162 thoughts to “Open Thread Non-Petroleum, August 26, 2019”

  1. Hydrogen

    Due to the variable nature of wind and solar, it has been long understood that large scale storage solutions are needed.

    https://www.worldenergy.org/news-views/entry/hydrogen-is-key-to-unlocking-the-full-offshore-wind-potential-of-the-north-sea

    Hydrogen produced from wind and solar would be the best in terms of environmental impact. Avoiding the problem of battery recycling of electric cars and pollution from mining.

    Hydrogen can also be burned in cookers and boilers just like natural gas.

    https://fuelcellsworks.com/news/the-fuel-cell-powered-home-an-approