 70m get scrapped every year. 80m get sold, so the fleet grows by 10m (1%) a year.
So 3 m fewer units is not enough to stop the growth of the fleet. Meanwhile EV sales might hit 2 m in 2019. That would mean ICE fleet growth halved in 2019.
Those are very rough numbers though.
>> All-electric vehicles still represent only a fraction of total car sales. The UKERC said they remained at less than 1% of new car sales in 2019. <<
Really? This SMMT (motor industry) report shows UK EVs at 1.5% of the 2019 market, up from 0.6% last year…
https://www.smmt.co.uk/vehicle-data/car-registrations/
John —
Yes, it seems all-electric vehicles remain a niche market. Navigant Research estimates in a new forecast that light-duty vehicles make up 95 percent of the total, and that the vehicles we drive everyday will shortly cross the 1.2 billion mark. Then there’s the additional impact of off-road vehicles — farm and industrial equipment, all-terrain vehicles, etc. — which may have little or no emission control equipment fitted. But you don’t need to get anywhere near the ninth digit of precision to understand the impact of adding more vehicles to the planet — when 98 percent of them are powered by gasoline or diesel fuel. BTW Total new-vehicle sales were 84 million last year.
Have been looking into the energy required to mine and build lithium batteries. So far it looks like EV’s will not reduce emissions enough to have any real effect. Be better off driving less and using high mpg ICE vehicles when necessary. How about ride sharing?
Yet the conversion to electric will continue and might be helpful in a few decades. Of course a lot can happen in 20 years, such as hard limits to growth of any kind.
Right now we are in the Great Christmas plume, where huge amounts of shipping, driving, shopping, eating out, killing trees and swaths of electric lights burn into what used to be darkness. Was out walking and a rental moving truck stopped, UPS guy got out and delivered a package to a nearby house. Apparently the delivery companies are hiring people with cars and trucks to deliver during “the season”. Lots of GHG emissions, more than aircraft. 🙂
So did you com up with any specific numbers? How much energy does it take per kWh to make a battery? How did you calculate it?
The research paper I found says it takes about 1 MWh per kWh of battery capacity. For a 60 kWh battery that is 60 MWh which is about the total consumption of power that an EV has over it’s lifetime.
If using grid power that amounts to 120,000 pounds of CO2 for both battery manufacture and running the car. There is also methane involved but I will not include that yet. There is also energy and emissions to build the rest of the car, similar to an ICE car.
At 35 mpg a typical US car emits about 6900 pounds of CO2 per year and about 130,000 pounds of CO2 over it’s lifetime. It might have another 20,000 pounds of CO2 emissions to manufacture it.
GF,
Is this the paper?
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.est.6b00830
It’s behind a paywall, for a quick summary for anyone interested:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0306261917305433
No, not that paper. I will post the address when I have finished analyzing their methods and results.
The paper is very specific to EV batteries.
Iron Mike, here is the paper on EV battery production.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Yelin_Deng/publication/316884465_Manufacturing_energy_analysis_of_lithium_ion_battery_pack_for_electric_vehicles/links/5a177572aca272df0808b3bb/Manufacturing-energy-analysis-of-lithium-ion-battery-pack-for-electric-vehicles.pdf?origin=publication_detail
Thanks GF
I will check it out.
All of that paper data is based on the operations in a ‘pilot plant’ scenario, rather than a mass production facility, so the results are of dubious relevancy ?
[“based on directly measured data of a pilot scale
industry production facility”]
Nonetheless, we should expect all storage mechanisms to be energy losing events. No storage mechanism is free of energy degrading factors, such as friction.
That shortcoming is baked in the cake, so to speak.
But the energy loss of the whole storage process is often a small price to pay to have access to energy, such as driving down the highway at night without a gas tank (on battery power). Even petrol is stored energy, from the sun.
Is energy collection at scale ever free, or cheap, or carbon neutral? Sorry-no.
But the various choices are magnitudes different in their cost, footprint, and sustainability.
In the balance, electric vehicles with lithium batteries, and charged by solar or wind, are big winners in this analysis, in this world.
Don’t lose the overview of the forest, for the sake of a close look at the brambles.
In this study, we have conducted a unit process level energy
analysis for lithium ion battery manufacturing for electric vehicles,
based on directly measured data of a pilot scale industry
production facility. Detailed manufacturing processes are presented
along with material
flows for manufacturing a 24 kWh
LMO-graphite lithium ion battery pack. The manufacturing energy
required for each unit process of the battery manufacturing are
presented. It is found that the electrode drying and the dry room
facility are the two major energy consumers in battery cell
manufacturing. A total of 13.28 kWh of energy is needed to
produce a 32 Ah LMO-graphite battery cell. For 24 kWh battery
pack assembly with 192 battery cells, the energy consumption is
found at 50.1 kWh/kg battery pack manufactured, while this
number can be reduced to 40.5 kWh/kg by lowering the
concentration of PVDF binder in the NMP solvent from 4 wt% to
2 wt%, and can be reduced by 72% by increasing production size
from pilot-scale batch production to industrial-scale mass
production. Besides, the primary energy embedded in battery
materials are also quantified and analysed in this study. It is found
that a total of 88.9 GJ of primary energy is needed to produce a
24 kWh LMO-graphite battery pack, with 29.9 GJ of energy
embedded in the battery materials, 58.7 GJ energy consumed in
the battery cell production, and 0.3 GJ energy used in the
final
battery pack manual assembly. Future study could explore the use
of industrial robots for automated battery pack assembly which
may change the energy profile of battery production. It is expected
that this study will provide valuable data support for sustainable
manufacturing of both commercial and next generation lithium
ion batteries for electric vehicles.
I thought this was the most complete, thorough and honestly communicated assessment of battery energy I have found.
While battery manufacture process energy may have fallen, lithium mining energy and transport has risen per kg due to increased demand. That too may fall again with time.
One of the problems I see with industry and business in general is as volume rises and things commodify, the quality starts to drop and the lifespan does also.
Clothing and shoes are generally short life now,versus a few decades ago. Even LED light bulbs have fallen to about 1/3 or less of their original lifetime ( a lifetime or half lifetime product is not conducive to maintaining product flow).
The 6 billion solar panels needed to run the global transport system plus the huge number of large batteries will have to be replaced every 30 and 10 years. It’s probable that solar panel life will fall with time, once the big rush slows down.
Right now global panel production is on the order of 40 million per year. About 200 million a year will need replacement just for transport energy in 2040 or 2050.
To run the global civilization will need at least 600 million panels per year for replacement.
That assumes we continue on the population rise and economic growth track we are on now and as much as possible electrifies.
Have to keep those coffee makers, TV, computers and EVs running, plus everything else.
Not even going to get into the 3 million or more wind turbines that will probably show up ( think an area one quarter the size of the US covered with wind turbines and about a billion less birds in the world).
“Don’t lose the overview of the forest, for the sake of a close look at the brambles.”
Yes, Hickory, it seems as if we have a strong intentions to fully electrify the world as much as possible. That is not in question. I think it is short sighted and very limited in it’s scope of possible directions.
I see the odds of that thrust continuing past 2030 as quite low.
Anyway, it’s not sustainable unless we drastically cut demand and population.
Earlier this year Tesla Motors acquired Maxwell Technologies and there was a fair amount of discussion about the ramifications of this acquisition on this web site.
Below is a screenshot of a Powerpoint slide from a Maxwell Technologies presentation that speaks for itself. Apart from the numbers on performance, the numbers that jumped out at me were the 16x production capacity density increase
and 10–20% cost reduction. These sort of numbers explain some of the outlandish claims Tesla has been making.
It appears obvious that a big part of their cost reduction involves reducing the carbon footprint of their manufacturing process. For other battery manufacturers to compete, they will either have to license the technology or come up with cost/performance innovations of their own. The carbon emissions of battery manufacturing (per kWh) are clearly headed down.
“Have been looking into the energy required to mine and build lithium batteries.”
The battery of a Tesla Model S has about 12 kilograms of lithium in it, while grid storage solutions that will help balance renewable energy would need much more. To mention the environmental (true) cost of mining lithium is almost a taboo topic. Rather than give my opinions on this, even though I do have actual experience in some aspects of lithium exploration, reserve estimates, and extraction, rather than being accused of being a shill for the fossil fuel industry I (normally) choose to keep my opinions on this to myself. Once I reported here on the horrors of the rare earth mines in Inner Mongolia, which I visited twice in the 1980s, and was attacked for my views. So, I mainly keep my mouth shut on lithium too; hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil. ?
Expressed differently: “It seems like an impossible bind: Even if the global economy manages to transition off of fossil fuels it will simply sub out one kind of harmful extraction for another. The future of technology metal mining in South America and elsewhere could look eerily similar to centuries of colonial exploitation, dressed up as environmentalism. American highways could buzz with Teslas traveling between sprawling suburban rooftops and office parks decked out in solar panels, all premised on capitalist profiteering and disregard for indigenous rights. Moreover, given Chinese firms’ domination of the lithium industry, we could see geopolitical conflicts akin to previous ones over oil.”
https://newrepublic.com/article/155753/climate-changes-great-lithium-problem
Yeah, 12 kg sounds about right. Of course you randomly chose the largest battery Tesla now delivers.
Compare that to diesel, which weighs in at about 0.84 kg/liter. The weight of lithium in a tank is about as much as 14 liters of diesel.
If a car consumes 7 liters /100 km, which is quite good, that’s roughly the same weight of fuel you need to go 200 km. If a car does 200,000 km in its lifetime, that’s about 1000 times the weight of the lithium the battery needs, and the battery could last twice as long.
But what about the fuel for the electricity? Well that depends on how the electricity is generated. The point is that the lithium is trivial compared to the amount of fuel involved — several orders of magnitude too small to be taken seriously. Furthermore is isn’t consumed, and can be recycled.
Meanwhile Tesla’s get up to 130 MPG, according to the EPA, compared to about 25 MPG for the average new car SUV or truck in 2017. The worst Tesla gets over 100 MPG.
Forget the lithium, you’re saving 75% of the fuel. People get stuck on lithium because the batteries are called “lithium” batteries. There isn’t much lithium in them.
Or let’s say 80m cars are produced each year, and each one needs 12.5 kg of lithium. That’s a billion kg of lithium, or one million tons. That’s an extreme scenario.
Compare that to the over 7 bn tons of coal mined annually, and you’ll see that the quantities aren’t so overwhelming.
And again, that lithium can be recycled.
“the energy required to mine and build lithium batteries. So far it looks like EV’s will not reduce emissions enough to have any real effect”
Its a big statement-Is that true, or a false narrative?
Are you talking about CO2, over the life of a vehicle, or just original manufacture? Compared to drilling, refining and burning crude oil (and manufacture of the petrol engine)? EV charging source from coal electricity vs wind/solar/hydro?
On considering the carbon footprint of batteries.
Once in operation, electric cars certainly reduce your carbon footprint, but making the lithium-ion batteries could emit 74% more CO2 than for conventional cars.
https://www.industryweek.com/technology-and-iiot/lithium-batteries-dirty-secret-manufacturing-them-leaves-massive-carbon
>As it is now, manufacturing an electric car pumps out “significantly” more climate-warming gases than a conventional car, which releases only 20% of its lifetime C02 at this stage, according to estimates of Mercedes-Benz’s electric-drive system integration department.
74% of 20% is about 15%. But you’r saving 75% of the fuel, and the grid is rapidly decarbonizing.
>Just switching to renewable energy for manufacturing would slash emissions by 65%, according to Transport & Environment.
Th problem is the grid.
The problem is that PV is no help at all, in fact it has a large energy deficit (GHG positive) to make up.
Wind power appears to be doing some good in CO2 reduction due to it’s high rate of power production per unit. Still, about 1/3 to 1/2 of the output is soaked up by manufacturing and mining energy.
As long as we keep adding layers of industrialization at a high rate, there is no way to get off fossil fuels since the energy input rate is greater than or similar to the energy output rate.
Eventually the renewable energy system will be developed and the reduction of GHG emissions will commence, but that could be 20 years from now or longer.
Right now life style changes, efficiency increases and quickly reducing materialism are the major avenues.
Even planting lots of trees takes a couple of decades to have a significant effect.
From what I hear we don’t have all that time to get our carbonized rears in gear. Today is a good day to start making better and immediately effective choices.
“The problem is that PV is no help at all, in fact it has a large energy deficit ”
Please show proof of this. From I can tell in the factual world 2019- this off by a huge factor. Another false narrative, until we see unbiased proof on it. Are you being paid by CM?
When I purchase a PV module, the energy cost of manufacture, and all the other costs of the chain of production/installation/labor is included. And still the payback period is well less than 10 yrs.
GF, really? The US DoE says PV energy payback is between 1 and four years.
PDF: https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy04osti/35489.pdf
Apparently this is too advanced for the people here who have tiny reference frames and don’t understand rate equations.
Getting nasty is no way to get answers.
Live in your delusions.
“The problem is that PV is no help at all, in fact it has a large energy deficit (GHG positive) to make up.”
Sorry, that is BS.
Hint: The energetical payback time of PV is under two years. Therefore, you could double PV each two years in a sustainable way. Do we observe this?
Sure Ulenspiegel, quote the value for thin film PV which is 5% of global generation and falling. Maybe the BS you say I spout is coming from your brain.
Of course if you read the studies you would know that they ignore some quite energetic processes. Even so, multi-crystalline PV has a 4 year payback. I was generous and used 3 years in my calculations, assuming future improvements.
But think of it U, all that older PV already installed has an even longer energy payback period.
Maybe someday you will understand what energy payback period actually means. Until then keep believing.
Yes John, have read that publication before and 95% of the producing PV is multi-crystalline, meaning 4 year energy payback.
I was generous in my calculation and assumed future improvements, so used a 3 year energy payback.
At any rate above 26% PV production growth the energy to build the PV becomes greater than the energy produced by the energy of all installed PV. In other words if it doubles every three years and the payback time falls to the predicted 3 years then no energy gain is obtained.
Energy in = Energy out
PV production growth rate has been 30 percent or higher in the past. Obviously the extra energy is coming from other energy sources. The net energy of PV is negative so far.
GF- you seem to have gone so far down this narrative you can’t seem to climb back out to the true surface. Sorry to see it happen.
Truly.
Only you can fix it.
Trump on Wind Energy-“They say the noise causes cancer.”
Hickory, in your magical world it takes no energy to produce PV. It just appears at your house and produces energy. That would be nice, but it’s not true.
Last year over 360 million panels were installed. It took the energy from over one billion panels to produce them which is about all there were globally.
So where is this magical surplus energy coming from to reduce the fossil fuel burn?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnbfuAcCqpY
Gonefishing,
I think you guys are talking past each other.
Yes the manufacture of PV requires energy and currently that energy comes from fossil fuel.
I think the disconnect is that you are looking at energy produced by PV only up to the current time rather than what people typically consider which is over the life of the PV installation. The 27 years of energy production after energy payback is pretty significant and as PV reaches scale it begins to displace coal, natural gas, and nuclear power.
If your point is that this will take time, I am sure most would agree (or I certainly do).
The claim that it will make no difference strikes me as silly.
Dennis, misinterpreting and misconstruing my claims and analyses may make you feel better, but it is still wrong.
I am looking at net energy versus growth rate. That does not change going forward.
You do agree that PV has to grow exponentially to eventually displace fossil fuel energy? Unless you like to take hundreds of years.
Net energy has been negative, now it is near zero at the current rate of growth.
What displacement in energy occurs at net zero energy production?
As I clearly stated, as growth rate decreases PV will start to produce more energy than it takes to build it.
BTW that 3 year value is imagined. Reality is about 4 years and it might eventually go to three. Keep hoping.
Gonefishing,
I was using your number of 3 years. A change to 4 reduces years of surplus to 26 years.
I agree that to date the output from PV likely has not reduced CO2 emissions due to the exponential rate of growth.
Obviously the exponential growth rate will slow and PV will eventually reduce emissions.
I agree that to date PV may not have reduced emissions, particularly if one ignores the fossil fuel combustion that has been displaced by the PV output.
To put the other side of the arguement,
https://www.ivl.se/english/startpage/top-menu/pressroom/press-releases/press-releases—arkiv/2019-12-04-new-report-on-climate-impact-of-electric-car-batteries.html
”
According to new calculations, the production of lithium-ion batteries on average emits somewhere between 61-106 kilos of carbon dioxide equivalents per kilowatt-hour battery capacity produced. If less transparent data is included, the upper value will be higher; 146 kilos carbon dioxide equivalents per kilowatt hour produced. The large emissions range primarily depends on production methods and the type of electricity used in the battery manufacturing process. Current figures for climate emissions are lower than they were in the 2017 report where the average was 150-200 kilos of carbon dioxide equivalents per kWh of battery capacity.”
Batteries are becoming cheaper because they are using fewer resources to make them. This ends up equating to a smaller carbon footprint to make them.
However, electric cars are getting bigger and driving ranges are getting longer which more than offsets the benefits of less carbon intensive production. We should all be using the least carbon intensive method of transport that gets us to where we need to go. And we need to think twice before we decide to need to travel at all.
Where have you been “looking into the energy required to mine and build lithium batteries”? Places like this?
Are electric vehicles really so climate friendly?
In that case, you may have fallen pray to what appears to be a deliberate plot to cast a bad light on EVs. I frequently link to the Twiiter feed of Auke Hoekstra who is a researcher at the TU Eindhoven in the Netherlands who’s work focuses on EV. Over the past several months he has had to be playing “whack a mole”, debunking study after study, claiming that the lifecycle CO2 emissions of EV are worse than vehicles fueled by petroleum based fuels. See:
https://twitter.com/AukeHoekstra/status/1201852063254233088
and
https://twitter.com/AukeHoekstra/status/1200725209751392261
By strange coincidence, most of these studies are coming out of Germany, where a sizeable portion of their auto manufacturing is dedicated to making premium (expensive) vehicles (e.g. Mercedes, BMW, Audi and Porsche). It is this premium segment that is being hit hardest by the entry of Tesla Motors into the market and a couple of the named manufacturers have announced job cuts, blaming them on the switch to EV manufacturing which apparently will reduce the number or workers required,
Hoekstra does a very thorough job of debunking these articles but here are the basic facts . The manufacture of everything outside the batteries has a similar CO2 footprint for both types of vehicle so, the focus is on the batteries. The key is the assumptions made about the manufacturing of the batteries and their expected lifetime. Hoekstra has pointed out that in all of these “studies” the assumptions bear little relation to reality.
I have little interest in reading studies that appear to be deliberately trying to spread misinformation about EVs so I am not going to read them but, I would challenge anyone who is inclined to believe them to head on over to Hoekstra’s Twitter feed and point out where Hoekstra is wrong and highlight any glaring errors he has made.
It seems that the people industries most threatened by renewables and EVs are prepared to engage in all sorts of questionable tactics to oppose the disruption they are facing. As far as I am concerned it is all the same old, same old.
Islandboy said “In that case, you may have fallen pray to what appears to be a deliberate plot to cast a bad light on EVs. ”
Nahh, I haven’t gotten stupid yet Iboy. Give me time, I avoid TV but the internet can erode the brain too. 🙂
You just need to go down the rabbit hole a bit further to shine some light on those “clean green” industrial marketing ploys. They too have a significant dark side.
You apparently have not read many of my previous posts.
I just want to make it clear what we are actually doing and how long it will take to have any significant effect. Also to be clear on the degree of change presently happening, (so far more negative than positive). Without a clear picture we just get run into one more trap by the people who will make huge amounts of money doing just that.
I do not disagree that if people choose to try and maintain an industrial world, they should move to less harmful systems.
Do we have the time to wait for energy transistion to occur in a meaningful way (less than 2 Gt CO2/year emissions global)?
That is the big question now and it’s mostly negative.
The problem with industrial energy transistions is the faster we do it, the more fossil fuel we burn doing it. Again, one has to look behind the curtain and make wise decisions.
As Doug points out, air conditioners and refrigeration are fast growing energy devices as is the internet/cell phone/computing systems. The smart thing would be to invest in insulation, better windows, shading and ventilation to keep the buildings cooler. Better building design would help a lot too for both heating and cooling. Otherwise the ROW will start humming constantly like the US, if it hasn’t already.
Not sure what to do about the growing internet of things other than some more efficiency, which is easily wiped with growth.
Yes though, in some possible future world, the EVs won’t even need roads, they will fly from place to place landing vertically.
Have you looked at Hoekstra’s Twitter feed? If so, what do you think of his arguments?
I don’t source from twitter. Any other sources.
Here goes”
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2542435119302715
“I don’t source from twitter.”
What does that mean? Aueke Hoekstra summarises his thoughts on his twitter feed but he links to a lot of interesting stuff. The link above was from the second Twitter thread I linked to earlier.
Here is some EV news for you and for OFM. Standardized modular parts coming and much more.
Toyota is building very, very tiny electric vehicles for the next Olympics
For Toyota, it’s part of a strategy to transition from an automobile company to a mobility company. It’s testing new business models featuring modular EV parts and repurposed batteries for less demanding applications such as compact, short-distance battery-electric vehicles. Down the line, it envisions an interchangeable ecosystem of batteries, motors, and structural components that can be resized and recombined across different vehicles.
It also sees the demographic for its vehicles expanding. Rather than targeting the conventional car crowd, Toyota wants to build vehicles for grandparents, fleet operators, and young drivers who don’t need premium or full-sized vehicles. “We want to create a mobility solution that can support Japan’s aging society and provide freedom of movement to people at all stages of life,” said Akihiro
https://qz.com/1734790/toyota-debuts-very-very-tiny-electric-vehicles-for-2020-olympics/
Toyota seems like a thinking company, not just interested in power and high end glitz. More realistic than some.
My favorite line, “The UKERC said the “extraordinary leap” in SUV sales over the past four years seemed to be due to “attractive car financing packages which divert attention from running costs”.”
So one thing EV-topians (Seba, etc) failed to think of was that humans are easily tricked. That hiccup really could have been missed by anyone 🙂 The other blind-spot being loose and exotic finance, which has only been a permanent fixture of the world economy since 2009. Takes time to accept new realities. again 🙂
However, fleet operators are harder to dupe. That is why they are targeted as early adopters for EVs.
For example, delivery vans are very likely to be a big EV markt in the next few years.
I have been designing and marketing high tech products for decades, and it is amazing how the same naive remarks like this come up over and or again with every wave of innovation. Just because you can think of a demographic that won’t buy a new product, you claim that the product can’t work.
This ignores the fact that a new product only needs to get a few percent of the market to register spectacular growth. And since new products change fast, once the succeed in one niche, the move on to the next.
A full frontal attack on the mainstream market is never the goal of any serious high tech marketing. As Sunzi pointed out, it makes n sense to attack where your enemy is strong. Attack where he is weak. That is why Tesla started out with the Roadster. Since then they have moved step by step to bigger and bigger niches.
Nobody cares how many people WON’T buy into a new idea. The question is how many WILL. If you don’t get that, you will never understand how new products get launched.
The car industry sees the writing on the wall. Cadillac will be fully electric by 2030, unless there are a few legacy combustion motors for their older customers. Ford and GM are investing billions in electric pickups.
Also, look at this from the manufacturing point of view. Car companies are switching to electricity because EVs offer the same car at lower manufacturing cost – 30-40% by VW’s estimate. Designing a new combustion engine costs billions, and few car companies can stomach the risk.
a lot of the buildings and parking structures in Portland OR have been built with a large amount of “compact” spaces (I’m a field technician so I travel to a lot of hospitals). There aren’t any cars built or purchased today that even closely resemble a compact size from 15 – 20 years ago. Not that you can’t have lighter weight vehicles in a large frame but I just find it funny that even in (what some consider) the most progressive city in the country – it is chock-a-block with GIANT cross overs
10 [ NOT SO NEW 😉 ] INSIGHTS IN CLIMATE SCIENCE
A new easy-to-read guide, ’10 New Insights in Climate Science’ has been presented to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s Executive Secretary, Patricia Espinosa, at the COP25 climate conference. The report provides an assessment of the key advances that have been made over the last 12 months in understanding the drivers, effects and impacts of climate change, as well as societal responses. It summarizes new findings on 10 specific aspects of climate change, including the record high in greenhouse gas concentrations, sea-level rise, forests under threat and extreme weather being the “new norm.”
From this report: “The pace at which greenhouse-gas concentrations are increasing is unprecedented in climate history. Carbon dioxide reached 407 ppm in 2018 with methane also at a record high. A GLOBAL TEMPERATURE RISE OF 1.5°C ABOVE PRE-INDUSTRIAL LEVELS COULD BE REACHED IN 2030, RATHER THAN 2040 as projected by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.” Caps are mine.
https://phys.org/news/2019-12-satellites-key-insights-climate-science.html
James Hansen just said it was possible for the West Antarctic Ice Sheet to collapse during this century.
Another researcher thinks that biological productivity will drop by half in two decades.
“Another researcher thinks that biological productivity will drop by half in two decades.”
One wonders. Sometimes I think we’re like six year old kids playing with matches.
NEWLY IDENTIFIED JET-STREAM PATTERN COULD IMPERIL GLOBAL FOOD SUPPLIES
“Scientists have identified systematic meanders in the globe-circling northern jet stream that have caused simultaneous crop-damaging heat waves in widely separated breadbasket regions — a previously unquantified threat to global food production that, they say, could worsen with global warming. The research shows that certain kinds of waves in the atmospheric circulation can become amplified and then lock in place for extended periods, triggering the concurrent heat waves. Affected parts of North America, Europe and Asia together produce a quarter of the world food supply.”
https://phys.org/news/2019-12-large-atmospheric-jet-stream-global.html
How was it the Secretary General of the UN put it? Something like “We are in a deep hole and we are still digging. Soon it will be too deep to escape.”
Some 25,000 VIPs like Hansen and a couple thousand journalists flew private jets or business class just to attend COP25. It’s kind of creepy how you think these people are credible at all.
Participating in society does not disqualify you from wanting to change society.
But the KGB thanks you for your service. Just kidding. You’re the victim.
Stude says “It’s kind of creepy how you think these people are credible at all.”
Yes, education does that to people. I was ruined early by attending one of the top engineering and science schools in the country. I was never the same. I can even tell the difference between big and little.
I recognize that professional climatologists understand the earth has went through elevated warming & cooling periods in the ancient past, but don’t yet fully comprehend why or how it happened or the various factors involved. That’s why this report will do little to nothing to get society to make sacrifices, especially because those of us without the PHDs don’t understand none of it. Humans have only been taking records of the planet’s climate for a couple hundred years at most. So if climatologists don’t yet fully comprehend how or why the climate naturally changed before, how would they be able to say with 100% certainty the new climate change triggers are completely due to human influences?
Troll alert
Straw man plus illiteracy. Maybe a parody?
Lets be kind, and think of it as a sort of parody. Probably the second of the two categories-
Definition of parody- 1 : a literary or musical work in which the style of an author or work is closely imitated for comic effect or in ridicule wrote a hilarious parody of a popular song. 2 : a feeble or ridiculous imitation a cheesy parody of a classic western
Remember Victoria Falls?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/dec/07/victoria-falls-dries-to-a-trickle-after-worst-drought-in-a-century
30 kilometers from the Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe, situated on several hundred hectares is the Africa Center for Holistic Management. Their records are also showing that this year has been the driest on record. During the 60’s this property was a ranch that struggled to maintain 100 head of cattle due to severe severe desertification. Today it is home to 500 head of cattle and about that many goats owned and managed by the village. The herders along with the rest of the villagers draw up a grazing plan every year to ensure that they only graze any given area once the plants have had enough time to regrow and build up their root reserves. Generally they will graze all the plants once during the 4 month rainy season and once during the 8 month dry season. During the dry season the herders make and extra effort to concentrate the whole herd so that all the dry grass stems get smashed down to make a mulch layer and to expose the crowns so that when the rains come the new shoots are not shaded out by the old stems.
At night they herd their cattle into a lion proof temporary corral built of steel pipes and tarps. They move the corral once a week to the next spot where they will then grow crops with all the fertilizer from the cows.
It took several decades of good grazing management to be able to increase the stocking rate to this level but the soil regeneration and grass production just continues to increase. They now are wanting to double their cattle numbers once again.
In addition to the livestock this once barren land is now home for lots of wildlife including a herd of elephant, and cape buffalo. As the forage in the surrounding government managed parks runs out during the dry season the concentration of wildlife on this community land just increases.
The mastermind behind so much of this is Allan Savory. He started out as a range scientist and has devoted his life with a tremendous passion to reversing the desertification that he was witnessing on the land through out southern Africa including all the national parks. He attributes a lot of their success to implementing the concepts of managing wholes by Jan Smuts who was a friend of Einstein.
Allan Savory says very emphatically that livestock managed holistically are the only tool we have to reverse desertification and their are now tens of millions of hectares of pasture and farmland across the globe that are being managed holistically and so much of this goes back to one man that refused to quit. Many of his presentations are on youtube. this is one of his latest https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vILw12ecPM
Sounds exciting to have so much land growing again and being re-wilded. A Siberian Arctic researcher has been showing how herds of animals can help keep the permafrost frozen.
We need to re-wild large portions of the landmass and ocean to prevent all kinds of trouble.
There used to be giant herds of buffalo roaming the North American plains. Now we have tractors roaming around and corn out our ears. Seems a poor replacement.
I’m guessing this article is overstating it a bit but they raise a valid point.
The decline in the plankton and the planets life support system did not start with the industrial revolution, it started with the ‘chemical revolution’. After the 1940’s, toxic chemical discharges included; herbicides, pesticides, antibiotics, pharmaceuticals, toxic cosmetics, industrial waste and plastic. https://www.whatsorb.com/newsletter/breaking-did-you-know-all-you-read-about-co2-rise-is-half-the-truth
So we poison the plankton with chemicals, thereby reducing the planet’s most effective CO2 sink, leading to an ever increasing rate of atmospheric CO2 increase, leading to acidified oceans, which leads to a collapse of carbonate-based ocean life. Talk about ecological ruin in overdrive.
islandboy, while you champion Australia’s solar energy achievements others have a vastly different perspective.
AUSTRALIA SEEN AS BEING ‘TOTALLY DISCONNECTED FROM REALITY’ ON WORLD STAGE
“While chunks of Australia’s east burns and Sydney chokes on dangerous smog, the global community is looking at Australia in dismay. When you talk to some Europeans, they look at Australians like they’re from a different planet. They cannot comprehend how a country can literally be on fire and admit the fire emergency is unprecedented, its experts knowing that climate change exacerbates and supercharges fires, and at the same time and in the same breath lobby for special consideration to do as little as possible on climate action.”
https://www.news.com.au/technology/environment/climate-change/australia-seen-as-being-totally-disconnected-from-reality-on-world-stage-climate-expert-says/news-story/1bd2bbbdd47385d9c9ffc613caadf92d
Hi Doug, here is some perspective. Looks like the Aussies are installing faster than anybody. I run on about 100 watts personally and they are installing much more than that per person every year.
Australia is the runaway global leader in building new renewable energy
In Australia, renewable energy is growing at a per capita rate ten times faster than the world average. Between 2018 and 2020, Australia will install more than 16 gigawatts of wind and solar, an average rate of 220 watts per person per year.
This is nearly three times faster than the next fastest country, Germany. Australia is demonstrating to the world how rapidly an industrialised country with a fossil-fuel-dominated electricity system can transition towards low-carbon, renewable power generation.
https://theconversation.com/australia-is-the-runaway-global-leader-in-building-new-renewable-energy-123694
Now if they could plug that coal and methane leak that spills over to the rest of the world.
Yes, coal aside, the producing and exporting LNG is driving growth in Australia’s greenhouse gas pollution; because, there are currently seven LNG production plants in Australia. By 2020, Australia will be operating ten LNG production plants and potentially exporting roughly 80 million tonnes of LNG per year. So, I guess my point is, GREENHOUSE GAS POLLUTION ASSOCIATED WITH LNG BETWEEN 2015 AND 2020 CANCELS OUT EMISSIONS REDUCTIONS FROM AUSTRALIA’S NATIONAL RENEWABLE ENERGY TARGET.
There are no emission reductions from PV yet, so it’s fossil fuels all the way.
The sad thing is that if you read articles at reneweconomy.com.au as frequently as I do, it appears that by and large, the majority of the Australian population is on board with the energy transition and global warming etc. It also appears that a relatively small minority of Australians with interests in the FF business, with the help of the same media company that owns Fox News, have been able to hoodwink the majority to elect a set of politicians to their federal government that is doing the bidding of the FF interests. The same media conglomerate seems to be pushing the idea that the financial interests of Australia on a whole are inextricably linked to the interests of the FF industries.
Australia and the US are studies in mass media gone rogue.
Sorry islandboy you are wrong. Getting your information from reneweconomy.com.au is like getting your information from fox news. They both have their own brand of propaganda.
If the Australian people cared about energy transition or climate change, they would have voted for the Green or Labor party in the Federal election held on May this year. But they voted in the Liberal government. Because job secure in the coal and gas industry and the state of the economy is MUCH MUCH more important to the majority of Australians than climate change and energy transition.
Iron Mike, there are two problems with what you have said. One is that, at the state level, individual state governments appear far more favourable to renewables than the federal government. The other is that if Australia were to transition to a renewable energy based economy, who is to say that less wealth would be generated? Even if less wealth were generated, it is likely that the wealth would be more evenly distributed.
The problem as I see it is that large communities have their world views influenced by what they see around them every day and I have seen clips of Sky News broadcasts in Australia (courtesy of reneweconomy.com.au) and some of what is published in the print media. From where I sit, Rupert Murdoch’s media empire is just as powerful in Australia as it is in the US, if not more so. If one gets most of their news and opinion from a particular source, it is very likely that one will eventually buy in to any agenda being pushed by that source, assuming that the choice of news/opinion sources was not determined by a previously held world view.
Since you live in Australia, you probably see more public opinion polls etc. than would be available to non residents. A quick internet search brought up the following:
Lowy Institute Poll shows Australians’ support for climate action at its highest level in a decade
Is this “fake news”?
I would think that people in the Murdoch Empire would be aware of these polls and adjust their messaging to get the results desired by the owners. That is one of the things that mass media does, influence public opinion and yet from the quoted piece, “while the federal government doggedly pursues a “technology-neutral” energy policy, Australians don’t seem to be buying it. Public support for a large-scale energy transition in Australia is even more emphatic than support for climate action.”
What gives?
One is that, at the state level, individual state governments appear far more favourable to renewables than the federal government
Too broad a statement, which state?
Federal election involves the whole nation so the sample size is more reflective of the mindset.
The other is that if Australia were to transition to a renewable energy based economy, who is to say that less wealth would be generated? Even if less wealth were generated, it is likely that the wealth would be more evenly distributed
Don’t shoot the messenger. I am telling you the majority Australian mindset. They take pride in mining since it’s the backbone of the economy. Labor lost largely due to Queensland, because of their stance and policies regarding coal mining. Today the labor leader met with coal miners as it seems they are changing their stance. Wrap that around your brain.
People throughout history and throughout the world have always been influenced one way or another by propaganda. It distorts clear and independent thinking in one way. In another people in general DON’T GIVE A F*^# about issues that don’t directly affect them in the immediate future.
You need to accept facts. Propaganda always plays a factor in life whether politics or otherwise, but Australian people in general care about jobs and the backbone of their economy which is iron ore, coal and gas. And a lot of people are doubters at best of climate change, as the federal election showed. They elected a prime minister who is more or less part of a cult (hillsong).
You can delude yourself all you want and immerse yourself in your brand of propaganda and hopium. But facts will always remain facts, no matter how bitter or sweet.
Not just Australia, LNG export is spreading fast.
Environmentalists lost the fight to stop an LNG export port in New Jersey. LNG headed to the Caribbean.
Federal officials will let LNG be shipped by rail to Greenwich Township port
Delaware River Partners LLC, which is building the port facility, is owned by a company that is controlled and managed by Fortress Investment Group, a New York hedge fund affiliated with New Fortress Energy.
New Fortress has proposed building a 3.6-million-gallon-per-day natural gas liquefaction plant in north-central Pennsylvania, and says it plans to export the LNG it produces to locations in the Caribbean.
Delaware River Partners LLC say LNG is only one of several commodities that may be shipped from the port, including other fuels, automobiles, and bulk cargo.
https://www.inquirer.com/business/federal-approval-lng-trains-repauno-new-fortress-phmsa-20191209.html
Here’s another perspective from my favorite propaganda and hopium outlet:
Can we dig it? Battery metals market may be worth twice coal exports
Generally speaking, it’s reasonable to expect the renewables business to reduce the volume and the profits of mining.
“Too broad a statement, which state?”
South Australia for one and from my favorite Ausie web site:
NSW to cut emissions by 35 pct by 2030, attacks “vested interests and ideologues”
Another one of those annoying “more than expected” reports.
GREENLAND ICE LOSSES RISING FASTER THAN EXPECTED
“Greenland is losing ice seven times faster than in the 1990s and is tracking the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s high-end climate warming scenario, which would see 40 million more people exposed to coastal flooding by 2100.
The findings, published today in Nature today, show that Greenland has lost 3.8 trillion tonnes of ice since 1992 — enough to push global sea levels up by 10.6 millimetres. The rate of ice loss has risen from 33 billion tonnes per year in the 1990s to 254 billion tonnes per year in the last decade — a seven-fold increase within three decades.”
https://phys.org/news/2019-12-greenland-ice-losses-faster.html
Do they have a baseline for how quickly the Greenland ice *should* be growing or melting? Without such there can be no genuine expectations.
Marty —
The Greenland ice sheet, as a whole, was near balance over the time period 1972–1990. It is since then that the mass balance started to deviate from its natural range of variability.
Looks like a cold air mass is moving down across Canada and into the US. Map shows forecast for the 19th. Batten down the hatches, expect Blue Blob Bob to make a showing.
Marty —
GREENLAND’S RAPID MELT WILL MEAN MORE FLOODING
“There are climate projections that are based on models of varying levels of complexity and observations, but they have large uncertainties. Our study is purely an observational one that tests those uncertainties. Therefore, we have irrefutable evidence that we seem to be on track with one of the most pessimistic sea level rise scenarios,” said Erik Ivins, second author and lead scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=7556
Those with a geological and/or geophysical bent will enjoy this. And, almost anyone can appreciate the graphics.
THE ANTARCTIC: STUDY FROM KIEL PROVIDES DATA ABOUT THE STRUCTURE OF THE ICY CONTINENT
“We are finally getting to know the Antarctic properly,” says Ebbing. In addition to the temperature distribution, the researchers have also determined other properties of the solid earth, such as the composition and the rock density.
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-12/ku-tas120919.php
Original publication: Pappa, F., Ebbing, J., Ferraccioli, F., & van der Wal, W. ( 2019). Modeling satellite gravity gradient data to derive density, temperature, and viscosity structure of the antarctic lithosphere. Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, 124. https://doi.org/10.1029/2019JB017997
I have a question to my U.S buddies on this blog.
Does Trump legitimately have a chance of being impeached? Or is it just a media shit show which will turn into nothing.
He will be impeached by the House, but the Senate Repugs will put party over country.
The Dems know this, obviously.
Hello Iron Mike,
This is from wiki on the impeachment and conviction process. They are two separate processes:
“Impeachment in the United States is the process by which a legislature (usually in the form of the lower house) brings charges against a civil officer of government for crimes alleged to have been committed, analogous to the bringing of an indictment by a grand jury. At the federal level, this is at the discretion of the House of Representatives. Most impeachments have concerned alleged crimes committed while in office, though there have been a few cases in which officials have been impeached and subsequently convicted for crimes committed prior to taking office.[1] The impeached official remains in office until a trial is held. That trial, and their removal from office if convicted, is separate from the act of impeachment itself. Analogous to a trial before a judge and jury, these proceedings are (where the legislature is bicameral) conducted by the upper house of the legislature, which at the federal level is the Senate. However, impeachment is not a criminal proceeding, as the defendant does not risk forfeiture of life, liberty or property; the only penalty is removal from office upon conviction by two-thirds of the senators present. Upon conviction (no president or vice-president has ever been convicted), a second vote is held to determine, by majority vote of the senators present, if the convicted office holder shall be barred from holding further federal office. ”
“At the federal level, the impeachment process is a three-step procedure.
First, the Congress investigates. This investigation typically begins in the House Judiciary Committee, but may begin elsewhere. For example, the Nixon impeachment inquiry began in the Senate Judiciary Committee. The facts that led to impeachment of Bill Clinton were first discovered in the course of an investigation by Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr.
Second, the House of Representatives must pass, by a simple majority of those present and voting, articles of impeachment, which constitute the formal allegation or allegations. Upon passage, the defendant has been “impeached”.
Third, the Senate tries the accused. In the case of the impeachment of a president, the Chief Justice of the United States presides over the proceedings. For the impeachment of any other official, the Constitution is silent on who shall preside, suggesting that this role falls to the Senate’s usual presiding officer, the President of the Senate who is also the Vice President of the United States. Conviction in the Senate requires a two-thirds super majority vote of those present. The result of conviction is removal from office.”
Trump may be impeached by the Democratically controlled House by a simple majority vote but the Senate is needed to vote for a conviction. The former is likely to happen but not the later as the Senate is controlled by the Republicans and a 2/3rds super majority vote is needed.
The likely outcome is that he will be impeached but not convicted thus remaining in office.
The senators will follow their voters. So Trump will most likely be not convicted by the Senate (after Congress Impeachment). The Senate is currently controlled by the republican party. He will remain in office.
He has a strong chance of re-election.
Democracy has many broken pieces here in the USA,
and enough voters like his version of the world to give him a strong chance.
He has a strong chance of re-election.
Possibly, but I’m no so sure.
He lost the popular vote last time by 3 million votes, even with an incredibly weak Dem candidate, Hillary.
We shall see how far the political literacy of The States has fallen.
Both parties are capitalists, we don’t have any other options with our outdated political system.
Reformist politics is disappearing into the rear view mirror.
It is way too late.
Unfortunately it is the electoral college which decides the president, the popular vote means very little on the national scale.
Thank you everyone for your replies. Very informative.
Hi GF, Hi Doug
First off, GF, I owe you an apology, and hereby humbly offer it for some very unkind remarks I made a while back. My only excuse for not doing so earlier is that I’m as stiff necked and obstinate as the next boneheaded old fart, but I do eventually come around.
I know you’re better informed than I am, in terms of many technical aspects of the problems we discuss here, but it drives me out of my tree when people don’t also stop to consider the PRACTICAL aspects of dealing with things, of dealing with PEOPLE as they ARE, of the ECONOMY as it IS, etc.
Given that I’m not in a position to do any first hand research, I have to go with what I can read, and judge what I read by how credible I find the publisher. It’s generally easy for somebody like me to come to a reasonably sound opinion as to the editorial standards and ethical standing of a website or organization, because I know enough about enough things to judge any particular site or organization as being professionally sound and ethically respectable.
This remark goes back to the discussion up above about the CO2 issue as it relates to electric cars versus conventional cars, solar panels versus ff fired electricity and so forth.
If anybody knows of a NEW given book written in terms accessible to a person such as myself, well educated but not an engineer or mathematician, etc, I would love to read it.
It’s GODDAMNED hard to find ANYTHING that presents both sides of ANY serious argument fairly, unless it’s written at the sound bite level intended to be digested over coffee and forgotten.
For instance…… I find myself compelled to ask GF to document the argument that solar panels aren’t an environmental BARGAIN, compared to the REAL WORLD alternative…… simply continuing on burning ever more coal and gas to generate electricity.
Consider this. EVEN if the manufacturing process results in more CO2 being released than will be offset by the electrical energy captured by the panel, there’s the issue that the SAME amount of electricity as the panel will produce will require at least DOUBLE the actual CO2 being released by burning coal and gas… because the central power plants used to generate the juice on the grid are less than fifty percent efficient….. and at least ANOTHER ten percent of that juice is lost to waste via the transmission process.
And that argument does not allow for the fact that whatever goes into a new panel is almost certainly going to be recycled down the road.
And the issue that Doug points out about lithium mining being an environmental disaster…… well, I don’t know anything about it, other than what I can find that’s not behind a paywall, but here’s my question for Doug?
Hi Doug?
Do you have any reason to believe that the people, or corporations, or governments, that are mining lithium are any worse than the people that are mining coal, mining uranium, mining gold, platinum, drilling for oil or gas in underdeveloped countries, etc?
I’m a realist, and we don’t HAVE the luxury of being in a position to say we aren’t going to buy lithium from scum bag people and corporations, any more than we have the option of saying we aren’t going to buy oil and gas from the Russians, or gold from South Africa, or soybeans from the people who are burning the Amazon.
In the real day to day world we live in , we don’t really have any choice but to use all these things, and they are all fungible, and not dealing with any one producer or some other producer does no more good than cutting CO2 emissions in one country by exporting carbon intensive industries to some other country that will use EVEN more coal per unit of production……
while that CO2 blows around the world in a matter of a month or so, and from pole to pole in a matter of a year or so, that coal, oil, gas, gold, diamond, platinum, etc crosses borders just as easily.
And only an idiot argues that there’s any real chance we will change or collective ways until we HAVE NO CHOICE.
This is why I keep talking about PEARL HARBOR Wake UP EVENTS.
Such events are the only thing I have even been able to IMAGINE happening that will result in our getting our collective asses in gear, and going proactive about the environmental crisis in general, the climate crisis in particular, and the non renewable resource crisis coming in a distant third, unless the depletion crisis sets off WWIII. ( Of course both the overall environmental problem and the climate problem might also ignite WWIII. )
OFM –
I’m up for my monthly chemo therapy today so will make this very short (perhaps expand later). Or maybe not. As I mentioned before, it’s sort of a taboo topic.
First, my actual “lithium exposure” is fairly old now. I was hired to look for reserves in the Western US by a multinational then sent to try and tie up deposits in foreign lands. My focus became Bolivia which contains the most lithium in one place.
The first thing to realize is that there is an ongoing “lithium rush” whereby countries are trying to tie up reserves; so far the Chinese are winning this race. The Germans made a major play to secure the Bolivian deposits but this effort has recently failed, apparently.
The second thing to note is that lithium extraction requires a lot of water. Since the main deposits occur in some of the world’s driest places this does not bode well for the locals. In some cases, it’s a disaster.
Third, there are also some issues with lithium toxicity which are typically ignored in third world countries.
Must go now. I apologize for the garbled (and over simplified) response.
Hope your treatment is uneventful Doug.
Yep, good luck Doug—
The first thing to realize is that there is an ongoing “lithium rush” whereby countries are trying to tie up reserves;
What about this ?
“A team of chemists and engineers at Swiss-German battery start-up Innolith have developed a new battery chemistry they claim is superior to lithium-ion.
Innolith, a Basel-based company with a 60-strong R&D team in Bruchsal, near Frankfurt, formally launched on Wednesday with plans to commercialise an inorganic battery chemistry that is non-flammable and durable by 2020. “
https://www.ft.com/content/6b20f63e-cc5b-11e8-b276-b9069bde0956
let’s see when they get 10% market share—–
I wouldn’t hold your breath.
Still using Lithium Ion, just using Sulphur Dioxide in “room temperature molten salt” as electrolyte, preferably LiAlCl4.
https://worldwide.espacenet.com/patent/search/family/047722213/publication/US2015207172A1?q=pn%3DUS2015207172A1
(app shows assignment to Alevo, the predecessor company. Last legal event on EPO is assignment to Innolith).
Well, yes, that’s not going to burn.
But if it bursts open, it will take water out of the air (or water from fire fighting) and give hydrochloric acid (gas, unless a lot of water is used).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_tetrachloroaluminate
Currently used in primary (non-rechargeable) lithium-thionyl chloride batteries.
The SO2 when off-gased is toxic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfur_dioxide
I’m concerned about safety in accidents, definitely more nasty than the usual electrolytes in the type of Li-ion batteries used in EVs.
I will add to my 10:31 AM that I agree with Doug that time is very short, and that any plan that doesn’t help reduce CO2 emissions short term may not help us much, if at all, because the shit may be well and truly in the fan within the next few years, and it be that a crash and burn climate scenario is already baked in anyway.
Big Lithium mine expansion in western NC, that’s your stomping grounds right OFM?
https://insideevs.com/news/387030/largest-us-lithium-mine-federal-approval/
Thanks Stephen,
That’s right under my doorstep, figuratively speaking, not much more than a two hour drive, and I hadn’t even heard of it this mine being in development, although I’ve read up on places where lithium MIGHT be mined within the last couple of years.
There’s quite a bit of it in the world, and if we ever learn how to extract it economically from sea water, the supply is for all practical purposes inexhaustible.
If this mine produces as expected, according to the link, that’s going to be enough lithium for over a million cars per year, and if the battery tech improves and cars get smaller, it might be enough for two million or more cars.
It’s probably enough for two million small cars with relatively short ranges using CURRENT battery designs.
People will be GLAD to own a sub compact short range commuter car sometime within the next ten to twenty years unless I miss my guess, because that’s all they will be able to AFFORD or and it might even be the only size and range of new car available without paying a huge luxury tax penalty.
It’s either going to be own your own subcompact electric commuter, or robo taxi, or GIVE UP the McMANSION.
It might even be that the only choice for a LOT of people will be to take a subcompact robo taxi, lol.
Pardon my french, but as my neighbors say, there ain’t no fucking decent affordable housing in town, and there ain’t about to be no fucking decent and affordable housing in town. That’s WHY we have suburbia and sprawl.
A place as nice as mine, which is quite ordinary for a mountain area farm house and grounds would RENT for well over a hundred grand annually, absolute minimum, within commuting distance of DC.
Sky Daddy alone could even GUESS what such a place would sell for, with a few acres of nice landscaping, woods for a quarter of a mile all around,except for the orchard visible from the picture windows, and views comparable to those that grace the post cards sold in New England tourist traps, lol. And I’m a POOR man, as far as net worth goes.
The next oil crisis, and there WILL be one, it’s simply a question of WHEN, rather than if, will have people lined up to buy an electric car at any dealership that has a couple in stock.
OFM said “It’s GODDAMNED hard to find ANYTHING that presents both sides of ANY serious argument fairly, unless it’s written at the sound bite level intended to be digested over coffee and forgotten.
For instance…… I find myself compelled to ask GF to document the argument that solar panels aren’t an environmental BARGAIN, compared to the REAL WORLD alternative…… simply continuing on burning ever more coal and gas to generate electricity.”
Not the question I was trying to answer. We all know that PV is a better energy source than coal.
I was trying to find out how much help PV was giving us in the present and near future. The answer is not much, possibly negative for years to come.
Let’s say we have one billion PV panels deployed at 300 watts per panel. How many PV panels could they produce per day (using the NREL value of 4 years for a panel to produce enough energy to produce another panel? The answer is 684,931 or 0.2 GW per day. Over the year that adds up to about 81 GW per year can be added using an equivalent amount of energy from all the panels installed already.
We added over 100 GW in 2018, from a base of about 400 GW in 2017 which is right at the energy limit of installed panels. in previous years we were installing beyond the energy produced by all panels.
So no help with energy from PV yet, that is in the future when the production rate slows down. As the predicted energy payback time in the future falls then we may start to get some help or we will just produce them faster.
What is better than coal, or all energy sources? Avoiding the use of that energy through changes in demand and efficiency. Also reduction in consumption, which means less energy demand through the system. Activities that promote soil building, forest building, reduction in waste, etc.
Gone fishing,
I agree, we should pursue both approaches.
I imagine that you might agree, as reducing energy use to zero will be difficult.
So we should use energy as efficiently as possible and develop technology to do even better than what is currently possible (in a technical sense, obviously we are subject to physical laws). At the same time we should build out wind and solar power as rapidly as possible (while also improving those technologies) and develop more efficient transportation that minimizes energy use as much as possible.
Or that is my take, might be very different from yours.
The present is the only time we have for action. If our action is not helping the present, then we are mostly wasting precious time in the hope that those actions might effect the future. The future will be very different than now, we know that, so why all the hubris and effort to build things for an unknown future that may be totally useless then or even harmful?
If we learn how to act properly in the now, the future will take care of itself. We need faith, not hopium.
Gonefishing,
Every action occurs in the present. I guess one needs to consider whether one wants to take action that will make the future better or worse.
Answer is not known until the future arrives.
It is far from clear what you think is good policy, even an attempt to agree with you is met with criticism.
This tends to lead to disengagement from discussion. Perhaps that is your preference.
There was no criticism of you.
Dennis, I am not “here” to make people comfortable or to be a cheerleader.
Obviously civilization is headed down a horrible path, so people learning how to act in the present is paramount otherwise it just gets repeated in a different form at a later time.
Gone fishing,
It is not clear to me what you believe is a realistic way forward. Often people’s behavior is effected by their environment and can be affected in part by relative prices (in terms of the products they choose.)
I would certainly agree that reducing population growth is a good idea as is reducing consumption by buying well built new goods (so they last a long time) or buying used goods. Lots can be done to improve energy efficiency, but building out PV and wind to replace natural gas and coal electric power seems a reasonable short term approach, as does replacing some ice vehicles with EVs, electric rail, and electric light rail. One would need to do the analysis to determine at what population density EVs make more sense than rail and light rail.
high fossil fuel prices in the future, is likely to lead to many changes in behavior, perhaps government intervention taxes or other means will also be needed. High fossil fuel prices might lead to those changes as well.
The NREL paper on PV payback period is badly out of date. Here’s the paper: https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy99osti/24619.pdf
And here are the references. Look at the dates: they’re more than 20 years old!!
Alsema, E. (1999). “Energy Requirements and CO2 Mitigation Potential of PV Systems.” Photovoltaics and the
Environment. Keystone, CO, July 1998, Workshop Proceedings. Brookhaven National Laboratory report (in press).
Dones, R.; Frischknecht, R. (1997). “Life Cycle Assessment of Photovoltaic Systems: Results of Swiss Studies on
Energy Chains.” Appendix B-9. Environmental Aspects of PV Power Systems. Utrecht, The Netherlands: Utrecht University,
Report Number 97072.
Kato, K.; Murata, A.; Sakuta, K. (1997). “Energy Payback Time and Life-Cycle CO2 Emission of Residential PV Power
System with Silicon PV Module.” Appendix B-8. Environmental Aspects of PV Power Systems. Utrecht, The Netherlands:
Utrecht University, Report Number 97072.
Palz, W.; Zibetta, H. (1991). “Energy Pay-Back Time of Photovoltaic Modules.” International Journal of Solar Energy.
Volume 10, Number 3-4, pp. 211-216.
The thing about rebuilding PV is true, and often forgotten, but it also applies to any power plant. The current fleet of power plants is more or less constantly being renewed. One reason American coal and nuclear are dying so fast is that there hasn’t been much investment since the early 80s — short term profits matter more.
The advantage to PV is that you don’t need energy between rebuilds.
That said, I question your 30 year replacement claim. NREL’s studies put the median degradation rate for solar panels at 0.5% a year.
https://www.nrel.gov/state-local-tribal/blog/posts/stat-faqs-part2-lifetime-of-pv-panels.html
At that rate, the panels would still output about 86% after thirty years. After 50 years, output falls to about 78%. That suggests 25% would need to be replaced every 50 years, or the entire fleet every 200 years.
Advocates of nuclear energy often point to the low “energy density” of solar panels as a disadvantage, but the advantage is that the individual panels don’t take much stress. Like LEDs, which are just solar panels running backwards, solar panels have low stress levels, so they live longer.
Good point Alim, if oil and gas wells were abandoned at 80 percent output most would never be drilled at all. The calculated life of a panel has moved from 20 years to 25 years, now 30 years. If one does not worry about profit they can probably be allowed to go much longer once panels get at their peak efficiency. I can see a residence fully dependent upon them replacing when they fall below their needed power demand but otherwise they can probably be run down to 50% unless power is so expensive that it really pays to replace more often. For all we know that could take 100 years if people take care of the covers. Most panels out there are 10 years old or less, so we don’t know.
Weather damage, lightning, accidents and water invasion are more likely to kill a panel than cell degradation.
Rumor Mill: Tesla Gigafactory 4 To Produce 500,000 Cars A Year
If this is true, then by sometime around 2022, Tesla alone will be producing more pure EVs (1.5 million) than were sold worldwide last year!
The Dutch EV Market Surges Again In November To 18% Market Share
I sometimes wonder if EV sales are being constrained by a lack of options in all segments of the market. Tesla’s will only appeal to a limited group and there are not many compelling choices outside of Tesla at the moment. It will be interesting to see what happens when VW ID3 deliveries get underway next year.
“I sometimes wonder if EV sales”
Yes I agree, they are being constrained by lack of options at the lower and mid-levels (of price). And yes, when VW and Ford and others come out with reasonable choices it will have a big effect.
But the biggest constraint is the cost of batteries. Can’t emphasize that enough.
But the biggest constraint is the cost of batteries.
Lithium ion was first commercialized by the Japanese in the early 1990’s.
While improvements have been made, it has been a while comrades.
This is not a minor issue.
(if it is, let me know)
When living in Sonoma, I traveled in a friends EV frequently– I like them.
Lithium ion battery packs have had double digit percentage decreases for the last ten years (except one 8%). Bloomberg has $100/kWh packs by 2023, 2024 at the latest. Hopefully some cheaper options will be readily available mid decade. And yes we need to figure out a better solution for grid backup batteries and save the Li for EVs.
https://insideevs.com/news/386024/bloombergnef-battery-prices-156-kwh-2019/
It’s all coming. Nickolas Motors purportedly has a sulfur based battery using more common elements for its semiEVs. Honda is working on a flouride based battery with CalTech and NASA. Both have purported double to 8 to 10 times the energy density of lithium based batteries. Cheaper, higher energy density, and longer lasting is where the development is taking us.
An analogy would be aviation in the mid-1920’s. A ten times jump in energy density would be a Model 3 going from Key West to almost Seattle. No more “puddle jumping” from Supercharger to Supercharger. Instead of Linburgh going across the Atlantic, it will be some EV going cross country on one charge.
Such a battery will have profound effects on our energy storage and usage.
Yes there’s a few disrupters out there that may make Tesla look like GM in a decade. I’m watching Lightyear One, Sono, and Aptera. Aptera claims a thousand mile range based on their advanced low drag design. Lightyear is claiming 7.5 miles per hour of recharge off their integrated PV panels.
I think next year Tesla will show a new battery technic.
Why?
They want to start their Roadster 2.0 with a 200 Kwh battery pack.
In Tesla 3 technology ( 480 Kg for 80 Kwh), the pack will weight 1200 KG – that’s not an roadster anymore, but a truck. The same with the Semi – the prognosed pack of round about 1000 Kwh would weight 10 tons, eating away the payload of the truck.
They are already hinting about their new “1 million mile battery”. I think surprisingly this battery will be more compact.
If it’s double the current density, the both vehicles come to 600 Kg / 5 tons. Makes much more sense.
Also the 500 mile Cybertruck. This behemoth will use some more electrons / mile than a M3 – so big pack there, too.
There is a reason why they don’t say anything about it – they don’t want customers waiting for the new battery tech. Avoiding the “next IPhone” effect. Keeping it secret as long as they can.
I like ice cream, comrade, but too much of it messes with my system in ways I dislike quite a bit.
With a sideways regard to your often-mentioned phrase, ‘It’s been awhile’, the elapsed span of time can ‘do things’, such as if for example, ‘everyone on the planet’ had an EV and lots of other things that require batteries and the mining of rare earths and related activities, including storage in general. That would probably be too much for Earth’s systems.
Like too much ice cream for mine.
You really don’t need much rare earths for an EV, only the part for the electronic.
You need lithium and copper – and I think the lithium prospectors are out to look for more.
And if you see it in comparasion to for example fracking oil, lithium from salt seas is a very low impact operation when done right (Just build a small desalination plant to recycle water).
Eulenspiegel, if I can be a little metaphoric, you’re standing too close to the pointillist painting and so I would respectfully suggest you back up to see more of its larger picture and that you make greater attempts in general to see things more along that line, if you already aren’t, at least with regard to responding to my comments. It will likely save some time and annoyance.
There are developments that might make batteries significantly less CO2 intensive to make and somewhat less costly as a result. Look for an announcement probably within the next three months.
The biggest constraint to EV sales is the supply of batteries not the cost. cost might be a problem somewhere down the road, but right now demand is far outstripping supply, so cost obviously isn’t an issue.
Production has been growing at a double digit rate for years, but this isn’t enough to satisfy demand. If anything the problem is that prices are too low, opening up new niches for consumption, including power tools, electric scooters, utility storage as well as cars.
https://www.thecarexpert.co.uk/electric-car-market-long-waiting-times/
The Mental Cybertrucks
The so-called market appears woefully inadequate for appropriate resource allocation.
‘New niches for consumption’ sounds like yet another red flag and signal for a bad drag against where resources need to go in this critical time in our history-in-the-making.
But of course the unreality-bubbles enrobing, such as on sites like POB, the unaerodynamics of denial and delusion, irrespective of their irrational shapes, coast along…
All that is rational is not brown blobs,
brown blobs, by all account is irrational.
Big, black, brown blobs.
Are you upset by how unreasonable they are?
Does it tear you apart to see the brown blobs so superstitious?
A buoyancy, however hard it tries,
Will always be blatant.
Now unconcealed is just the thing,
To get me wondering if the buoyancy is clamant.
One afternoon I said to myself,
“Why aren’t blowholes more nonfat?”
Down, down, down into the darkness of the blowholes,
Gently they go – the jowly, the suety, the chubby.
Just like a banter, is the bubbles.
Squeege. squeege, squeege.
Nice! Thanks for sharing. ^u^
I sometimes wonder if EV sales are being constrained by a lack of options in all segments of the market.
Islandboy, I wouldn’t call a 18% market share sale (in november) constrained. Holland however is a small country, but the batteries get better regarding distance covered with one charge and price
There are some Kias that are nice, the Chevy Bolt, and the Nissan Leaf, an upcoming Ford Mustang-E, a bunch of stuff coming from VW and other German Manufacturers. there are plugin Hybrids from Toyota and Honda, and Chyrsler and Ford.
Tesla is not the only game in town. The Model 3 is pretty nice and I imagine the Model Y will sell well when it becomes available in 2020.
https://cleantechnica.com/2018/01/04/plug-hybrid-electric-vehicles-available-purchase-usa/
That was Jan 2018, no doubt there are more up to date sources, the choices will grow.
For EVs in US
https://evadoption.com/ev-models/bev-models-currently-available-in-the-us/
Embedded Insolence
It’s pretty disappointing, maybe even terrifying, to see all the prioritized banter from some who should know better, about particular technologies and at this late stage from a system that’s trashing/trashed the planet and cultures.
If some wonder why we’re apparently so good at collapsing our civilizations and localities, perhaps they should simply take a look around them…
And watch it play out.
Time Has Got Nothing To Do With It
are all chargers universal at this point? are most chargers universal? i’m assuming tesla plug is proprietary. so do they provide an adapter for universal chargers?
There are three different standards:
CCS-US/North America
CCS-Europe
Chademo-Japan
Cars manufactured in Japan have a Chademo port and may or may not include a CCS port for the market to which they are shipped to. Cars manufactured for sale in North America should be equipped with the appropriate CCS port as should those manufactured for sale in Europe. Other markets that import cars from the US, Japan and Europe will have the headache of having to deal with the two incompatible CCS standards in addition to Chademo. As far as I know, Tesla can supply adapters for all three standards.
Yes, Tesla cars come with an adapter, and can even plug right into a home 120v outlet for slow charging. Slow charging is slow, but the battery life will be vastly improved.
Hickory,
Level 2 charging does very little damage to battery especially id one typically charges only to 85% of capacity and only run the battery down to about 20%, that is the sweet spot. Level 3 (fast charging at 120 kW) charging is probably not good for battery life, but charging at 7.7 KW (typical home charging at 24oV and 32 A) is not a problem, there is no advantage to charging more slowly, but if one thinks that males sense the Tesla will allow one to limit the current to 2 Amps (0.48 kW), about 7 or 8 Amperes would be similar power to the typical 120V, 15 Amp circuit, but charging would be 4 times slower ( about 7.5 miles of range per hour of charging) instead of 8 hours for 240 miles of range it would be 32 hours, not all that practical.
In short, level 2 chargers are fine, faster chargers are probably ok occasionally, but better not to charge beyond 85% with the fast charger.
Dennis, are you saying that a 300 mile range battery is really a 200 mile range battery for practical use?
Holding the battery between 20 and 85% is like driving a gas car always very carefully, never flooring it, always doing every maintaince in time, always selecting the right gear… the engine will thank you for this with a longer life.
You can do this with an electric car easy for daily use – normal people seldom need the 300 miles every day, so this 200 miles range is enough since you charge it every time you come home.
But it’s not really a problem to charge it full when you need it.
Supercharger loading is only for long road trips anyway – you charge only to 80% at superchargers since charging speed gets very slow after this.
GF and Eulen…
If you get a car that has been measured to have a 240 mile range, that already takes into account the limitations of the charge cycle imposed by the manufacturer.
“While not all manufacturers publish the “usable” battery capacity for their cars, Chevrolet did for the Volt plug-in hybrid. Of its 18.4. kWh battery pack, just 14 kWh of electricity is actually available to drivers – about 75% of the battery’s actual capacity. This means a charge from 0% to 100% in the car is more akin to a charge from 15% to 90% – a much less intense use-case for the Lithium-ion battery. This allows for thousands of cycles before serious degradation begins to occur, compared to just hundreds.”
“Speaking of Tesla, they have a slightly different approach to protections than other manufacturers. Tesla is transparent about their top-end buffer – their cars will only charge to 90% by default. You can actually adjust this daily driving buffer to be anywhere between 50% and 90%, depending on your personal preference.
However, Tesla permits you to charge up to actual 100% when you want to. For example, you may want the extra range if you’re going to be doing a lot of extra driving one day, or if you’re leaving for a road trip. This approach allows drivers to get full utility of the car and battery when they need it while still protecting it from premature degradation.”
https://www.currentautomotive.com/how-long-will-an-electric-vehicle-battery-last/
Gonefishing,
Not really. You charge to 100% if you need to make a long trip.
If you typically drive less than 200 miles each day, then you increase the longevity of your battery by charging to 75% or 80% each night, ideally you would anticipate your usage and if you only need 20% of the battery range on a typical day, you would charge to 60% and run the battery down to 40%, keeping in the middle of the battery’s voltage range is easiest on the chemistry.
Most vehicles have built in limits on the battery pack charging cycle depth. For example, I have a 16 kw pack, with the effective use being limited to 12kw by the manufacturer. The mileage of the battery pack has been measured on the effective (limited) battery capacity at standard conditions.
Even my iphone is now doing that to give a longer life (just got a message to that effect this morning via a software update).
Secondly fast charging does indeed degrade the battery life.
Just saw an article on this yesterday that reports on the experience with over 6000 electric vehicles-
https://cleantechnica.com/2019/12/16/new-data-shows-heat-fast-charging-responsible-for-more-battery-degradation-than-age-or-mileage/
Bottom line for lithium batteries
-charge them slow whenever possible
-keep them cool [liquid cooled battery pack models do better]
-keep the action at between 20 and 80% of total capacity
Example of how EV manufacturers are working to keep the batteries cooler-
Rivian-
https://insideevs.com/news/388413/rivian-top-energy-density-battery-cooling/
Hickory,
My point is that 240 V and 32 amps is not a fast charge.
I agree high power charging might reduce battery life (12o kW).
But 10 kW is not a problem as far as I have read.
There Is No Such Thing As A Level 3 EV Charger: Video
Auto manufacturing in turmoil, lots of job cuts globally as car makers assess the new vehicle types and systems they want to manufacture.
The German companies joined General Motors, Ford Motor Co. and Nissan Motor Co. in massive retrenchments put in motion over the past year. The industry is sputtering as trade tensions and tariffs raise costs and stifle investment, and as manufacturers reassess their workforce in an era of electrification, autonomous driving and ride-on-demand services.
The global auto industry will produce 88.8 million cars and light trucks this year, an almost six per cent drop from a year ago, according to researcher IHS Markit. German auto-industry lobby VDA on Wednesday predicted that the decline will continue next year, forecasting global deliveries of 78.9 million vehicles, the lowest level since 2015.
https://canada.autonews.com/automakers/automakers-cutting-80000-jobs-globally-ev-shift-upends-industry
So what happens to the car industry when million mile cars show up that are cheaper to run and maintain, plus might start driving themselves as taxi fleets? A business minefield for planning is what happens and lots of companies caught behind the curve of development. Add to that new global trade tensions to make a mixmaster of the business.
The automotive industry has definitely taken a big hit through the past few years, and it’s a worldwide phenomena.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/25/global-car-sales-expected-to-slide-by-3point1-million-this-year-in-biggest-drop-since-recession.html
“So what happens to the car industry when million mile cars show up that are cheaper to run and maintain, plus might start driving themselves as taxi fleets?”
A Clean Disruption a la Tony Seba!
So what happens to the car industry when million mile cars show up that are cheaper to run and maintain, plus might start driving themselves as taxi fleets?
Same thing that happened to the typewriter industry and the secretaries who used them when word processing was introduced.
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/05/382664837/map-the-most-common-job-in-every-state
Look behind every successful businessman, and you will see the woman who runs it for him.
The secretary of yesterday is taking care of dozens of problems that either didn’t exist in pre computer days, or that were formerly delegated to other job titles such as accounting, other records maintenance, automated pay roll, customer relations out the ying yang, etc.
It’s one of those things. Electricity was supposed to free women from the drudgery of housework.
What actually happened was that electricity raised the bar on housework so that the typical woman of the house these days maintains her home to the standard formerly possible only to the rich who could afford a cook, a house keeper with helpers, and a gardener with helpers.
CARS are NOT people, and I can’t envision anything they can do to help a business or an individual or a family other than provide transportation, possibly serve as a grid backup battery for the home, so far as BUSINESS is concerned.
There’s ONE more function a car often serves. Cars are REFUGES for countless people. They use their car to escape from the tensions inside the house, and the tensions involved in dealing with the public. In his or her car is the one place most people have a high degree of control over their IMMEDIATE surroundings, the place where they can listen to the music they want to, the place they can just recline the seat a little out of hearing of the spouse and kids, the one little bit of luxury in their lives. Inside the nice little cell of their car, which locks from the INSIDE, is the only place most people can feel free these days.
Thoreau expressed it so VERY well.“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”
( He also said something along the line of “You must work very long to write short sentences.” Now THAT one hits home for me just as hard, but in a forum such as this one I can’t take the time to write up to a professional standard. )
All you guys who focus or at least seem to focus almost entirely on technical issues are mostly beating on academic dead horses. Hey, I’m guilty too, and I enjoy beating on dead horses as much as anybody else.
But any positive change, and most negative change, comes as the result of the collective behavior of people, and people have to be herded more or less like cattle. The ONE reason I spend so much time here is that there are people here with working brains. The BIGGEST single failing of people with working brains is that for some reason, they tend to ASS U ME that the common man has a working brain as well.
The common man has a good enough brain, but his brain is like a computer with a good operating system and programs but only bad data being fed into it for processing. Garbage in, garbage out.
Pray to the Sky Daddy or Sky Mommy of your personal choice for a series of PEARL HARBOR WAKE UP EVENTS.
IF we get them, along with a healthy shot of good luck, there’s at least a possibility we will get our collective shit together and PROACTIVELY do something before it’s definitely too late to save SOMETHING resembling industrial civilization as we know it and some substantial portion of the biosphere as we know it today.
Liquid Hydrogen Jet Aircraft : A Carbon-Free Flying Future?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WukX4O-hraY
I never heard of carbon-free liquid hydrogen. Imported from the sun perhaps, using gravity?
Maybe Ron can help with understanding this?
Seems to solve all the problems.
Great!
Carbon would tend to sink to the bottom of the fuel tank so they will probably filter out the coal.
The portent of runaway greenhouse warming
by Andrew Glikson
Earth and climate scientist
Australian National University
http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2019/12/the-portent-of-runaway-greenhouse-warming.html?m=1
Even the IPCC is starting to realize the potential of irreversible changes occurring between +1.5C and +2.0C. I wonder how many dead fish, bugs, birds, mammals (people) that adds up to when they say irreversible?
Tesla Cybertruck Screen Shows Range Of 620 Miles
More food for my theory: They have the next generation batteries at the start, and they will hit hard. At least double capacity / kg as the best current ones.
Look at the other E-Pickups – they can be lucky to reach 200 miles electric with monster battery packs.
620 Miles range? I think the most gas pickup tracks don’t manage this – only possible with Diesel.
And to add more spin: When Musk has these batteries, he’ll start building planes.
islandboy, this July 2019 piece is from the AUSTRALIA INSTITUTE, an independent public policy think tank based in Canberra. It is funded by donations from philanthropic trusts and individuals and commissioned research. To quote: “We barrack for ideas, not political parties or candidates. Since its launch in 1994, the Institute has carried out highly influential research on a broad range of economic, social and environmental issues.”
HIGH CARBON FROM A LAND DOWN UNDER
“Australian domestic emissions are rising, not falling, and have hit levels not seen since 2011. Land sector aside, emissions have risen almost continuously for two decades. Yet these rising domestic emissions are only a fraction of Australia’s role in fuelling the climate crisis. Australia is a vast coal and gas exporter. From 2000 to 2015 Australian coal exports more than doubled and Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) exports tripled, and since then LNG exports have nearly tripled again. Australia is the largest coal exporter in the world and on recent reports the largest LNG exporter too.”
https://www.tai.org.au/sites/default/files/P667%20High%20Carbon%20from%20a%20Land%20Down%20Under%20%5BWEB%5D_0_0.pdf
Meanwhile, Sydney’s air 11 times worse than ‘hazardous’ levels as Australia’s bushfires rage. A NSW Ambulance superintendent, Brent Armitage, said paramedics were attending up to 100 respiratory-related call-outs per day and the state’s health department warned residents to stay indoors as much as possible amid “unprecedented” smoke pollution.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/dec/10/sydneys-air-11-times-worse-than-hazardous-levels-as-australias-bushfires-rage
Up thread there was a claim made that net energy with Solar PV is negative.
I do know the nature of the political agenda that would try to make this claim. So very hard to know these days.
It has already noted that the energy costs of a manufactured PV module is recovered in just a few years of energy production when placed out on a sunny area [real world phenomena]. The article cited below determined a EPBT [energy payback time] of 1-4 years depending on the particular variables.
Of course, if kept in a warehouse, the energy output will not come to equate the energy input in creation of the PV module.
For those who would like to review a detailed article on the subject, here is a good one.
Feel free to take it for what it finds [that EROEI energy return on energy invested ranges between 8.7 and 34.2 depending on the type of PV module],
or feel free to dismiss the information if it does not fit your belief system or intended message.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S136403211500146X
mistake in second line above- Should say “I do not know the nature of the political agenda…”
I think that the issue is that we WILL burn FFs if we can get our hands on them. The question is whether we should use them to make – for example – pickup trucks or if we should burn them to make PV / renewable related equipment. That is a societal question.
A couple of years old but still somewhat relevant?:
https://connectrandomdots.blogspot.com/2012/07/test-post.html
True. And others will want to use the FF to make war. Or to make cosmetics, or rocket ships. Or fly to Disney Land.
The Invisible Hands of The Crony-Capitalist Plutarchies
Keyword search: “Lithium ion” “vacuum cleaner” “leaf blower” (“pick your useless trinket”)
As if the planet’s still pristine, we have plenty of rare earths (etc.) that can be mined effectively, there’s general resource non-depletion and there’s only the average global population on the peak fossil fuels down-slope as there was going up who only want what’s sustainable…
And many are not all hard at work on certain narratives.
Jevon might be inclined to say, remove some uses for fossil fuels through pseudorenewables, though, and the ‘remaining’ fossil fuels can theoretically be used to fight wars. And then there’s ethanol (and indoctrination/propaganda/jingoism/etc.) to help with that. ‘Win-win’.
And then there’s the intangible notion– quaint and naive some say– of an ethically non-corrupt society and its narratives that so-called renewable technology and electric vehicle advocates consistently fail to quite address.
But, hush-hush; systems and ethical thinking and their narrative shifts, especially that challeng the status-quo and its narratives that’re threatening the Earth, are a no-no in some fora…
That Narrative must be maintained at all costs.
Put this scheme through the analysis machine.
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/natural-gas-plant-replacing-los-angeles-coal-power-to-be-100-hydrogen-by-2/568918/
They are planning to produce hydrogen via electrolysis, which will then be burnt in a turbine plant (currently coal fired) to make electricity. Clearly this is an energy losing proposition. But…
reading between the lines this is an energy storage scheme. The creation of the hydrogen will be accomplished by hydrolysis of water with the energy for that process coming from wind and solar. In effect, it will be storing the renewable energy as hydrogen which can be burned for electricity when ‘the sun ain’t shining’ strong enough.
Energy storage is always a energy losing proposition, or costly. This may end up being both. Or be a pioneer in the energy storage effort.
Its not going to be easy (cheap) folks, to replace what we’ve become accustomed to.
Half the people who run their pie holes endlessly about EROEI don’t seem to be able to distinguish between theoretical physics and real world applications of physics theory.
EROEI, energy returned on energy invested is NOT NECESSARILY worth a flying fuck in terms of making real world every day decisions about the way we use energy.
It’s entirely relevant when the question is whether we should be using natural gas to extract tar sands oil in Canada, because we could be burning that same natural gas to generate electricity or heat homes or manufacture nitrate fertilizers or for any of a dozen other important purposes.
But it doesn’t amount to a hill of beans when the question is what we could do with some otherwise surplus wind and solar juice, that’s a use it or lose it proposition, never to be recouped.
In the real world, if hydrogen obtained by electrolysis of water with such otherwise surplus renewable electricity is available, then it makes perfectly sound engineering sense to use it for any purpose that’s economically feasible.
Using it to fire up a peaker plant is a potentially good use for it, if it means avoiding building more conventional generating capacity.
But my back yard engineering background leads me to think it would be better to build some nice big grid scale fuel cells that could use such hydrogen to generate electricity that could be fed into the grid and continue burning some natural gas in peaker plants.
It’s my impression that such fuel cell generating plants are technically feasible as of today, and it would be possible to build some of them, plus electrolysis plants, at places where they can be put to best use, such as near major cities. The juice can be delivered over existing lines from remote wind and solar farms to an electrolysis plant , and the hydrogen stored on site to be used in a fuel cell installation, all within one security fence.
I don’t have the data needed to crunch the numbers, but this could be an excellent way of dealing with daily peak loads, in essence shifting abundant afternoon sunshine into late afternoon peak demand electricity worth twice as much at five to nine pm as it’s worth from ten am to two pm, etc.
I think they are going to use that current coal burning plant to burn the hydrogen (and nat gas in the transition period), because they already have the facility built and ready for use. But on a more widely distributed basis, fuel cells sound great. (I want one).
“the question is what we could do with some otherwise surplus wind and solar juice, that’s a use it or lose it proposition,..”
I look forward to the time when we have enough consistent surplus to worry about this in more places than just the scorching desert. In the meantime, my beard is getting very long.
https://www.livescience.com/hidden-subglacial-river-greenland.html
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2019/12/12/a-way-to-achieve-100-solar-power-in-the-u-s-without-sacrificing-arizona/
Here’s a good article concerning the potential of solar power, but as usual it’s written in a way that I personally find almost as offensive as a goddamned advertisement, because it doesn’t even MENTION the INSANE cost of trying to replace windows nationwide with solar glass.
Anybody that knows a hammer from a tape measure knows what building Musk’s proposed hundred mile square installation would cost, in terms of labor. The labor would be peanuts, and just one permitting process would take care of the ENTIRE job.
Then there would be the distribution problem of course.
But Musk’s way of doing it would probably cost ten cents on the dollar, max, compared to the solar glass every where scenario.
I don’t have the foggiest idea what enough HVDC transmission lines would cost to get that much power to places it’s needed though, and I know that some people say HVDC won’t work very well past a thousand miles max.
The trick would be to have some square mile solar farms well distributed all thru the country, which would mostly solve the long distance transmission problem and go a hell of a long way to solving the afternoon peak demand problem as well.
I generally agree that the best electrical generation is local (distributed), but…
long distance HVDC transmission is likely feasible over 2000 miles, rather than 1000.
Projects are be planned to take solar from sunny places like far west China to its eastern coast, and Australia to Singapore.
Here is one recently announced with 3800 km (2,280 miles) of HVDC transmission line-
https://www.suncable.sg/
If indeed viable, these projects will also be applicable for bringing electricity from southern USA to northern, and Med zone to Europe north of the alps, wind from Wyoming to the coasts, for example. Also the huge offshore wind resource becomes even more viable.
Excellent to be able to supplement the local resource when needed.
Amarillo to Chicago- 880 miles
Macon to Pittsburgh- 574 miles
Offshore Maine (huge wind energy resource) to Toronto 522 miles
Traversing the longitudes extend the solar Day. Reduces the need for Costly Storage.
But increases the costs WRT buildout, yes?
Other problems with that?
And how much time and money have we got?
btw- there are long HVDC transmission lines already in use, including
Rio Madeira transmission link in Brazil- hydroelectric energy, 1431 miles
Jinping-Sunan transmission link in China- hydroelectric energy, 1254 miles
Xiangjiaba-Shanghai transmission line in China – hydroelectric energy, 1188 miles
Inga-Kolwezi HVDC power transmission line in Congo- hydroelectric energy, 1020 miles
Talcher-Kolar transmission link in India- coal thermal- 870 miles
many others in planning stages
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HVDC_projects
islandboy, more data for your famous spreadsheet. ?
AUSTRALIA’S BUSHFIRES HAVE EMITTED 250M TONNES OF CO2, ALMOST HALF OF COUNTRY’S ANNUAL EMISSIONS
“This is a nasty negative feedback cycle of a biosphere carbon sink becoming a source [of carbon].”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/dec/13/australias-bushfires-have-emitted-250m-tonnes-of-co2-almost-half-of-countrys-annual-emissions
Meanwhile,
LEADING SCIENTISTS CONDEMN POLITICAL INACTION ON CLIMATE CHANGE AS AUSTRALIA ‘LITERALLY BURNS’
Escalating conditions on Thursday and Friday led to dozens of out-of-control bushfires, including in the NSW’s Hawkesbury region, where a fire at Gospers Mountain merged with two other blazes burning in the lower Hunter on Friday. “Here we are in the worst bushfire season we’ve ever seen, the biggest drought we’ve ever had, Sydney surrounded by smoke, and we’ve not heard boo out of a politician addressing climate change.”
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/dec/07/leading-scientists-condemn-political-inaction-on-climate-change-as-australia-literally-burns
““Here we are in the worst bushfire season we’ve ever seen, the biggest drought we’ve ever had, Sydney surrounded by smoke, and we’ve not heard boo out of a politician addressing climate change.”
Ain’t life a bitch. Maybe this is nature’s way of letting Australians think twice before they elect a bunch of climate denying FF lackeys to form their federal government!
U.S. Solar Market and 15 States See Best Quarter Ever for Residential Solar
Somehow I don’t think this bit of positive news is going to make it into any of Trumps campaign speeches. There are bit of cost reductions baked into the cake as it were so, that this is happening in the greatest bastion of free market economies is remarkable. Is the US residential market going to follow Australia?
islandboy, from your link:
>> Wood Mackenzie is forecasting that the total amount of solar installed in the U.S. in 2019 will reach 13 gigawatts, representing 23% annual growth. <<
The chart in the link shows installations flat at best since Q1-2016. Not exactly the 41% per year needed to give Tony Seba's doubling every two years. But 2013 – 2016 looked promising!
From the link “The increase in residential installations helped the U.S. solar market grow 45% year-over-year and contributed to 15 states having their best quarter ever for residential solar.”
Electric Vehicles May Fall Victim to Their Own Success
https://www.anasalhajji.com/articles/electric-vehicles-may-fall-victim-to-their-own-success
Survivalist —
That’s a good article but it contains (at least) one error. It says: “More than 99% of lithium reserves are located in only four countries: Chile, China, Argentina and Australia.” In fact, one of the largest reserve bases is in the Salar de Uyuni area of Bolivia, which hosts 5.4 million tonnes of lithium. As I remember, Bolivia used to hold the largest lithium reserve but (I believe) Bolivia has since been overtaken by Chile.
I’m glad you found it interesting.
I quite like his articles.
Now that I have firmly established PV manufacturing energy is higher than the energy produced by all previously installed PV on a real time basis, there is another problem. Apparently PV panels themselves have a carbon footprint, so never recoup their original manufacturing and mining emissions over their lifetime. The double edged sword of high rate of production plus intrinsic individual panel footprint make PV a positive carbon emitter. So it not only is adding to the carbon stream now but will continue to do so into the future.
So do all you can to reduce and avoid emissions now, help will come eventually, but even then it is not perfect.
From the director of sustainability at First Solar
Carbon footprint of solar panels under microscope
Similarly, photovoltaic (PV) power plants also have carbon footprints which, on a lifecycle basis can range from 12g per kWh for a facility using First Solar’s thin film modules, to as much as 24 g per kWh – for one using multi-crystalline silicon panels.
While the carbon footprint is of paramount importance in the context of decarbonising the energy system, other impacts created by the manufacturing of components of a PV system – such as acidification, eutrophication, abiotic resource consumption and particulate matter emissions – are also important.
The comparatively high carbon footprint of multi-crystalline silicon panels is a direct result of the energy-intensive processes required to refine silicon and ‘grow’ the ingots that are sliced into wafers. It is also a direct consequence of the fact that the manufacturing of commoditised multi-crystalline silicon panels had largely moved from markets where electricity has a low carbon intensity, to countries that often rely on coal and other carbon-intensive forms of electricity generation.
As a result, many of today’s commodity PV modules may come with a heavy environmental price tag.
https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/opinion/mondaycop22-lower-co2-emissions-with-lower-carbon-solar-energy
2+2=4
GF- talking pure malarkey here. Its a technique that trump uses. Keep saying something irrelevant, and without factual substantiation or pertinent context, hoping that eventually people will believe it. Just because he does it every day doesn’t mean that it is appropriate behavior.
GF- “Now that I have firmly established PV manufacturing energy is higher than the energy produced by all previously installed PV on…”
I once again refer you to article on Photovoltaic Energy-
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S136403211500146X
-determined a EPBT [energy payback time] of 1-4 years depending on the particular variables
-EROEI energy return on energy invested ranges between 8.7 and 34.2 depending on the type of PV module
“Now that I have firmly established PV manufacturing energy is higher than the energy produced by all previously installed PV on a real time basis”
“high carbon footprint of multi-crystalline silicon panels is a direct result of the energy-intensive processes required to refine silicon”
Fish, I really don’t understand your point here for two reasons. First, if your manufacturing in the current carbon intense environment. Which is were todays current starting point to transition must start. It doesn’t seem right to call the final product a failure. If the process of mining, transportation and manufacturing have been converted to renewable electrical sources. Basically problem solved. The real problem is the current carbon rich economy, not the idea of a solar panel future.
Second, if there is some built-in carbon usage in the manufacturing process of panels and the carbon payback is one or two years compared to fossil fuel use. With a life expectance of 30 years panels. Your previous installed carbon statement seems irrelevant. Also, there is a built-in carbon usage to a fossil fuel power plant. Actually to me, your statement sounds like something one would hear on FoxNews to mislead the masses. Am I missing something here.
From the original article:
“Since the goal was to replace carbon-intensive generation with clean energy, one could argue that 24g per kWh for a multi-crystalline silicon power plant is still a significantly better deal than having almost 1,000g of CO2 emitted for the same amount of electricity generated by coal.”
The article is a PR piece, in which one PV company argues that it’s products at 12g per kWh are slightly better than the competition’s 24g. But, the difference is tiny compared to the basic savings of all PV.
Ok, you guys are missing completely what I said and keep running back to EROI and energy payback time (which is just part of the rate equation) Since Hickory is hopeless on this I will explain to you, HB.
I am taking the energy produced by all installed PV globally for a given year and subtracting the energy used to produce new PV for that year. That is the net energy obtained by PV. When the rate of growth exceeds about 25% (which it has up till now) the result is negative each year. That means PV is a net energy loser so far and it turns out a net GHG producer. When the rate slows down finally, the energy payback will start.
You can review my earlier example of that here. http://peakoilbarrel.com/eias-electric-power-monthly-november-2019-edition-with-data-for-september/#comment-693416
The point is that PV has done nothing to reduce fossil energy yet or reduce GHG.
Depending upon how fast we install it, it might start reducing the energy deficit in the 2030’s when growth goes more linear. After full deployment it will be a positive energy producer (minus the replacement energy which is about 1/30 per year).
The marketing focuses on individual panels and groups, saying how much they are doing but never counting the energy that it takes to keep deploying them each year. So it looks good on paper by using a very narrow view of the system.
Not sure why no one is getting this, it’s a simple rate problem. But I guess it goes against the great and wonderful OZ media hype.
I am not saying we should not produce or install PV but just getting a realistic look at what it has (has not) done lately and in the near future.
Can you imagine the kickback in many nations that spend huge amounts of money on PV/battery when in a decade or so he CO2 and methane are still rising? It will look like the biggest error on the planet and no amount of explaining will reduce the anger/frustration/disappointment. People will lose complete faith in faith in the idea, wondering why they spent close to a trillion dollars to get no effect.
Of course we could get lucky with a long recession reducing emissions overall. 🙁
But is that the correct way of looking at it? If the world only made one solar panel and then stopped production the result would be positive over time.
The fact that PV is at the moment a net energy user / sink is simply a function of a ramp up in production. And personally I’d rather see energy going into making PV equipment than in F150’s. (which would be not just an energy sink but an ongoing energy sink as well.
Rgds
WeekendPeak
Net energy tells one if there is an actual positive value obtained, in this case to reduce fossil fuel use to help avoid severe climate change. The latest IPCC results show that GHG emissions need to be descending every year to possibly not cross the 2C line. So it is proper to know if efforts to reduce are actually doing anything. The only realistic way of looking at it.
Other efforts can be brought on line, but the current view is that PV is actually reducing fossil fuel use, despite the evidence to contrary. Until it is admitted that PV is not going to do much to help during the energy transistion period, other methods will not be sought and GHG emissions will continue to rise.
As you say, if only one PV panel was made each year, there would be no problem. Nor would it help the global energy transistion.
Gonefishing,
I guess where people may disagree is that you leave out the emissions of the alternative to PV for electric power. You seem to favor coal over natural gas so each kWhr of energy that is produced by PV that reduces a kWhr of energy produced by coal should really be part of your analysis, it seems you leave that out.
That NREL payback time of four years is badly out of date – it came from research that probably 15 years old, when PV required 10 or 20 times as much resources to manufacture as they do now (we can tell because it cost 10 to 20 times as much!). Sadly, EROEI research pretty much stopped about 20 years ago, when it became clear that net energy/EROEI was high enough, and and it was no longer important to identify improvements.
PV costs less than 25 cents peak watt, now. It can produce 1.5 to 2.5 kWhs per year. If it required 4 years of production as a manufacturing input that would mean about 8 kWhs. Eight kWhs would cost around 50 cents at normal industrial prices, or more than twice the selling price!
So, PV very likely returns it’s embedded energy in well below one year.
GF- “Hickory is hopeless on this “,
he will never be able to take my frivolous argument seriously.
Well, you got one thing right.
That was totally weird, you pretended I made a comment and responded to it.
Actually the main advantage of PVs is the destruction of the existing, mostly fossil fuel based utility business.
A lot of ink gets spilled calculating the output total of PVs, but what makes utilities hate them is the fact that they steal money from peakers. Sorry to interrupt your engineering flights of fancy with marketing again, but here we go:
Traditionally, there are two kinds of power plants: Baseload and peakers. Baseload is cheap and inflexible and runs 24/7. Peakers are expensive and flexible and cash in when demand peaks. Baseload also cashes in when demand peaks, because the utilities raise rates to reflect the cost of the peakers, even though most of the energy is coming from the cheap baseload.
The whole business model relies on the premise that the cheapest energy comes from plants with the steadiest output. Wind and solar are cheaper but highly variable, turning this assumption on its head.
It doesn’t matter what percentage of the total energy renewables output. What matters is how much profit they skim off the industry.
Air conditioning is the utilities best friend, and utilities are the best friend of fossil fuel. By generating energy that is free at the margin when the sun is shining, solar ruins the entire business model of utilities.
One reaction to the death of utilities is to build lots of solar panels and batteries to replace existing fossil fuel plants. Another is to question whether all that waste made sense in the first place.
Some will claim that humans are inherently wasteful, so nothing can change. I disagree. Humans are only wasteful when it is profitable or convenient.
Wow, everybody is getting nasty and snarky here. Can’t even introduce a concept here anymore.
“Sorry to interrupt your engineering flights of fancy with marketing again, but here we go. ”
“It doesn’t matter what percentage of the total energy renewables output. What matters is how much profit they skim off the industry.”
Yeah, I guess climate and GHG’s don’t mean anything in the business world. Nature doesn’t either if it doesn’t make a profit. Having a viable world just does not matter.
Power companies are moving more to distribution than generation. How does solar effect that model? Electrons are electrons to them.
If they are smart they will get involved in storage.
That and distribution will be the big winner in all of this while the generators battle it out. Oh yeah, forgot about charging infrastructure, money coming there too. Maybe load demand will increase some due to EV’s.
Prices may be falling at the load end but they sure are not at the retail end.
Here is someone you need to get in touch with about your ideas. Maybe you can write an article for her.
https://www.tdworld.com/utility-business/article/20973057/thinking-into-the-future-of-the-electric-utility-industry
Will a person driving 3000 miles a year (like me) ever recoup the CO2 of even the EV battery manufacture let alone the entire car if they power from the grid? The answer is maybe. For an average driver it might be 3 to 6 years.
How clean is my electric car?
Electric vehicles can be thought of as having an upfront ‘carbon cost’ for manufacturing the battery, which can then be ‘repaid’ through lower emissions as they are driven. With Britain’s current grid electricity (producing 205 g/kWh), smaller electric cars and vans will take between 2 and 4 years to have saved the amount of CO2 than was emitted in making their batteries. For the larger luxury models, it will take more like 5–6 years of driving to pay back that carbon.
With each passing year as the electricity mix gets cleaner, this payback time will continue to fall, and the environmental credentials of electric vehicles will keep growing stronger.
https://www.drax.com/energy-policy/how-clean-is-my-electric-car/
In the meantime that extra CO2 hangs around for a long time.
BTW US energy grid is about 448 gm/kWh, much larger than GB so much longer emissions payback time for EV’s. China has an even bigger grid emissions value at 778 g/kWh, making EV’s charged from the grid about equal to ICE cars.
Something we can agree on?
Every mile traveled by human, except perhaps walking with no tool or weapon in their hands,
is destructive.
No two ways about it.
No way to sugarcoat or ‘greenwash’ it.
Only way to clean it up thoroughly is to simply walk, or check out.
Greenwash- the practice of ‘painting’ a particular activity or product as ecologically friendly, when in fact its net effect is still destructive to the worlds environment
ex- some people think that planting trees can offset the destructive nature of their air travel.
Now Hickory, walking isn’t that good if our food is industrially produced . Lots of fossil energy in walking. Society has trapped us in an ever destructive cycle.
Trees are one our actual avenues out of the CO2 dilemma. If we just let the current forests grow and also increase the forest areas instead of decreasing them, we can have long term carbon and water storage, as well as improve the carbon-water cycle.
I will let this fellow explain some of that. Specifically from 15:30 onward.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wl9Z_miGBNw
2+2=4
> walking isn’t that good if our food is industrially produced
That’s pure bullshit. I walked five minutes from my house to the grocery store today. the claim that I spent as much energy as a SUV driving ten kilometers to a shopping mall is just a lie.
Good one alim, but for the more naïve best to put a couple smiley faces on the comment.
from GF post “With each passing year as the electricity mix gets cleaner, this payback time will continue to fall, and the environmental credentials of electric vehicles will keep growing stronger.”
True, and the equation looks much more favorable when you charge the vehicle without the grid, direct from your own production, as many people in the biggest state in the union do. Photovoltaic they call it.
Hickory, PV, EV, and wind power will continue to be developed and will start to take over electric power plus transport. There may be a huge public backlash as these “renewables” and alternatives do very little to reduce emissions or even slow the growth of emissions over the next decade.
So they are charging their vehicles at night from solar panels? Neat trick.
Hi GF.
I wouldn’t worry about the ‘public backlash’ if electric transport doesn’t lower CO2 emissions as much as people expect (although I’m not sure that will be the case at all). There will be plenty of other stuff to worry about in the attempt to live, and other things for the public to backlash over. Of that I am certain.
Best, of course, is to have no miles to travel, but if you must travel then electric will be certainly much less damaging to the earth/mile.
Secondly, the neat trick of charging at night isn’t so complicated to understand. For those who aren’t familiar, in a place like California or Norway, where there are plenty of electric or plug-in hybrid vehicles on the road currently, they charge
-in the day via solar at home, work or public charging stations
-at night via battery storage of daytime energy stored up,
-at night or day via the grid energy, with the source of that grid energy being wind, hydro, solar, Nat Gas, nuclear, coal or storage of any these sources.
Its pretty simple, certainly doable, certainly cheaper/mile, and a hell of a lot cleaner in many ways. Thats about as complicated as it needs to be.
Of course if you want chatter, there is more to say….
I ride share to go grocery shopping and other tasks. Even when we are not together, we shop for each other, via texted lists. A car pulls up to my house and I walk out to take away the groceries or other sundries.
Cutting demand in half personally is easy and can build community relationships. I will not reach my 3000 mile limit this year, not even close.
If one could mostly fill the seats of ICE vehicles, the oil companies would have a fit as their demand dropped dramatically. That is real time, right now, demand destruction. That keeps up for a year, companies fold after prices fall. No need to build a whole new infrastructure to get benefits 30 years in the future. Kill demand right now.
But most Americans like the “freedom” and the big car payment every month. They like sitting in traffic jams too or spending hours in a metal and glass cocoon at highway speeds going for a ride, hoping they don’t get smashed like a bug that day.
Maybe someday we will get your electric world dream. We might get teleportation and fusion power too. But there won’t be much left alive if we don’t smarten up quickly.
“Maybe someday we will get your electric world dream.”
For many people, and even for the biggest state in the country- its an action plan rather than just a dream.
But dreaming has its role too-
Imagine no country to live and die for, and no religion too…
Even though California is a big state and most of the transport is gasoline and diesel, it uses very little per capita compared to many other states. Do Californians sit home a lot?
The highways are crowded. Seems like they drive drive drive. Maybe its all downhill?
-btw these states have adopted the Calif ZEV rule for automakers selling in their state. Its a slow step towards better. Colorado, Oregon in the West and Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, and Vermont in the East.
And, Senate Bill 100 speeds up the state’s timeline for moving to renewable energy sources like solar and wind, and requires that all retail electricity be carbon-free by 2045. California is the second state to adopt such a goal, after Hawaii.
Too bad its not 2030, but better than denial or no plan at all. Things like this don’t just happen. You have to push it hard. Not here- in your town, and your state.
The state where I reside is one of the leaders in PV installations. This is nothing new to me, got interested in solar thermal and passive back in the 80’s.
Best as I can see from internet statistics Californians travel about half the average distance per day.
I have electric transportation here already in my town – the streetcar goes electric, the train, some busses (they want to buy more) and with Taxis there are at least some Hybrids.
It will get more. Main CO2 producers are heating Energy , Industrial need and electricity production producing more CO2 the more “green” we get … in a few years the last atomic plants will go offline. More load for coal…
While we squabble:
DEFORESTATION IN BRAZIL’S AMAZON UP BY MORE THAN DOUBLE
“Deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon in November surged by 104 percent compared to the same month in 2018, according to official data released Saturday. The 563 square kilometers (217 square miles) deforested that month is also the highest number for any November since 2015. For the first 11 months of the year—also the first months in office of Jair Bolsonaro, a far-right leader who has eased restrictions on exploiting the Amazon’s vast riches—deforestation totaled 8,974.3 square kilometers. That is nearly twice the 4,878.7 square kilometers reported for the first 11 months of 2018.”
BTW Apparently around 17% of the Amazon forest has been lost in the last 50 years, mostly due to forest conversion for cattle ranching.
https://phys.org/news/2019-12-deforestation-brazil-amazon.html
Hot off the press
Global Automotive Electric Bus Market Insights Report 2019-2024: : Yutong, King Long, Zhong Tong, Nanjing Gold Dragon, BYD, Daimler, Iveco
http://theindustryreporter.com/74654/global-automotive-electric-bus-market-insights-report-2019-2024-yutong-king-long-zhong-tong-nanjing-gold-dragon-byd-daimler-iveco/
Oh well, maybe next year. Or, maybe not!
WAS ANYTHING ACHIEVED?
Governments at the UN climate talks in Madrid responded to the growing urgency of the crisis with a partial admission that carbon-cutting targets are too weak, but few concrete plans to strengthen them in line with the Paris agreement.
Chema Vera, the interim executive director of Oxfam International, said: “The world is screaming out for action but this summit responded with a whisper. The poorest nations are in a sprint for survival, yet many governments have barely moved from the starting blocks. Instead of committing to more ambitious cuts in emissions, countries have argued over technicalities.”
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/dec/15/cop25-un-climate-talks-over-for-another-year-was-anything-achieved
Man you have to laugh at these “urgent” climate summits. They desperately put on a front of wanting to drastically reduce CO2 emissions, but at the same time they want “good” economic growth. Talk about having your cake and eating it too. These are nothing but a bunch of career politicians and business interests meeting up for a banquet. And probably getting drunk and hitting a few strip clubs and high class brothels afterwards.
If i know humans and i think i do abit, economic growth specifically GDP figures is the single most important statistic which largely determines political preference from corporate lobbyists. Almost no one in the industrial world would choose the climate issue over a recession, especially the older generation, the younger ones will vote for the climate issue, because they have never lived through a severe economic recession or depression and this is assuming they have a say at all. There are corporate + governmental institutions such as central banks, IMF, world bank, BIS, S&P and Moodys etc in place to deter a recession from ever occurring and to insure good economic growth on a global scale. And while we are at it, a nice transfer of wealth from the middle class to the wealthy, but that’s a whole another topic.
Humans are funny creatures. The way i see it is that we will BAU until we literally cannot anymore. Whether it be resource depletion, climate catastrophe or [enter end of industrial civilization scenario here].
Speaking of BAU:
Canada wants 100 million people by 2100
https://youtu.be/M1jat2-zI98
This is one of the most accurate posts I’ve ever read on the non-petroleum based part of this web site. These climate change summits are all being used by specific political activists and people with special needs looking to justify holding very expensive taxpayer funded parties for themselves.
Jon, maybe instead of focusing on the stuffed shirts you should pay attention to all the talks and protests going on around the COP. The COP is a center of attention and media coverage for more than the government officials.
Talks like this:
Dr. William Moomaw – Humanity’s Mortality Moment
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wl9Z_miGBNw
and this protest: https://www.nationalobserver.com/2019/12/11/news/unprecedented-protest-rocks-kafkaesque-cop25
Meanwhile people are out there making changes, while the governments fiddle around with which end of the egg crack or not to at all.
Good news for those who are electric vehicle enthusiasts (and very bad news for those who are TCA-Terminally Curmudgeon Afflicted),
Electric car batteries appear to holding up well under usage-
data from 6300 vehicles of 21 models shows-
1. If current degradation rates are maintained, the vast majority of batteries will outlast the usable life of the vehicle.
2. The average decline in energy storage is 2.3% per year. For a 150-mile EV, you’re likely to lose 17 miles of accessible range after five years.
3. EV batteries decline in a non-linear fashion. There’s an early drop, but the rate of decline slows down in subsequent years.
4. Liquid-cooled batteries decline slower than air-cooled packs. Geotab saw that a 2015 Tesla Model S with liquid cooling had an average annual degradation rate of 2.3%, compared to an air-cooled 2015 Nissan Leaf’s rate of 4.2%.
5. Battery-powered vehicles that have bigger state-of-charge buffers fare better. In other words, some carmakers use a smaller percentage of the battery’s capacity, which reduces usable range. But the conservative approach slows down the degradation rate.
6. Higher vehicle use does not necessarily equal higher battery degradation.
7. Vehicles driven in hot temperatures show a faster decline in battery health.
8. The use of DC fast-chargers speeds up the process of degradation, but there’s not much difference in battery health based on frequent use of Level 1 versus Level 2 charging. Losses that happen with frequent DC charging are made worse in hot climates.
https://ww.electrek.co/2019/12/14/8-lessons-about-ev-battery-health-from-6300-electric-cars/
Have a 2013 Leaf, have only lost 9% capacity in 6.5 years, wya less than what I was told to anticipate. Have charged approximately 1100 times.
Perhaps the following paper from Nature Communications volume 7 (2016) has relevance to some of the discussions above? BTW You need to read the entire paper, not just the Abstract that I’ve quoted.
RE-ASSESSMENT OF NET ENERGY PRODUCTION AND GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS AVOIDANCE AFTER 40 YEARS OF PHOTOVOLTAICS DEVELOPMENT
“Since the 1970s, installed solar photovoltaic capacity has grown tremendously to 230 gigawatt worldwide in 2015, with a growth rate between 1975 and 2015 of 45%. This rapid growth has led to concerns regarding the energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions of photovoltaics production. We present a review of 40 years of photovoltaics development, analysing the development of energy demand and greenhouse gas emissions associated with photovoltaics production. Here we show strong downward trends of environmental impact of photovoltaics production, following the experience curve law. For every doubling of installed photovoltaic capacity, energy use decreases by 13 and 12% and greenhouse gas footprints by 17 and 24%, for poly- and monocrystalline based photovoltaic systems, respectively. As a result, we show a break-even between the cumulative disadvantages and benefits of photovoltaics, for both energy use and greenhouse gas emissions, occurs between 1997 and 2018, depending on photovoltaic performance and model uncertainties.”
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms13728
Yes, they are on right track but use only manufacturing energy of modules which makes the whole thing look much better.
NREL and others say multi-crystalline has a 4 year payback now versus the one year stated in the above paper.
But as the title and paper says it’s an assessment of production energy. So if we ignore 3/4 of the energy, things are looking good (added that for the fanboys).
use only manufacturing energy of modules which makes the whole thing look much better.
I don’t think that’s what they say. First, this isn’t a single study, it’s a meta-analysis of 40 studies. Second they include studies which use the standard boundaries for this kind of analysis:
” We gather results from a total of 40 life-cycle assessment (LCA) studies of PV systems (including inverters and support structure) conducted from 1976 to 2014″.
Read reference number 8 which they use for those low numbers for payback time.
“Balance of system contributions have not been included in the analysis and in the result figures, both for EPBT and CO2 emissions. The resulting EPBT values for the modules only are 1.09 and 0.93 years for monocrystalline and multicrystalline silicon, respectively, both under southern European conditions. “
Yes, the analysis in reference 8 is just for modules. As best I can tell from the text that refers to it, that was included for purposes of historical comparison. It’s not clear if it was included in the meta-analysis – if so one assumes it was normalized (as they describe elsewhere) to be consistent with the meta-analysis parameters. I agree that it’s not a clean, clear data point for a system cost, which would be higher. OTOH, it’s 5 years old. Which gives me an excuse to segue to a larger question:
Do we agree that the overall meta-analysis shows that PV energy payback drops sharply over time?
Nick, they are using 1 year payback for their current silicon based modules. They are also not including the original mining and smelting energy.
So, no I do not believe the 1 year payback time at all. That would make the EROEI at 30:1. Which would be great but does not jive with other papers on the subject.
Using that trend line, it will soon take no energy at all to produce PV panels.
You can’t burn sand, so it’s hard for the process to energize itself.
I also noticed they use the 1700 kwh/year solar insolation value from reference 8. Which is significantly higher than what I receive at 40 north latitude. That must be from a dry, low cloud cover region. That makes any payback shorter.
After reading the paper several times and some of the references, I get the feeling they are using lowball values where possible.
Still might be somewhat accurate for some areas with lots of sunlight, but not a practical situation since most of the population is in less sunny regions where a rainy day can cut sunlight by 90 percent.
India gets about the same solar direct insolation as my area and the eastern half of China is much less.
Monsoon regions are like that.
they are using 1 year payback for their current silicon based modules.
If I understand your comment correctly, that’s not how a meta-analysis works. It draws from a lot of studies, not just one, and develops statistical inferences from the population, not just one analysis.
They are also not including the original mining and smelting energy.
I don’t think that would be consistent with standard boundaries used in this kind of analysis:
“For the studies on the energy payback time and greenhouse gas footprint of PV module production, it is sometimes difficult to ascertain in retrospect whether the studies were performed using a consistent method, especially for the older studies selected here. Other meta-reviews of PV LCA’s employ a stringent screening process eliminating most of the studies available30,37. As we are interested in development of environmental footprint over time, a similar procedure would exclude most of the studies conducted before 2000. Therefore, we have adopted a simpler screening process: the LCA studies should report CED and/or GHG emissions for a complete PV system with enough meta-information to convert the reported units to our harmonised units (see section), and should analyse existing production processes (not prospective, worst or best case processes).”
I do not believe the 1 year payback time at all. That would make the EROEI at 30:1. Which would be great but does not jive with other papers on the subject.
Actually, it’s entirely consistent. It’s consistent with the projections in the NREL study*. It’s consistent with the article you provided which refers to 12 to 24 grams of CO2 per kWh which gives values for EROEI of about 30 to 60 (divide the grid average by the PV gm per CO2 to get EROEI).
*”Deleting the frame, reducing use of aluminum in
the support structure, and assuming a conservative
increase to 9% efficiency! and other improvements,
Alsema projected the payback for thin-film PV ten
years from now (about 2010) to drop to just 1 year.”
OK Nick, switching off now. Will be watching the GHG fall from that 5 GW of thin film installed last year.
Nick, so you are basically saying it’s OK to push global PV growth rates to 50% yoy or higher.
2017 was 34%.
Yes, I don’t think it makes sense to worry about investing too much money or energy (even if it’s FF) in PV or wind. I say push it to the max, whatever that is. We need to transition ASAP, and faster is only better.
Ok Nick, that will make a nice carbon plume that will hang around for a long time. You do realize that many other things have to grow simultaneously to make the PV build up work.
It’s a big system to rebuild and replace, while growing at the same time.
Of course it’s a complex system. At this point, like most large industries, it would be hard for it to grow faster than 40 or 50% per year.
On the other hand, avoiding an energy sink is just crazy. First of all, how do you get started? 2nd, as the article under discussion makes clear, we’re well past the point where that’s a realistic possibility.
It would, of course, be good to free up any energy needed for investing in PV by increasing efficiency and conservation elsewhere. But one way or the other, we need to eliminate fossil fuels by building non-carbon sources like PV and wind and it’s crazy to delay it in any way.
We should be reducing GHG emissions, of course, We should do that ASAP, as well with carbon taxes, efficiency regulations, consumer education and word of mouth, etc., etc., etc.
But…perfect is the enemy of the good. There’s no reason to delay any component of the transition away from fossil fuels.
Nick, that is the exact blindered attitude that put us in the position of creating a civilization that is doomed to failure.
There are trillions of reasons to be careful and deeply consider what we do and if we do it at all. Most are alive now, dying fast, so I guess if industrial civilization goes on a few more decades you will be correct. There will be no reason to stop the stupidity.
That is a very interesting article. It points out the mismatch in time between the CO2 “investment” and the “payoff”..
Thanks
WeekendPeak
Congratulations Doug, you win the “smarter than the average bear” award! Of the regular commenters it appears as if you are the only one who understands what I am presenting as far as net energy of PV.
Regarding energy- modern photovoltaic Energy Return on Energy Invested [EROEI]
ranges between 8.7 and 34.2 depending on the type of PV module.
If you don’t like it, sorry can’t help you.
Thanks, Doug.
It seems like a good article. A couple of high points:
1st, energy payback periods are declining by about 13% per doubling of cumulative installed PV.
2nd, as of 2014 the payback was down to about 1 year: ” Energy pay-back times drop from around 5 years in 1992 to around just under 1 year for poly-Si and just over 1 year for mono-Si PV systems currently.”
Which means that by 2019 the payback is well below 1 year.
It may well be too little too late, but Yankee society is changing fast.
I’m in one of the deepest and darkest parts of the so called Bible Belt, and I can say without any doubt that religion is in STEEP decline, on a generational basis, at least in the American South.
There’s a HELL of a difference between paying lip service to an idea, an institution, or a community more or standard, and actually practicing it.
At least half of the ill educated farmers and other men I know believe in evolution, as evidenced by talking to them over extended periods of time about the natural world……. but virtually every one of them deny this actual personal belief when questioned directly in such a way that an honest answer would put them in the position of contradicting family and community values and beliefs.
And you can take THIS to the bank. The kids who are on their way too and from church in the back seats of their parents’ car are playing dinosaur and space ship games on their pocket computers aka cell phones. Their phones don’t even HAVE any Bible games on them.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/there-are-now-16-house-republicans-retiring-what-does-this-mean-for-2020/?cid=referral_taboola_feed
OFM —
Didn’t the shift in focus between the Testaments cause Mark Twain to observe that only after the Deity “became a Christian,” did he turn “a thousand billion times crueler,” by inventing and proclaiming hell. Sounds like a modern “computer game” to me. 😉
Hi Doug,
I’m a Twain nut, but I don’t recognize this particular quote. But he said something to the same or similar effect lots of times, dozens of times for sure and probably hundreds of times.
I’ve only read a small part of his total work, just the stuff that’s well known at least to people into American lit. Even locating all that takes some work.
That’s probably more than most people read grand total in a lifetime, lol, once they get out of school.
I managed to avoid computers until ten or twelve years ago, and I don’t play computer games,excepting some math puzzle games, so I don’t get the ” Sounds like a computer game” and smiley portion of your answer.
God as conceived, collectively, by the ” People of the Book” has always been a simply APPALLING character, in terms of being cruel, vain, selfish, and vindictive beyond description. I don’t see much difference between the OLD and NEW Testaments in this respect.
But you have to understand HE is what he IS because HE WAS CREATED by his priests, after the image of THEIR OWN KIND……. in other words the Hebrew / Christian God is modeled on MEN……. alpha men of the sort who ruled and still rule some tribal societies and police states.
Such men maintain their power via two key primary strategies. One, they take care to preserve the economic and physical security of their followers……. they may and do treat their foot soldiers or cannon fodder followers the way a capable farmer treats his horses , providing them with a LOW standard of living, but never the less this is a SURE standard, for which they are VERY grateful.
And of course they are promised PARADISE in the after life, forever, which makes the price of a hard short mortal life look like a DEAL.
Two, they deal VERY harshly with anybody who steps out of line. The first level of this harsh treatment is psychological excommunication, condemning those who fail to follow to burn in hell, forever, in a lava pit. That generally works most of the time. I know a LOT of people who are MUCH better behaved than they would be OTHERWISE, except they fear that eternal fire.
When that doesn’t work, the priests/ preachers move to make life hell for those who are outside the fold, anyway they can. They have routinely done all they could to make life miserable if not impossible for minorities, people of different sexual orientation, etc.
Having said all this…….
It bears repeating.
RELIGION of the sort practiced by my community WORKS in the biological sense that it confers FITNESS on the community. My folks ‘ church holds this community together, or used to, but with the arrival of the governmental safety net, this GLUE function is fast failing.
When I was a kid, if a family lost everything in a house fire, one of our blankets, one of our cooking pots, one of my own or my sisters suits of clothing ….. went to kids in that family, because there WASN’T any RED CROSS, there weren’t any emergency food stamps, there wasn’t any rental assistance, etc. I need not belabor the point that I seldom if ever had three pairs of pants that fit at any one time in my entire childhood. One or two of those would have been hand me downs, with one pair bought for me.
I’ve personally delivered a car load of boxes full of staple foods to such a family, back in my younger days, and got to hug all the girls in the process, lol, and nobody felt any shame for being a recipient, because that day’s recipient was the previous year’s DONOR, and would be a donor again.
Any BIOLOGIST who has a problem answering the question “Why do religions exist, and why do they persist? ” has his head up his ass so far he will NEVER see daylight, lol.
It’s simple as shit. Religions confer Darwinian fitness on followers, individually and collectively.
But times change, and circumstances change, and yesterday’s winning strategy may be a loser today, and this is the case in terms of religion now.
The people who take their religions most seriously are falling behind in today’s world. Yesterdays winning community culture is all too often a losing culture today. Kids that could grow up to be doctors or engineers are winding up doing trade work as the result of growing up in such communities.
The way I see it is that the religious community as a whole has coalesced behind trump, who’s their worst POSSIBLE leader, and fighting one last tremendous, stupendous, gargantuan battle to maintain the old time status quo when it was not only OK but MANDATORY that you saluted the flag, went to Sunday School, prayed at school functions, etc.
They may actually be winning, short term, as evidenced by trump being in the WH, but in the longer term……… they’re losing.
Demographics rule.
I think this is the quote:’
http://www.online-literature.com/twain/letters-from-the-earth/11/
Thanks Nick,
I’ve read Letters From the Earth many times, but not in recent years.
I personally rate it as probably the best religious satire EVER written, and believe me, I’ve read a lot, lol.
But that one line didn’t ring a bell.
Voltaire’s Candide is more elegant, more polished, but Twain has the salt, the blood, the raw meat down pat in such a way as to leave Voltaire in a far distant second place.
If you haven’t yet had the pleasure, you will really enjoy what Twain had to say about Shakespeare.
If what we know about Shakespeare the person, the man, his station in life, is even inside the ball park, there’s no way in hell he could have written his plays, any more than you could play ball like Babe Ruth.
Now, you could research the social customs , the history, the politics, etc, because there’s the net, and lots of libraries, and more relevant data available than you could look over in ten years, lol.
But in Shakespeare’s day…….. such resources were almost non existent, and not much available to commoners. Not one man in ten thousand back then could have known enough to have written his plays.
You might as well expect a farm boy that just fell off the turnip wagon to come up with some new physics or to write a post modern novel.
Speaking of Mark Twain and Shakespeare, has anybody read Twain’s little “1601”?
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3190/3190-h/3190-h.htm#link2H_4_0002
Some interesting notes before and after the text.
islandboy, now would be a good time to do your “fiddle while Rome burns” thing. I’m talking about Australian solar energy adoption rates vs their ongoing devastating wildfires, of course! BTW roughly how much CO2 does a 400,000 ha fire generate? Aw, come on, give it a guess. 😉
Meanwhile,
AUSTRALIA TOOK A MATCH TO UN CLIMATE TALKS WHILE BACK HOME THE COUNTRY BURNED
“What will it take for Australia to treat the climate crisis seriously?” International friends, colleagues and strangers looked on in horror at the effects of the bushfires and outright amazement at the Morrison government’s denial of the link between the fires and Australia’s coal industry, and seeming lack of concern at this extreme impact of climate change.”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/16/australia-took-a-match-to-un-climate-talks-as-back-home-the-country-burned
All the fires in NSW would be much larger than 400,000 hectares which is only 1 fire (Gospers mountain). If i had to guess from the current maps, fires in NSW would cover an area close to the 1.5-2 million hectares. The fires are spreading very fast.
Also, Saturday temperatures are tipped to hit high 40’s where the fires are and possibly records will be broken again in Sydney regarding temperatures. More fires to come i would guess.
One of the only beneficiaries of the bushfires are Eucalyptus. The oils in their leaves combusts at around 300 C (possibly an evolutionary adaptation to destroy competition). They also have many more adaptations, and regenerate quickly afterwards.
And, you think WE have a carbon issue!
CARBON COCOONS SURROUND GROWING GALAXIES — ALMA SPOTS EARLIEST ENVIRONMENT POLLUTION IN THE UNIVERSE
“Researchers have discovered gigantic clouds of gaseous carbon spanning more than a radius of 30,000 light-years around young galaxies using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array.”
https://phys.org/news/2019-12-carbon-cocoons-galaxiesalma-earliest-environment.html
Cheers IslandBoy-
“One in five newly constructed California homes now comes topped with a solar installation. Starting in January, that needs to jump to five out of five.”
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/new-year-new-mandate-california-preps-for-home-solar-requirement
And, it looks like Australia may be the first big territory that will have to confront Solar Energy over production. Perhaps rather than just curtail output during the sunny times, they will be incentivized to pioneer solar energy storage mechanisms.
https://www.renewableenergyworld.com/2019/12/16/solar-vs-solar-in-australia-rooftop-pv-is-pushing-down-prices-for-large-scale-pv/
Did someone mention weaning ourselves off fossil fuels? Well, maybe give it a decade’s (or two) worth of thought first.
ISRAEL SIGNS EGYPT GAS PERMIT, BECOMES MAJOR ENERGY EXPORTER
“Israel signed a $15 billion deal last year to provide Egypt with 64 billion cubic meters of gas over a 10-year period that will help transform both into regional energy players. The Leviathan reservoir was discovered in 2010 some 125 kilometres (75 miles) off the Israeli coast, and together with the discovery of the smaller Tamar field, ushered in a wave of optimism for a country that used to take an almost perverse pride in thriving with very few natural resources.”
https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/israel-signs-egypt-gas-permit-133950638.html
Interesting to see this, since Egypt is currently #16 proven reserves in the world, vs Israel at #46.
But there already exists a pipeline, and Israel is closer to bringing that fields gas to the surface than the projects going after the newer Egyptian reserves. Also, Egyptian demand is huge compared to Israel.
Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, Palestine, Cyprus, Turkey and Greece, like Israel, also have new offshore Nat Gas reserves under the eastern Med.
If things proceed as they are now it will be decades before fossil fuel is abandoned. However, things rarely proceed in the future as they are now.
Doug, you might find this interesting.
The Futurists (1967) | Scientists Predict The 21st Century
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPETzKYLkco
“it will be decades before fossil fuel is abandoned”
Oh you can bank on that. Certainty.
Sad, but might come true. Unless things just crash and die off, which is becoming a possibility.
Time to go for another walk and burn some more fossil fueled calories. Have a good night.
Fish –
Indeed, I found it interesting on several levels. For one, this was done in 1967 (I completed my formal studies in 1968) so it reflects a lot of the thinking I was exposed to as a student.
Incidentally, my leading prof, a geophysicist and electrical engineer, and head of the geophysics department where I studied (who had studied with Paul Dirac and Enrico Fermi), used to say: “If you don’t take the stuff I’m teaching with a grain of salt, I haven’t done a very good job with you guys (there were no girls in our classes).” And a renowned geology prof said something similar: “Remember, almost everything you’ve learned here will be superseded or shown to be downright wrong within the scope your career in the earth sciences so don’t be reluctant to move with the times.”
Asimov’s predictions for 2019
https://bigthink.com/technology-innovation/isaac-asimov-future-predictions-from-1983?rebelltitem=3#rebelltitem3
November 2019, on global average, was the second warmest November since reliable measurements began in 1880, at 1.02°C relative to the 1951-1980 base period (1.27°C relative to 1880-1920).
The 2019 meteorological year (prior December through November) was the second warmest at 1.23°C relative to 1880-1920, trailing only 2016. We expect calendar year 2019 to be the second warmest year.
http://www.columbia.edu/~mhs119/
Beware the allure of green policies
Can grid-scale storage solve intermittency problem, asks Global Warming Policy Foundation
And you chose to omit the rest of the article.
Interesting choice.
InfinityPeak
That’s what quoting something pretty much is.
If recalled, there is also the paper the article refers to that I ‘omitted’, along with plenty of other supportive references online.
While we’re at this, perhaps you would like to consider changing your nickname to WeekPeak, or how about MonthPeak or even AeonPeak? It would omit less.
But why stop there?
From Wikipedia
The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) is a lobby group in the United Kingdom whose stated aims are to challenge “extremely damaging and harmful policies” envisaged by governments to mitigate anthropogenic global warming.[3][4] While their position is that the science of global warming or climate change is “not yet settled,” the GWPF claims that its membership comes from a broad spectrum ranging from “the IPCC position through agnosticism to outright scepticism.”[1] The GWPF as well as some of its prominent members have been characterized as promoting climate change denial.[5][6]
In 2014, when the Charity Commission ruled that the GWPF had breached rules on impartiality, a non-charitable organisation called the “Global Warming Policy Forum” was created as a wholly owned subsidiary, to do lobbying that a charity could not. The GWPF website carries an array of articles “sceptical” of scientific findings of anthropogenic global warming and its impacts.
‘Give us the man and we will make the case.’
But would it/he still be correct?
Also, there’re all the other references online from many sources supporting this sort of thing, including the other one in my comment.
Since we are dealing with humans, might all sources be argued as ‘suspect’– all their establishments and institutions, etc., including scientific? I seem to recall reading and quoting Ugo Bardi hereon about problems with the latter. Seems the scientific establishment isn’t what it’s all cracked up to be.
Maybe we can dig up some dirt on Ugo or Tim, or even you. What do you think? ‘u^
Give us your real name and location, ‘GoneFishing’, and we’ll take it from there. ‘u^
“Maybe we can dig up some dirt on Ugo or Tim, or even you. What do you think? ‘u^”
“Give us your real name and location, ‘GoneFishing’, and we’ll take it from there. ‘u^”
Your sweet personality is easily revealed.
I suppose you didn’t notice my custom winkies.
In any case…
(‘u^ <– custom winkie)
Tic toc, tic toc, ……….
HOW COP25 TURNED ITS BACK ON CLIMATE ACTION
“The final text released after a marathon talks harked back to a deal made in Paris that placed no requirement on most countries to raise their targets until 2025. So, without clear action in 2020, the first concrete moment for nations to step up their national climate commitments under the Paris Agreement is not until 2025. THAT’S MORE THAN HALF THE TIME LEFT BEFORE THE CARBON BUDGET FOR 1.5C IS BLOWN AT CURRENT EMISSIONS.”
https://www.climatechangenews.com/2019/12/16/madrid-talks-turned-back-climate-action/
Looks like the political scene is the only chilling effect on this planet.
The Arctic’s grand reveal
http://www.fasterthanexpected.com/2019/12/12/the-arctics-grand-reveal/
Survivalist —
From your post: “A key accelerating factor in permafrost thaw has been dramatically underestimated.”
Yeah, been reading about this. Nature will have it’s way while governments dawdle and “pull out”.
“by 2035 permafrost thaw may continue on its own, disregarding the processes that have kept it frozen for thousands of years.”
As goes the Arctic, so goes the world.
If it’s not methane or Arctic sea ice, it’s permafrost. In this case it’s global dimming.
The article
Cooling role of particulate matter on warming Earth stronger than previously thought
The relationship between aerosols (particulate matter) and their cooling effect on the Earth due to the formation of clouds is more than twice as strong as was previously thought. As the amounts of aerosols decrease, climate models that predict a faster warming of the Earth are more probable. These are the conclusions of researcher Otto Hasekamp from SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research, who published the results in Nature Communications. He carried out his research together with Edward Gryspeerdt from Imperial College London, and Johannes Quaas from Leipzig University.
https://phys.org/news/2019-12-cooling-role-particulate-earth-stronger.html
The paper:
Analysis of polarimetric satellite measurements suggests stronger cooling due to aerosol-cloud interactions
We take the median of this distribution, −1.14 W m −2
, as our best RF aci estimate, and define an uncertainty range using the 5 and 95 percentile values, respectively, which yields a range between −0.84 and −1.72 W /m−2
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-13372-2
Better results soon to follow.
.
Notice how nobody is willing to talk about the Solar Minimum we’re headed into will show it’s signs for the next decade an beyond. Just check under “space weather” to see what the sun has been doing. We will need all of the heat we can possibly get if this aerosol cooling research turns out to be factual and happens at the same time of the lower solar activity.
Let me know when this gets factual-“if this aerosol cooling research turns out to be factual”.
Factual is a good criteria to base discussions on.
I know, our country is having a real hard time with finding factual this these days, starting right at the presidential level.
Its a severe failure to find factual, by any measure really.
So, yes let me know when turns out.
I’m trying to find facts on the evolution of mitochondria. Its getting much better with modern nucleotide analysis.
Sometimes I wonder if we will have global cooling every winter, and global warming every summer. Although, its not very often that I do.
“Cycle 25 should begin between mid-2019 and late 2020 and that it should reach its maximum between 2023 and 2026, when between 95 and 130 sunspots are projected. Average is between 140 and 220 sunspots.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2019/04/11/scientists-predict-new-solar-cycle-is-about-begin-that-it-will-be-stronger-than-last-one/
Perhaps the next solar cycle maximum will coincide with a super El Niño in early to mid 2020’s. That’d likely twist a few things off.
Hi Eastcoast Chuck,
Some people, despite piles of evidence against it, including the obvious and continual assault on nature by human technological systems, still push stuff like so-called renewable energy and electric cars (for who?), and by implication, the suicidal system that ‘underwrites’ their buildouts.
So you seem to have sideways company WRT actual and/or potential human threats and risks to the planet.
Maybe somebody here can tell me why nobody at all seems to ever consider the possibility that autonomous cars can work just as well with IC engines as they can with electric motors…… allowing for the obvious facts that they will require gasoline that costs more than electricity and produce a lot of pollution.
But IC engines are a mature technology and actually very reliable, if reliability is a high priority. Such a car built to be easily repaired and kept on the road most of the day every day could easily be made to run reliably for four or five hundred thousand miles without need of major repairs.
And IC cars are still dirt cheap, compared to pure electric cars.
Bottom line, I thinking IC autonomous cars could disrupt the auto industry while bypassing the battery cost and supply issues.
I suspect you are correct about feasibility, but the electric vehicle have a huge advantage over ICE in their systems simplicity and diminished maintenance requirements. Seems like a no-brainer for a fleet vehicle to be of the electric variety.
Hi Hickory,
I agree, there’s no question that electric is the way to go…….. except that electric is all about batteries, and it’s going to take quite some time to ramp up the battery industry, considering all the problems ranging from obtaining enough essential materials to actually building battery factories.
That first hard drive full of zero’s and one’s is going to cost countless billions……. but the first copy of it won’t cost more than the price of the drive itself, lol.
I’m thinking that the cards may fall such that the autonomy problem will be solved faster than the battery supply problem, and so IC autonomous vehicles may own the market for a few years, maybe even a decade or longer, before the battery industry can giterdone.
I am surprised that the government has allowed autonomous modes on the street. It seems very premature to me.
I’d want to see much extensive testing under ‘fake’ conditions prior to launch.
Perhaps they are comparing the safety to humans, so the bar is pretty low on exceeding the safety performance.
Who has the legal responsibility in event of a crash?
Around the world, 1.35M people are killed annually in road crashes. That’s about 3,700 people per day.
About 90% of those deaths could be prevented by really capable vehicle safety systems.
Those safety systems are arriving incrementally: backup braking systems are already saving many lives, as well as preventing more numerous minor crashed.
Anything that delays the implementation of more effective safety systems is effectively killing 3,300 people for each day of delay. It’s astonishing that the death of a single individual, like Elaine Herzberg, can delay or eliminate major initiatives intended to develop something better.
It’s nice to expect good safety from new things, but really you’re absolutely right: the proper comparison is to the terrible safety of current drivers.
Good points Nick
‘Here’s some good food…
We will now add and subtract things to it over time, like add fillers and pesticide residues and subtract nutrients and so forth, and kind of ruin your food, what once was…
Ok, now we will offer better food (so we might claim) that we might call ‘organic’ which might be kind of like the food that we started with before we meddled with and ruined it.
And then we will charge you a premium for it, since it is now more expensive to produce.’
… … …
‘Here is a car for you. We created a need for it for you. Are we thoughtful? Answer: Yes. That’s right, we will also answer the question for you.
Let all your cars create a mess on the planet, including kill people and other living things.
Now, here is an ‘organic’ car that kills less. Is that great?! A car that kills less and is new and improved over what you had before? No car?
Hell yes.
So? What are you waiting for? Go get one and save the planet with it. On the open road. I think Jesse Ventura on RT says something like that– how you get your freedom: On the open road.’
The Volvo XC90 that killed Elaine Herzberg in Tempe Arizona is ICE powered.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Elaine_Herzberg
But Hickory is right about simplicity and ease of maintenance.
On an EV, one goes from digital and analog electronic outputs, probably via optoisolators, to power electronics.
On an ICE car, one needs an additional layer of motors/actuators to shift transmission, run the engine throttle, etc.
In addition, many cities in Europe are banning ICE cars from city centers, and some countries will be banning ICE vehicle sales to private owners soon (2025 for Norway).
So why would a manufacturer tune a self-driving system for an ICE vehicle, when they’ll have to duplicate it for EVs too?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-out_of_fossil_fuel_vehicles
Bristol UK will ban all diesels in the city center starting in 2021.
And for several years now, London and Paris and many other European cities have low emissions zones, so people in dirty cars are either charged (higher) fees or disallowed.
EVs are either free or lowest charge (i.e. many low emissions zones are also for congestion pricing).
Why build cars if there are already zones they can’t go or will be costly?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-emission_zone
re Paris:
https://www.rac.co.uk/drive/news/motoring-news/law-change-for-uk-drivers-in-french-cities/
costs you 3 Euro if you’re allowed in and buy the sticker, else fine of between 68 and 115 Euro.
re London:
Up to GBP 12.50/day charge in the Ultra Low Zone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_low_emission_zone
Thanks, Sunnv
All great points, except one.
Integrating an IC into the an autonomous vehicle will be a piece of cake, because all the essential engine and transmission management systems are already electronically managed, already built into new vehicles, and all that will be necessary is to send a command for vehicle speed and direction, which is essentially the same command that’s sent to electric motors, make us go JUST THIS FAST, no more, no less, either forward or backwards, lol.
I’m not arguing that electricity isn’t better, or that it won’t win out in the end.
I’m simply speculating that maybe there will be a lot of autonomous vehicles built with IC engines before the battery industry can catch up.
I know a hell of a lot about IC tech, and there’s essentially no reason at all, an engine is DELIBERATELY designed for fleet service, that it won’t run with near perfect reliability for half a million miles with hardly ANYTHING at all needed to keep it running in tip top condition, and when a large number of them are put into service, even a nincompoop can service them, because service in such instances consists of performing the same simple maneuvers over and over.
There’s no REAL reason oil changes should take over five minutes, in and out, or that the change interval shouldn’t extend out to twenty thousand miles, or even longer.
IC engines give problems in cars and light trucks because the VEHICLE itself is essentially designed to be a throw away product.
It’s a good question.
One thought: it may be possible to use similar commands to control ICE’s, but they won’t respond the same way. When managing driving in a very complex environment, timing will be very important and ICEs and electric motors respond very differently. Braking will also respond very differently between a pure ICE and a vehicle with regenerative braking.
There’s seldom ever any need for very sudden acceleration, and a modern ICE coupled with an automatic transmission can ramp up in one hell of a hurry….. as in about one quarter to one half of a second.
And so far as brakes are concerned, there just won’t BE any significant difference in actual braking performance. All the important difference will be in saving or salvaging energy while actually applying the brakes, and a much less important savings in wear and tear on the actual brakes due to regenerative braking with electric propulsion.
Modern brakes have very good antilock capabilities built in, and in an emergency situation, in electric vehicles, regeneration is bypassed for maximum braking effect.
The computer doing the driving will be applying conventional brakes of the sort fitted on every modern car in any emergency situation. There’s essentially no REAL difference between a conventional car and an electric car as far as the actual braking system is concerned.
The DIFFERENCE is that in an electric car, the REAL brakes aren’t used except when needed for sudden or fast stops. Regeneration shoulders the braking load at other times.
That’s pretty much true, and yet…the operating characteristics will be different, even if the average driver can’t tell the difference (and actually, they can – ask anyone who’s recently bought an EV: the braking and acceleration feel very different). This is safety related stuff, and there’s very little margin for error – they have to get it right, and it has to be precisely tuned to the equipment, all of it. There will have to be a lot of custom programming.
The Chevy Volt has 10 million lines of program code (more than an F15!), much of it to handle things that you don’t even notice, like the transition from the ICE to the electric motor. In fact, a lot of the programming was needed to MAKE the transition unnoticeable.
You asked why car makers prefer to focus on EVs when working on autonomy – my best guess is that this kind of custom programming is part of the reason.
Now, if you ask car makers publicly, they say it’s because power hungry processors need EV power supplies. Maybe they think 12V systems with lead acid batteries just aren’t up to the challenge…
Here you go OFM.
A Self-Driving Freight Truck Just Drove Across the Country to Deliver Butter
https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a30196644/self-driving-truck-cross-country/
According to the following article, Tuesday Dec 17 was the hottest day ever in Australia. As I write this it is after midnight on Dec 18 in Australia and I have not yet seen any news indicating that Wednesday was hotter. From reneweconomy.com.au:
Rooftop solar takes the heat off ageing fossil fuel generators
Below is a screenshot from the OpenNEM website showing a chart for Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday (Dec 16, 17 and 18, 2019) and the data for Tuesday at 1:30 pm. Australia time (the time stamp on the screen shot is for Eastern Standard Time, 13 hours earlier).
Here is a the pie chart for the same time
Meanwhile, it is worth noting that Australia’s greenhouse gas reporting only extends to greenhouse gas pollution associated with supply chains in Australia. It does not account for emissions which ultimately result when all their exported fossil fuels reach their destination and burned.
Yes, that avoids double counting since the emissions are counted where the fuel is burned.
In Norway they call it the Norwegian Paradox: Fighting climate change at home while selling the fuels that help cause it. Guess I’m referring to the Australian Paradox! 😉
Much of China coal use is to enable exports purchased by people in other countries. Who gets charged for that- The coal exporter, China, or your truly?
China gets charged. They’re the ones who chose to use coal in this case, and they’re the ones who can choose not to.
Don’t forget that much of the embedded energy is burned by parts suppliers outside of China: Chinese companies import the parts, assemble them and then export them on to other countries. Each of those suppliers also needs to be incentivized to make different choices.
Finally, the great majority of coal consumption in China is for domestic consumption, both by electricity consumers and goods consumers. They’re poisoning themselves for their own employment and consumption.
Yes, China gets the ill-effects and the sole responsibility.
But I was asking rhetorically, shouldn’t the seller of the raw product, and consumer of the goods also bear a considerable portion of the responsibility?
I think so.
Just like when a poacher kills a rhino for the horn- those who demand [purchase] the horn are a critical part of that horror show.
I know what you mean. I think consumers have some responsibility to know what they’re buying, and the harms that producing it might cause. Like buying shoes made in sweatshops, or wood from old forests.
But…there’s a difference here vs endangered animal products: nothing NEEDS coal for it’s manufacture (not even iron).
I’d say what we need is a system of tariffs based on embedded energy: stuff made with coal/FF is taxed more heavily. That would mean that both the manufacturer and the consumer is incentivized to move away from coal/FF based manufacturing.
As for the miner/producer: I think their main responsibility is honesty with the people who are buying their product. That’s why people are so angry with tobacco companies: they lied about their product and it’s health effects. That’s why people are so angry with oil companies: they lied about their product, and it’s pollution.
I also think that countries and states that export are missing a big opportunity when they under-tax the extracted products. This is a result of the political power of the miners/producers, who are trying to privatize their profits while socializing the costs. Australia and Montana should raise their coal excise taxes dramatically, and keep their profits at home.
Please help spread the word. This is the sole content of the Lincoln Project, which was first published in the NYT.
Try to remember that today’s REAL conservatives are pretty much one and the same as yesterday’s classic liberals, and that badmouthing them by lumping them in with the trump crowd does no good at all, but it does a great deal of harm.
Trump Defeated
The president and his enablers have replaced conservatism with an empty faith led by a bogus prophet.
By George T. Conway III, Steve Schmidt, John Weaver and Rick Wilson.
The authors have worked for or supported numerous Republican campaigns and administrations.
Patriotism and the survival of our nation in the face of the crimes, corruption and corrosive nature of Donald Trump are a higher calling than mere politics. As Americans, we must stem the damage he and his followers are doing to the rule of law, the Constitution and the American character.
That’s why we are announcing the Lincoln Project, an effort to highlight our country’s story and values, and its people’s sacrifices and obligations. This effort transcends partisanship and is dedicated to nothing less than preservation of the principles that so many have fought for, on battlefields far from home and within their own communities.
This effort asks all Americans of all places, creeds and ways of life to join in the seminal task of our generation: restoring to this nation leadership and governance that respects the rule of law, recognizes the dignity of all people and defends the Constitution and American values at home and abroad.
Over these next 11 months, our efforts will be dedicated to defeating President Trump and Trumpism at the ballot box and to elect those patriots who will hold the line. We do not undertake this task lightly, nor from ideological preference. We have been, and remain, broadly conservative (or classically liberal) in our politics and outlooks. Our many policy differences with national Democrats remain, but our shared fidelity to the Constitution dictates a common effort.
The 2020 general election, by every indication, will be about persuasion, with turnout expected to be at record highs. Our efforts are aimed at persuading enough disaffected conservatives, Republicans and Republican-leaning independents in swing states and districts to help ensure a victory in the Electoral College and majorities that don’t enable and abet trumps violations of the constitution; even if that means Democrat control of the Senate and expansion of the Democratic majority in the House.
The American presidency transcends the individuals who occupy the Oval Office. Their personality becomes part of our national character. Their actions become our actions, for which we all share responsibility. Their willingness to act in accordance with the law and our tradition dictate how current and future leaders will act. Their commitment to order, civility and decency are reflected in American society.
Mr. Trump fails to meet the bar for this commitment. He has neither the moral compass nor the temperament to serve. His vision is limited to what immediately faces him — the problems and risks he chronically brings upon himself and for which others, from countless contractors and companies to the American people, ultimately bear the heaviest burden.
But this president’s actions are possible only with the craven acquiescence of congressional Republicans. They have done no less than abdicate their Article I responsibilities.
Indeed, national Republicans have done far worse than simply march along to Mr. Trump’s beat. Their defense of him is imbued with an ugliness, a meanness and a willingness to attack and slander those who have shed blood for our country, who have dedicated their lives and careers to its defense and its security, and whose job is to preserve the nation’s status as a beacon of hope.
Congressional Republicans have embraced and copied Mr. Trump’s cruelty and defended and even adopted his corruption. Mr. Trump and his enablers have abandoned conservatism and longstanding Republican principles and replaced it with Trumpism, an empty faith led by a bogus prophet. In a recent survey, a majority of Republican voters reported that they consider Mr. Trump a better president than Lincoln.
Mr. Trump and his fellow travelers daily undermine the proposition we as a people have a responsibility and an obligation to continually bend the arc of history toward justice. They mock our belief in America as something more meaningful than lines on a map.
Our peril far outstrips any past differences: It has arrived at our collective doorstep, and we believe there is no other choice. We sincerely hope, but are not optimistic, that some of those Republicans charged with sitting as jurors in a likely Senate impeachment trial will do likewise.
American men and women stand ready around the globe to defend us and our way of life. We must do right by them and ensure that the country for which they daily don their uniform deserves their protection and their sacrifice.
We are reminded of Dan Sickles, an incompetent 19th-century New York politician. On July 2, 1863, his blundering nearly ended the United States.
(Sickles’s greatest previous achievement had been fatally shooting his wife’s lover across the street from the White House and getting himself elected to Congress. Even his most fervent admirers could not have imagined that one day, far in the future, another incompetent New York politician, a president, would lay claim to that legacy by saying he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it.)
On that day in Pennsylvania, Sickles was a major general commanding the Union Army’s III Corps at the Battle of Gettysburg, and his incompetence wrought chaos and danger. The Confederate Army took advantage, and turned the Union line. Had the rebel soldiers broken through, the continent would have been divided: Free and slave, democratic and authoritarian.
Another Union general, Winfield Scott Hancock, had only minutes to reinforce the line. America, the nation, the ideal, hung in the balance. Amid the fury of battle, he found the First Minnesota Volunteers. They were immigrants. Many didn’t speak English. They were the very people the Know Nothings tried to keep out of the country.
They charged, and many of them fell, suffering a staggeringly high casualty rate. They held the line. They saved the Union. Four months later, Lincoln stood on that field of slaughter and said, “It is left to us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.”
We look to Lincoln as our guide and inspiration. He understood the necessity of not just saving the Union, but also of knitting the nation back together spiritually as well as politically. But those wounds can be bound up only once the threat has been defeated. So, too, will our country have to knit itself back together after the scourge of Trumpism has been overcome.
George T. Conway III is an attorney in New York. Steve Schmidt is a Republican political strategist who worked for President George W. Bush, Senator John McCain and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. John Weaver is a Republican strategist who worked for President George H.W. Bush, Senator John McCain and Gov. John Kasich. Rick Wilson is a Republican media consultant and author of “Everything Trump Touches Dies” and the forthcoming “Running Against the Devil: A Plot to Save America From Trump and Democrats From Themselves.”
This article was originally published in The New York Times.
Well, I think they ought to join the Democrats as a moderate part of the party. The Dem party could use more of that.
They would probably have a hell of a time getting in touch with their target audience working as an integral part of the Democratic Party.
If they’re going to get thru, to get their signal across above all the noise, they are going to have to establish and maintain a separate identity, neither big D democrat or establishment big R republicans, since trump and company has captured the R party and hogtied it.
The majority of principled conservatives are not likely paying a lot of attention to Democratic party public relations initiatives, and they aren’t at all welcome inside the Republican Party anymore.
It’s SO sad that our country has fallen so far.
Rot and rust start small, and grow slowly for a long time, before they get to be serious problems.
With the benefit of hindsight, it’s not so hard to understand, and I among many others predicted that something along the lines of what HAS happened , WOULD happen, although none of us ever seriously thought things could go so bad so fast in just one election cycle.
The leftish end of the political spectrum has been extraordinarily busy by way of the COURTS, for the most part, rather than the ballot box, tearing down the old social and political order, since the sixties.
And given that the vast majority of the people then and since who are socially an economically conservative were also law abiding people, they found themselves in the situation of having only one effective way to fight back….. the ballot box.
Whether they’re RIGHT, or WRONG, is irrelevant to understanding our recent history and our current political crisis.
THEY HAVE A RIGHT TO THEIR OWN BELIEFS AND PREFERENCES, and they have voted that belief in large enough numbers in enough places that they have kept control of many governments from village councils to counties to large cities and entire states…… and even the WH.
Maybe it would have been better to have moved a bit more slowly in terms of forcing change. The backlash has set us as a country and a society back ten or even twenty years in a lot of respects.
The BOTTOM LINE single most important reason we have an orange orangutan is living in the WH is political backlash.
( I hereby apologize for insulting the orangutan community. I ‘ve never met one personally, but from all I hear they’re at least as civilized as most people. )
Thanks for the orangutan laugh!
“none of us ever seriously thought things could go so bad so fast in just one election cycle”
NOT, don’t get me started
“Maybe it would have been better to have moved a bit more slowly in terms of forcing change”
Appeasing racism and white supremacy is wrong. It’s been 150 years since the civil war. The Republican leaders need to step up and lead. Not exploit the situation.
HI HB,
You’re still as clueless as ever, and incapable of understanding political realities.
You win or lose depending on how well you play the game, and on the quality of the players you put on the field, not on whether you and your team occupy the higher ground, morally.
You as a big D Democrat set the stage for the R party standing behind the orangutan, by supporting BC and his miserable excuse for a modern woman, right down the party line, lol. You got what you wanted, when he was obviously guilty as hell. Party line all the way.
Every real woman I know would have SPIT on HRC for staying with Bill as a matter of principle and personal ethics, instead of running his BIMBO SQUAD for him.
She is the epitome example of the politician who puts personal power and position ahead of principles, as is TOTALLY obvious from her sticking with her philandering husband who is just about as obvious an abuser of women as the orangutan, but at least he was not BRAZEN about it.
You and countless others, including EVERY MEMBER , myself excepted, of this forum, somehow managed to OVERLOOK her very real criminal record, namely Cattle Gate, insisting just like orangutan fans that it was all just opposition lies, lol.
( Maybe some other members do agree with me about HRC, but don’t want to say so publicly, almost everybody cares more about his standing in his own “IN” group than he does about speaking the truth publicly. I strongly suspect this is the case. What I can say is that as best I can remember, not another soul here ever acknowledged that Cattle Gate was obviously a real and dead serious crime. )
I don’t give a flying fuck at a rolling donut about my personal standing with any particular political, cultural, or economic clique or crowd. What I am interested in is telling it like it IS, as I see it. There are enough people like me that I have an “IN” group of my own, but none of the others in it are members of this particular forum.
You put HRC at the top of the ticket, when ANY competent COACH of the political game would have chosen ANY OTHER DEMOCRAT as the nominee, because she had the longest baggage train of any prominent Democrat in the entire country.
It DOES NOT FUCKING MATTER if that baggage train was mostly R inspired propaganda.( It was, mostly. ) What matters, in TERMS OF WINNING AND LOSING, is that she was handicapped by it to the point that millions of people stayed home or actually voted R because of it.
Now the orangutan is going to get what he wants, party line, all the way, with the exception of a couple of D’s who put their own personal political fortunes above principles and voted against impeachment.
You and others like you helped DEFINE DEVIANCY DOWN.
Now go on off and suck your thumb in a corner someplace and console yourself because you LOST.
The country lost too. The WORLD lost.
But the game was basically played out by the existing REAL WORLD RULES……. get away with anything you can so long as you don’t get caught.
Bill got caught having a fling with an infatuated child employed in the work place under his own supervision as the HEAD of the fucking workplace.
How many big D women can you point out that have PUBLICLY condemned him, long and loud, for this OBVIOUS CRIME, according to current day big D morality?
Bill got caught ( It’s true this very serious offense is laughable compared to trump’s own countless offenses. ) and the cover up wound up costing ten times the price of admitting the offense.
Nobody should ever forget that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, especially if she saves the dress, lol, and can prove her case in court.
Now the orangutan has been caught,DEAD TO RIGHTS, and the cover up has cost it the same price, impeachment.
Now the R’s will just as brazenly support and defend it , just as your sort brazenly supported and defended BC, and HIS bimbo squad manager.
And incidentally you were quite right about the Russians. They have their very own pet orangutan, lol.
It’s a little late for you to go preaching morality at this point in time.
My point escapes you, as usual. You have to have a successful strategy to win, or bad luck may bite you on the ass, hard.
Only the dumbest possible coach with the game in the bag, and a minute to go, would call for a pass that might be intercepted and carried all the way across his own goal line, costing his team the game.
The leftish liberalish establishment arguably overplayed it’s hand, going for everything possible and thereby risking the game, lol, by forcing issues in court, rather than at the ballot box. HRC could have won, should have won , even considering her baggage train and wooden personality and arrogance, but bad luck bit her on her ample ass, and the orangutan squeaked by her, playing by the real world rules.
I had to pay off three personal bets I made on the basis of her winning. OUCH.
The right wing got really lucky, and intercepted that pass, and that interception, figuratively speaking, put the orangutan in the WH.
Incidentally if you go thru everything I have EVER posted here, or at the old TOD, etc, you won’t find a thing I wrote that doesn’t indicate I support strong environmental law, strong civil rights law, a strong publicly funded safety net, etc…….. but sometimes with the caveat that you can’t necessarily have everything you want, or do everything you should do, in the real world, because BACKLASH IS REALITY.
I’m on the same ground, morally, maybe with some minor variations, as you occupy yourself.
I’m a realist.
I spend a lot of time here because the quality of the debate concerning the environment in general is exceptionally high, and because the regulars are like old friends.
I ‘ m still learning a lot here about technical questions and issues. I’m contributing at least a little something along these lines myself, given that I’m the only regular here from the single most important industry of them all, the one that puts food in bellies.
When somebody proves me wrong on any given point, I’m grateful, because this helps me improve my own game, and I’m going to be going live with a site of my own sometime within the coming year.
This political game has been in play since the sixties, and it’s still in play today, and the left is going to win it, because the orangutan IS on his way out, given time, and demographics rule. A century is only an eye blink it terms of the BIG PICTURE.
It’s only rarely that I have met a young person with any serious education who supports the R party establishment in recent times, and my own generation is fast disappearing from the voter rolls.
Hi OFM,
I am not American or live in America, so don’t know about the fine details of U.S politics. Hence i seldom comment on anything political. However since you mentioned, I want to publicly say that i totally agree with you regarding the Clintons, whether it’s Bill or Hilary or their dodgy foundation.
From my narrow perspective, it seems the world is run by central banks, big capitalism and self interest groups who employ career politician to do their bidding. The middle class will continue to shrink.
The Clinton’s were less than role models, to be sure, as far as ethics were concerned.
But while they all too often failed to practice what they preached, they did preach the right stuff, in general terms.
And they’re saints, compared to the orangutan and his family.
Your post is full of Bullshit. Your a victim of your environmental culture. You can rant about HRC and be perfectly silent on racism and white supremacy. That’s the behavior of the Trumpism cult.
If it walks like a duck, looks like a duck and sounds like a duck. It’s a duck.
If you take away the political naiveté and the self-assured exceptionalism the American national character looks pretty bare.
My guess is Trump gets four more.
I’m willing to bet he won’t. His base is about as big as it is ever going to be, whereas the opposition can tap into millions of new young voters, if the D’s play their cards right.
In the meantime, I used to know at least three people personally who voted for him. All three died since then, and there’s a substantial chance at least one more trump voter of my acquaintance will kick the bucket between now and election day.
Of course I’m not representative, because I live in the Bible Belt and most of the local people I know these days are old people.
There’s also a possibility the rest of the R party will force him out by way of some made up excuse such as a health issue if the polls look bad enough.
But he will win the redneck states and some of the rust belt states. The question is, can he win all of them?
It took a sweep of the last three big rust belt states to put him over the top last time.
From your mouth to God’s ear.
Sadly, I think impeachment is going to help him. If he were a judge, a representative or a governor, it would be absolutely clear that he was unfit for office. But presidents are different. They’re a representative of our national identity and a kind of father figure, and impeachment will tend to rally people to him. I’m afraid that will include independents as well. Here’s a chart that’s part of why I’m thinking that might be true: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/?ex_cid=rrpromo
I hope it’s not a big factor.
I think it depends heavily on who the Democrats put up.
I think all the current leaders of the pack have big weaknesses when it comes to electibility. But then again I was surprised that Orangutan man got more than 4% in the republican primaries.
Trump will win where it counts; that’s how one can lose the popular vote yet still win the election.
If Sanders would win the Dim primary I’d give him a chance against Trump, but lets not pretend that’s in the cards. As it is, whichever empty suit wins the Dims will lose to Trump.
“Your post is full of Bullshit. ”
Said like the loser you are, lol. Just make up accusations of sins and crimes and fling them at anybody you disagree with for any reason, hoping that if you fling enough shit,some of it will stick, and discredit me.
And YOU call ME a trumpster, lol.
I have said repeatedly that I support the D party agenda. Show me a comment anywhere, any time, any place that indicates I’m a racist, or that support white supremacists, etc.
What I HAVE said is that everybody is entitled to their own beliefs and values, right or wrong, and that they tend to VOTE on the basis of their beliefs and values, and that for that reason, the orange orangutan is president.
But I suppose such subtleties are over your head, lol.
Understanding my comment requires that the reader be able to step back from his own particular values and beliefs, and look at the political scene the same way a person from out of town can look at a ball game between two local rivals, and dispassionately point out the reasons one team won and the other team lost.
You don’t have brains enough to do that. You don’t have brains enough to understand when somebody else does it for you.
Any body that cares to do so can check out my answers to political questions on Quora. I’ve been posting there for a few months and will shortly be up to a million views.
Practice makes perfect.
Mac,
Politics isn’t the same as sports. You can’t view the two sides as equivalent, and analyze everything in terms of impersonal tactics and strategy. If a team loses or wins, it doesn’t matter. But if a political party is fighting to save fossil fuels (as just one example) then they’re lying about the facts, while the other side will tend to be telling the truth.
And, if one party is fighting against civil liberties and the other party is fighting for them…..well, that’s not equivalent and it’s not just a matter of unimportant cultural differences.
I know issues like racism are radioactive. It’s too bad, because it makes it very difficult to talk about and deal with. The fact is that everyone has misinformation about people in other groups. Everyone is, at times, scared of people in other groups. There’s nothing sinful about it, and it’s not a crime.
Let me say that again: no one should be ashamed to have had misinformation or fears about race, or gender, or religion – we all have it, and we’ll only figure out what’s realistic by talking about it.
I hope I haven’t offended you – I really don’t mean to. But it will be pretty much impossible to deal with this stuff without talking about it…
Hi Nick,
A LONG time ago I decided you are a P R pro of one sort or another, and prone to making all your arguments in such terms.
You’re not as stupid as HB, but I’m wondering if you are smart enough to get it.
On the other hand, a P R pro never varies from his prepared positions, even if he does get it.
Lawyers and PR people argue their client’s cases, not their personal beliefs, although in THIS case I do think you are arguing from your personal beliefs as well as your IN group belief system.
Now so far as offending me goes, you are incapable of offending me. All you are capable of doing, as HB is doing, is demonstrating that you DON’T understand politics. I’m laughing.
You’re a regular here, and there’s no way you can fail to know that I’m consistently on record as supporting the modern day leftish liberalish vision of the modern day Democratic Party.
Why don’t you stop and THINK a minute, about where I stand on environmental protection, equal rights for everybody, a single payer national health care system similar to the ones in Canad and Western Europe, etc etc etc.
My last wife was a Big Apple Jewish woman. My field hands, when I have any, eat with me at the family table. I don’t HAVE a dining room, lol.
I’m talking in athletic terms because such simple analogies and or metaphors are the best way I can think of to try to get my point across.
I’m sorry, but you demonstrate an obvious lack of the capacity to step outside your own personal comfort zone and contemplate the perfectly obvious fact that in the real world, battles are NOT NECESSARILY won or lost in the space of a generation, or two generations, but that sometimes it takes longer, and sometimes the opposition ( enemy to you because you can’t seem to see the battle as an outside impartial observer) or “enemy” wins.
If you can’t get your head around this perfectly OBVIOUS point, assuming you have EVER read a few history books, etc, that’s not MY problem, it’s YOURS.
Let’s try a different approach. Literal war.
Lee marched his army into the north, gambling everything on winning there, and he got his ass kicked, and there after, for all practical purposes, it was over, all he could do was drag it out to the bitter end.
( Sure he was defending the South, and with it, slavery, etc, but if you are too stupid to be able to separate cause and effect, that’s your problem again. He gambled, he lost the gamble. )
IF he had stayed down south, he might have been able to drag it out until the people of the North got tired of it, and agreed to a settlement. But he felt compelled to take the gamble, because he believed that was his best bet.
Generals and coaches have to decide to go for it, or to play it safe. Going for it is GREAT, IF you don’t get your ass kicked.
The nazi regime that got control of Germany was one of the most evil in history, but that didn’t stop it from waging a successful war of conquest, until it went too far too fast.
The generals that kicked Hitler’s ass on the battle field had to make a hell of a lot of decisions, many of which involved taking time, suffering losses, waiting until the situation favored their going on the offense, rather than fighting a defensive battle.
There’s an ongoing culture war in this country. I’ve often said that the old line conservative establishment is going to lose it, because demographics rule.
BUT that doesn’t mean that that same old line socially conservative/ religious establishment can’t win a battle once in a while, even as it loses the WAR.
It would have been great if the liberal establishment won the culture war by going to the courts, and it damned near DID, but as the historical record indicates, it’s perfectly reasonable to argue that as a matter of bad luck, it moved a little too fast, over estimating the power of the court system, overestimating its own power, and again by bad luck running the WORST POSSIBLE FUCKING CANDIDATE last time around, the one Democrat in the entire USA with the highest negatives of ALL of them, even before the first primary, lol. I simply can’t understand ( sarc light blazing !) why big D Democrats are unwilling to admit in public that putting your worst batter up at the critical point, the win or lose point, is a BAD idea. But some of the ones I know well personally are quick to admit it in private, lol.
I’m SORRY for you , as well as sorry for HB, if you can’t get your head around the fact that the orange orangutan is president because the right wing got lucky and won the WH last time around, because of bad luck, because the D’s ran a totally piss poor candidate, one that was the PERFECT target for a trump type candidate.
Now in case you can’t remember what I’ve been saying all along, demographics rule, and because of all the younger people I know, except a very few who take their religion very seriously, they are going to be D voters, and the old farts of my generation, and my culture, are dying off fast.
IF we survive as a country, we will look a hell of a lot more like Canada, or France, or the UK, culturally and politically, in another ten years than we do now, and that will be a VERY GOOD THING.
BUT if we wind up fighting WWIII because the orange orangutan continues to fuck up as usual, that’s NOT going to be a good thing, no siree, not at ALL.
I’m a systems thinker, and I try to always step back far enough to see the forest, rather than the trees. You don’t see the forest, you’re too focused on individual trees. You don’t see the BIG PICTURE, the sweep of history.
I don’t support ANY major policy of the R party, other than that I believe it would be a truly GOOD thing for the PARENTS of this country to be able to put their kids into privately operated schools using public money, if such a program were to be operated HONESTLY, rather than geared in such a way as to support religious schools.
WHY? Because having BEEN there, IN the public school system, and having lived in a major city, I know how desperately fucked up our school system IS, and that fixing it from the inside isn’t an option. Any kid stuck in a typical inner city school, or a desperately poor rural school, is pretty much FUCKED.
If his parents had the option of putting him in a private school funded at the level of the public schools, most of those kids would do very well.
But the system as it exists sacrifices ALL of them while pissing and moaning about the ones that “would be left ” in the public schools.
You can’t run an effective classroom when you have a lot of kids in it who know goddamned well they can do as they please, rather than listen, or at least be QUIET. I’m not saying they should be ignored, but rather that they are in control, rather than the teacher, and that means NONE OF THEM get an education.
THIS is a fucking REALITY, one which the organized teachers deny of course, and one which the ( heart in the right place) leftish leaning establishment simply either cannot or WILL NOT own up to.
But I don’t see it actually happening, and if it does happen, it’s probably going to be as badly mismanaged as the ACA aka Obama Care.
I said here that while the intent is or was great, it was a political blunder of the VERY WORST sort, because it would create a huge backlash, and I know a dozen people personally who curse Obama’s name, because the ACA fucked THEM over but GOOD, resulting in their losing their own group insurance plans, and having to pay thru the nose for an inferior plan. These people up until that happened to them mostly didn’t pay much if any attention to politics. But since they have been and will be cursing the D party until they die of old age.
Sorry if you don’t get it. Pretty much the whole dozen bestirred themselves to the point of voting for the orange orangutan.
Can we all spell B A C K L A S H together?
And I’m sorry that I suspect that maybe you think roughly half the people of this country belong in political reeducation camps because they happen to disagree with YOUR cultural and political convictions.
I’m one of them, born and bred, but I disagree with their politics too. I’m no longer on speaking terms with a couple of relatives because I confronted them with the fact that trump was fucking a porno whore while his THIRD ( second imported!) wife was pregnant, and that they are stupid enough to believe his denial, etc, that they are stupid enough to believe he is a Christian, etc.
But I’m not on a high moral hobby horse to the point that I believe YOU AND I are entitled to do TELL them what they should think and believe.
Sometimes the only way to win is to wait for the opposition to simply DIE. That’s what’s winning the culture war in this country today…….. the death by old age of the core of the right wing, and the replacement thereof by younger and better educated voters.
The orange orangutan is in the WH because the right wing got very very lucky, and won one big last battle at the ballot box, playing under the real world rules, namely do anything you please, but don’t get caught.
That wouldn’t have happened if the cards of history had fallen differently. But they fell as they fell, and the left maybe pushed a little too hard a little too fast, via the courts rather than the ballot box, and ran the WRONG candidate, and managed to snatch a defeat from the jaws of what should have been a very easy victory.
The professors of history and political science will be writing books twenty years from now saying pretty much what I’m saying here and now.
I can see the sweep of history, because I’m able to step out of my partisan shoes, out of my cultural shoes, out of my personal comfort zone, and see the BIG PICTURE.
I’m no prophet, but it’s my personal belief that we are right now today looking at the the end of the R Party, as it has existed for the previous century or so, but it’s death is going to be a slow and drawn out process.
I can’t say what will happen to it, but I believe the country as a whole in another generation will look far more like Western Europe than otherwise.
The churches are mostly empty already, out in the country side, but you would never know it to read the mass media.
The relative handful, compared to past times, of kids on their way to church are playing dinosaur and space games on their phones.
There aren’t any Bible games on those phones.
The preachers these days don’t DARE say anything about a young woman in a short tight skirt, lol. They know she will leave, and take her boyfriend with her, and she won’t be bringing her ( to be born someday ) babies to church, if he does.
But maybe it’s too late.
There’s obviously a hard crash baked it.
The only real question is whether it’s to be a crash and burn with all hands lost scenario, or whether some people and major portions of the biosphere will survive it.
Now you tell me. Am I a right winger, or a left winger?
Ah, Mac.
I did offend you, and that’s too bad. I’m sad to see that you feel the need to attack my integrity, intelligence and ability to have a broad perspective. I’m sad to see that you think you need to defend your overall political position (right vs left). I don’t think you’re a right winger, but I do think you have a bit of a blind spot when it comes to social change.
It’s hard to know where to begin.
I disagree that it’s necessary to simply wait for conservatives to die – I think that people are able to learn new things, though media propaganda certainly makes that very hard. I disagree that “culture war” is a good description: I think that religions are going through a necessary change due to our change in understanding of science, and there needs to be a reconciliation of the emotional truths of old religion with the psychological and biological truths of science (oddly enough, I think you know that from reading Pinker…).
I don’t think that social change has to be thought of in terms of war and battles: to the extent that people actually learn new things, there can be fundamental change that is win-win, and not simply victory and defeat.
Just as I’m not trying to win an argument with you, but rather have a dialogue.
Which is really not easy, it’s true.
Looks like we (and our domestic friends) have won the race. Time to work on a new planet?
FOSSILS OF THE FUTURE TO MOSTLY CONSIST OF HUMANS, DOMESTIC ANIMALS
“The chance of a wild animal becoming part of the fossil record has become very small,” said Plotnick, UIC professor of earth and environmental sciences and the paper’s lead author. “Instead, the future mammal record will be mostly cows, pigs, sheep, goats, dogs, cats, etc., and people themselves.”
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-12/uoia-fot121819.php
Meanwhile, CO2 exhibiting healthy growth:
Daily CO2 — Dec. 18, 2019, 411.83 ppm: Dec. 18, 2018: 408.74 ppm
Speaking of healthy growth,
Consumption of fossil fuels — petroleum, natural gas, and coal — grew by 4% in 2018 and accounted for 80% of U.S. total energy consumption. Natural gas consumption reached a record high, rising by 10% from 2017. This increase in natural gas, along with relatively smaller increases in the consumption of petroleum fuels, renewable energy, and nuclear electric power, more than offset a 4% decline in coal consumption.
Interestingly, biomass consumption, primarily in the form of transportation fuels such as fuel ethanol and biodiesel, accounted for 45% of all renewable consumption in 2018, up 1% from 2017 levels. Increases in wind, solar, and biomass consumption were partially offset by a 3% decrease in hydroelectricity consumption.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=39092
Rising emissions drive greenhouse gas index increase
NOAA’s Annual Greenhouse Gas Index tracks the relative climate-forcing influence exerted by carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases since the start of the industrial revolution. This year it rose to a value of 1.43, meaning that the increase in the atmosphere’s heat-trapping capacity attributable to human activity has risen 43 percent since 1990.
The rate of methane increase has also accelerated over the past five years, jumping 50 percent since 2007-2013. Methane is 28 times more potent than carbon dioxide in trapping heat in the atmosphere over 100 years (150 times more at 1 year-mine) and exerts the second largest influence on global warming behind carbon dioxide.
https://research.noaa.gov/article/ArtMID/587/ArticleID/2455/RISING-EMISSIONS-DRIVE-GREENHOUSE-GAS-INDEX-INCREASER
The rate of growth of CO2 emissions is slowing (probably due to economic slowdown) yet the rate of GHG’s keeps increasing.
From you post: “Not surprisingly, the AGGI shows how humans’ cumulative impact on climate is also accelerating. Increases in greenhouse gas concentrations since 1950 are responsible for 75 percent of humanity’s impact on the climate over the past 260 years.”
Second Least Cold Year
https://tamino.wordpress.com/2019/12/11/second-least-cold-year/
“Two companies are planning to build the country’s first long-duration energy storage system based entirely on liquid air technology in northern Vermont ”
Alternative to lithium battery, pumped hydro and underground compressed air will be tried out.
I guess they mean liquefied N2?
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/first-us-long-duration-liquid-air-storage-project-planned-vermont/569384/
I think it’s air, with the water and CO2 removed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryogenic_energy_storage
BYD plans to make India a hub for S. Asia business
https://www.thehindu.com/business/Industry/byd-plans-to-make-india-a-hub-for-s-asia-business/article30323285.ece
BYD Produces 400th Electric Bus in Lancaster
https://www.greencarcongress.com/2019/12/20191219-byd.html
Extinction in 2020?
http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2019/12/extinction-in-2020.html?m=1
(I doubt it, as I’ll most certainly be quite alive)
This is just an example of triggered reiterative methane pulses, which have the potential to cause a major extinction event. The particular year is inconsequential.
The twelve steps to net zero energy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SE0_CJKADPk
Solid.
The retrofit of pre-exising homes and commercial buildings is the bigger challenge.
Nothing money and intention can’t solve however.
Got money?
$383B is being spent right now on homes alone: https://www.homeadvisor.com/r/why-home-improvement-industry-worth-billions/
Yes, the anti-improvement movement keeps steamrolling efforts to reduce eco-destruction and climate mania.
“Don’t worry about all that climate and eco-destruction, come look at my beautiful new kitchen and bathroom!”
Or as articulated in this McSweeny’s satire:
“The work is never done,” she said recently. “But before the city succumbs to flooding and famine in a few decades, we wanted a place that feels like home.”
https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/translation-of-a-new-york-times-real-estate-article-for-those-living-without-a-trust-fund/?fbclid=IwAR3m8y7w-2V6Cry0nBQBxiW5JHSPaHky510AyLgbc1gNT2mTbNpN4xEbPO8
“anti-improvement movement”
What is that? Haven’t heard of such. Maybe its a local thing.
In my region (11 counties), there is very little new construction. Almost all the activity is renovation of pre-existing. Most people don’t have the mullah to get the job done sufficiently.
Most the build-able lots have been developed long ago, or the land is off limits- zoning to wetland, ag/grazing, wildlife preservation, watershed etc.
Mostly its just too steep.
Yes, I thought this was one of the more realistic and well thought out approaches to energy reduction in homes. Long ago I realized the traditional salt box two story design gave minimum surface area to volume for single family structures. Reducing all those architectural “breaks” seen on more complex homes allows much easier air sealing and insulation.
FYI
https://trees-energy-conservation.extension.org/windbreaks-for-energy-conservation/
There may be considerable number of REAL Christians out there, one’s smart enough to actually follow the teachings of their religion, rather than slavishly worship an orange orangutan, a golden calf, or chicken entrails, who will not vote for R in 2020.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/dec/20/trump-rips-christianity-today-far-left-magazine-af/
I seldom read the Washington Times, but it’s good to keep an eye on a few such publications, so as to know what everybody is up to.
Two things blow me away about this article in this paper. One, the management ran it, although it also allowed Graham junior to say whatever he pleased to reduce the impact of it.
TWO, the comments are solidly in favor of the magazine being RIGHT, although there are only a few comments.
The dearth of pro orangutan comments indicates that maybe even readers of the WT are getting to be THOROUGHLY sick of the orangutan, and not eager any more to post a comment in his favor.
This is unexpected evidence that his welcome is wearing thin at least among evangelicals that read a little something other than their KJB, lol.
Trump is going to lose a substantial number of voters, due to some of his better NOW informed 2016 voters staying home, or even voting D in some cases.
But if it loses ten percent of its supporters this might not make much difference, in most cases, because of way they are distributed and because of the electoral college.
But it could make all the difference in a few closely contested races.
“Trump is going to lose a substantial number of voters, due to some of his better NOW informed 2016 voters staying home, or even voting D in some cases. ”
That is what I hear some of the locals Trump voters saying, they will not vote.
Even Hillary (the weakest 0f the Dim field) got 3 million more votes than Trump.
Our outdated and undemocratic political system is a disaster.
Both roads lead to disaster, one is softer and nicer than the other for a cushier ride over the edge.
Back atcha Nick,
Out of thread space up above, so I must reply down here.
I’m still laughing. I don’t question your integrity, other than that you so CONSISTENTLY say the same exact things over and over and over that you sound like an ADVERTISEMENT, like a pr release, like a SOUND BITE, talking about anything relating to the environment, etc. This is why I think your background includes substantial expertise in P R work. I’ve not encountered any body else who more consistently talks the way you do in a forum such as this one.
No ,I’m not offended, I’m still laughing at what I perceive to be your naivete. You’re helping me practice what must be my last new trade, writing. I’m hoping to live long enough to publish some stuff in an organized fashion, rather than as bits and pieces here and there on the net.
You and HB don’t seem to be able to get your head around perfectly obvious facts. If you want to put your principles and beliefs into effect, you have to WIN elections. IF you want to win elections you do NOT run a candidate with the worst possible standing with half the electorate, lol.
HB accuses me of hating HRC. I don’t. I have CONTEMPT for her, A LOT OF CONTEMPT for her. But to me, she’s more or less no more than a character in a play or novel, one of the kind the Gods first raise high to dash on the rocks as the just reward for her own overweening selfishness and ambitions. I’m the COACH from out of town. I don’t support EITHER team for the sake of supporting A team. I’m trying to be the outside observer, the guy that used to be sent by a third government to observe how a war is going between two other governments.
She has never in her entire fucking life displayed any real indication she has any PERSONAL qualities worth admiring. It’s all P R. I make a point of talking to young college women who talk politics, women who are willing to share their beliefs with anybody who shows up at a cafeteria table coffee session.Men are welcome, but they’re pretty quick to tell us where to GET OFF. They respect the fact that she has done a lot, a hell of a lot, in terms of moving the country forward in terms of equality for women, and social justice, and I don’t deny she has. I give her credit for doing so.
( But making my points doesn’t involve her good aspects, because I’m looking to get people to think about who and what they support long term. You , rhetorically speaking, if you supported her, after sticking with Bill, helped define deviancy down. So now the sort of outrage I hear from the left now rings hollow, like somebody condemning another person for stealing a million, which is in moral and ethical terms pretty much the same thing as stealing ten or ten thousand. )
Tell me this. I dare ya. Do you believe what the Washington Post and the NYT printed about Cattle Gate? I find it almost impossible to get a self proclaimed big D Democrat to admit Cattle Gate is a reality, lol.
Such young women generally have no respect for HRC as a PERSON, as a WOMAN, because she sacrificed her personal integrity to stick with Bill, making her a whore, in essence, for the sake of gaining power for herself.
I just don’t think you are capable admitting that people who disagree with you have a right to their own beliefs and mores, to their own culture. As a matter of fact, it shines thru that you think I’m an unwashed redneck, the sort of person who would support trump, lol, but would rather just drop a delicate hint to that effect than say so directly. Ron, our venerable founder, and HB don’t mind saying what they think,directly, no beating around the bush. Ron once said I’m too goddamned stupid to be a Democrat, lol. I still love him like a rumored long lost brother I never met, lol, because while he IS a PARTISAN big D Democrat to the core, at least he’s not a PC Democrat, and doesn’t mind telling it like it is when the subject is Saudi society, Middle Eastern culture, etc, laughing again. Ron’s as honest as the day is long. No bullshit about him, none at all.
To me, you’re the little brother in this joke. He meets his first girl, and they’re screwing each other silly, and she abruptly throws him over for another boy, and he’s crying his eyes out. So his big brother is trying to console him, and says look, there’s lots of other girls and you will find another one soon. And he bursts out bawling again, sobbing, “What about tonight!”
You are incapable of seeing the sweep of history, incapable of dealing with an IDEA that you aren’t comfortable with. At one point in time I joined the ACLU. I have been a member of the NEA, a member of a labor union, the Operating Engineers, my Dad was a Teamster for fifty years on his PART TIME job in town, only forty hours, lol. I see little kids every day, white mostly, but also some black and brown that don’t have enough to eat or a loving home and it breaks my heart.
You ain’t got a fucking CLUE about what makes poor people and socially conservative people, religious people tick. I don’t think you can COMPREHEND that the orangutan is in the WH because the left end of our society pushed for everything it wanted via the court system rather than the ballot box, and ALMOST won the figurative day over the last couple of generations, starting when I was a young guy myself.
It’s STILL going to win, in the end, but there has been an extraordinarily bad piece of luck in that the WELL INTENTIONED heart in the right place progressive movement failed, by the narrowest of margins, to carry the day in 2016, playing by the real world rules, with the result being that the orangutan is in the WH, and the federal judiciary is fast being packed with right wing cavemen, etc, and WWIII is probably more likely than at anytime since the Cuban missile crisis, etc.
So you go right on thinking I’m the one with the big blind spots,and worse and I will go right on thinking you’re virtue signaling, and that you can’t step back from the trees far enough to see the forest.
You should be careful what you ask for, because you may get it. You ( rhetorically speaking ) started the culture war. Now you have to deal with it. If you, rhetorically speaking, had displayed more patience, more understanding, more willingness to ACTUALLY TOLERATE freedom of choice in mores, values, lifestyles, culture, rather than more or less deliberately using the courts to do everything possible to destroy the cultural lives of people who were HAPPY with what they had, you wouldn’t be dealing with the orangutan today. I’m a small d democrat. I believe in democracy. The people who support trump are entitled to vote their values.
They hate your guts because you look down on them.
When you (rhetorically ) show some signs that you RESPECT them, well, at that point you might find it possible to work with them to get some useful things done, such as establishing a decent national health care system, making sure every little kid has plenty to eat,at least trying to save whatever can be saved of what’s left of the natural world, etc.
So long as you run candidates that refer to them as deplorables, they will continue to hate your guts. Can ya get your head around it?
I don’t think of my self as a liberal, or a conservative, or a Democrat, or a Republican, although I support nearly all of the current day D Party agenda, especially as espoused by Sanders. I find it necessary to keep my distance so I can see the forest, rather than the trees, so I can write about the forest.
This forum is for scribbling. I dash off comments here about as fast as I can type, which is pretty fast for an old fart with stiff hands and fingers. When I’m ready to publish, every page will be the result of a day’s agonized work trying to get it just right.
The political dirt will fly and all the propaganda will flow. It will be as inconsequential as a fart since almost no one is attending to the big problems and predicaments we all face. The politics reminds me of two drunks fighting it out in the street, completely oblivious of the bus about to run them down.
Or as the great social commentator Jean Shepherd once said ” all the news of today will be forgotten and meaningless in the not distant future” or something like that.
In this case it may well be very true.
You can extrapolate that saying to geological time and everything seriously becomes more or less forgotten and meaningless.
I find the fact that Sherlock Holmes, a fictional character, seems to have extreme time durability compared to real people who have made major positive changes to human suffering or protected animal/plant life.
Although many political occurences fade into the past, the environmental screw ups only fade from the mind of the many, but for the affected their illness and deaths are a reminder every day. Also the illness and deaths of all the living things caught in the toxic environment, though few think of them (collateral damage so we can have our soon to be junk).
“The World’s Worst Industrial Disaster Is Still Unfolding
In Bhopal, residents who survived the massive gas leak and those who arrived later continue to deal with the consequences.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/07/the-worlds-worst-industrial-disaster-is-still-unfolding/560726/
If the residents of the “developed” countries knew what was in their bodies and embryos right now, maybe they would be a little more present and conscious about the state of the world.
But few talk about it and those who do are often seen as “different” and “strange”.
BTW, I turned down a job at Union Carbide.
Have you given any consideration to Andrew Yang?
Is there any other presidential candidate you can imagine saying:
This is excerpted from an NPR broadcast called Off The Record, and they then go on to briefly discuss thorium reactors. Full video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2Wr7lDI-Hg
I’d love to watch this man in a head to head debate with Trump. It would be very clear who the adult in the room is.
And happy peak Winter to y’all in the the N.H.
It’s going to be a long night.
Dennis Meadows: The Limits To Growth
https://www.peakprosperity.com/featuredvoice/
Reality is not always comfortable.
It will be as inconsequential as a fart since almost no one is attending to the big problems and predicaments we all face. The politics reminds me of two drunks fighting it out in the street, completely oblivious of the bus about to run them down.
“Reality is not always comfortable.”
Indeed, as we prepare to enter the next decade: POLARISED WORLD ENTERING ERA OF CLIMATE IMPACTS
“Entrenched nationalism continues to threaten the multilateral order which underpins the Paris Agreement and a global commitment to limit warming well below 2C. Donald Trump has officially started to pull the US out of the Paris Agreement and Jair Bolsonaro is working to open up the Amazon to large agribusiness interests. Other emerging economies such as China and India are seemingly hiding behind the US retreat to delay bolder action.”
https://www.climatechangenews.com/2019/12/20/2019-review-polarised-world-entering-era-climate-impacts/
You bring up a point about reality. What should human reality be? A hum-drum mind numbing repetitive, clock driven, toxic wasteland or a vibrant, exciting, dangerous and living fabric where each day makes itself and there is no need to even have a word called freedom.?
Should our relationship with the world be one of belonging or one of disdain, delusion and destruction?
People focus on the carbon emissions, which are a side effect of civilization and industrial society.
Maybe they need to focus on civilization and society to change root causes for this current set of dilemmas.
That’s the opposite of playing a dominionist, which is defined as to “subdue” the earth.
Children, at least the dull ones, should not bug the adults. Now go play with your toys.
Earth only does what it has always done, that is: change, with or without man’s involvement. I would be more worried if there wasn’t any change at all. Plus, as an aside, more global warming would be worth it bring down my own heating costs (here in Ohio).
I’m sure it’s God’s way of saying thank you for loving him
‘Tis the season to be jolly, and wish Jesus a happy birthday.
Freedom of religion is a nice sentiment but freedom from religion is an essential for realistic action against extinction.
“Freedom of religion is a nice sentiment but freedom from religion is an essential for realistic action against extinction.”
Amen!
As temperatures keep braking records and wildfires scorch the land (and islandboy lauds wonderful progress in solar installations 😉 ) we have a new AUSTRALIAN ENERGY (2019) UPDATE, showing that — “Oil accounted for the largest share of Australia’s primary energy mix in 2017–18, at 39 per cent, followed by coal (30 per cent) and natural gas (25 per cent). Meanwhile, renewable energy sources accounted for 6 per cent.” BTW As at 2018 hydro power supplied 35.2% of Australia’s renewable electricity generation; solar accounted for a mind boggling 5.2% .
https://www.energy.gov.au/sites/default/files/australian_energy_statistics_2019_energy_update_report_september.pdf
And while the country is burning from bushfires, the prime minister is in Hawaii on holidays lol
We are definitely on the right track….
And Moscow is above freezing, no snow, rain forecast for New Year Day. 133 year high temperature was just broken. Flowers anyone?
Meanwhile the US/Canada has experienced some cooler weather now turning warmer.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-unites-republicans-may-be-changing-same-with-democrats/?utm_source=pocket-newtab
From this link
Some selected paragraphs from this link:
I don’t want to treat that book as gospel, but it speaks to a certain understanding that has existed throughout my 17 years covering national politics. Democrats have been considered the party of Asian, black, gay, Jewish and Latino people, along with atheists, teachers, union members, etc. — in short, a coalition organized around a bunch of different identity groups. Meanwhile, Republicans have been thought of as the party of small government, low taxes, a strong national defense and “traditional” moral values — in short, a coalition based around a few core ideological principles.
The two big stories happening right now in American politics — the 2020 Democratic primary and impeachment — show both parties being reshaped in ways that break with that asymmetry: The GOP is becoming increasingly organized around identity groups, and Democrats are becoming increasingly ideological.
With Republicans on Capitol Hill strongly defending President Trump amid the Ukraine scandal, you might say that the GOP has simply abandoned many of its principles in deference to Trump. Maybe. But I think the more accurate story is that Republicans on Capitol Hill are standing firmly behind Trump because GOP voters and GOP activists and elites are demanding that they do so. There just isn’t much room to break with the president of your party if close to 90 percent of voters in the party approve of him and many of those voters get their news from sources strongly supportive of that president.
Why are Republican voters and elites so strongly aligned with Trump? There’s not a simple answer, but I think identity — rather than ideology — is a big part of it. Trump is defending the identities of people who align themselves with the GOP, and this is a more powerful connection and reason to back him than pure ideological concerns. In defending Trump, conservative voters are really defending themselves.
But if you think of the GOP as being organized around identity groups, these policies hang together quite well. The clear beneficiaries of the Trump administration’s actions have been businesses and corporations whose leaders back the president (such as those in the coal industry), conservative Christians, farmers, gun rights enthusiasts, people wary of increases in the number of foreign-born Americans and Islam, people wary of movements like Black Lives Matter and MeToo, pro-Israel activists and residents of rural areas.
Of course, I’m not the first person to notice any of this. The journalist Ron Brownstein refers to the GOP as the “coalition of restoration,” trying to fight against a “coalition of transformation” led by Democrats. Robert Jones, head of the Public Religion Research Institute, has described Trump as the defender of a “white Christian America” that sees itself in decline. In a recent speech, Attorney General Willam Barr praised the “Judeo-Christian values that have made this country great” and warned that “irreligion and secular values are being forced on people of faith.” All three of those formulations describe a complicated mix of identity and ideology.
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I don’t give a hoot, one way or another, who agrees with me, so long as I attract some attention and some arguments. If the arguments are good ones, and hit home, perfect. I will use them to up my own game.
In a nutshell, the liberal left started a culture war,back when I was a kid, and the conservative right has been fighting back, mostly on the defense, for well over half a century now.
The left almost succeeded in putting HRC in office, but the right wing, playing by the real world rules, which allow cheating so long as you don’t get caught, got lucky and more or less stole the election via the real world electoral college rule with a little help from Putin and company.
It got caught, but the culture war is now raging to such an extent that the R side is willing to bet everything on winning it by defending the obviously guilty orangutan.
I’m not willing to bet either way on the odds of the orangutan getting away clean, politically. Short term, it looks good to excellent, for it in terms of its impeachment, but I’m thinking now that the odds are strongly shifting in favor of the D’s winning the 20 WH race unless they run a candidate with high negatives even before the first primary.
The right wing appears to me to be about tapped out in terms of reserves to bring to the ballot box battle field, and losing some troops, where as the left wing has tons of potential new recruits.
Its ass is grass as soon as it’s out of office, because the State of New York has a bunch of ambitious and capable prosecutors on the pay roll who will be on him like a duck on a june bug, once he’s out of the WH. One or more of them will ride that horse right into the NY state governor’s office , or the national House or Senate. Maybe even the WH.
I’m taking another young woman who has never voted by the DMV to get registered Monday, having convinced her that doing so is very much in her own interests, since she can’t afford medical care for her two kids.
She makes the fourth new voter I’ve helped register myself. That many more have promised to get on the voter rolls on their own initiative. All of them are young people.
The old people I’ve approached are registered years ago, if they intend to vote under any circumstances. They’re mostly voting R, if they vote at all. Of all the ones I know in my own age bracket that vote R, I’m estimating that four or five percent of them will be DEAD before Nov 2020.
Demographics rule, Saturday Night Live and Stephen Colbert rule, the old time city daily paper and the three net work news shows don’t run the political show anymore, as far as younger people are concerned.
Registering young voters is one of the best things one can do.
I went to a training session and got certified as a Volunteer Deputy Registrar of voters, so now I can hand out voter register registration cards, check them for completeness on the spot, and turn them in. No need for them to visit a registration office.
I work at a university with 50,000 students …
A fresh one from George
https://questioneverything.typepad.com/question_everything/2019/12/winter-solstice-2019.html
Yes, there are new things to talk about. New things to create new nightmares.
The new level of insanity being unleashed upon the oceans, while the naïve try to convince the sociopaths to stop being sociopaths, is enough to even make me shudder. There is no place to be left intact, no level of degradation is too much, and no amount of talk or group action will halt the mania to destroy this world.
Metallic hemorrhoids ripped from the ocean bottom make the plans to mine asteroids look like child’s play and most likely obsolete. The scale is immense and not the subject of futuristic novels, merely present horror stories.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/01/20000-feet-under-the-sea/603040/
@IronMike
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/dec/18/too-hot-for-humans-first-nations-people-fear-becoming-australias-first-climate-refugees
NAOM
A new oil post has been published
http://peakoilbarrel.com/is-non-opec-oil-production-recovering/#more-24042
A new Non-Petroleum post has been published
http://peakoilbarrel.com/open-thread-non-petroleum-december-22-2019/#respond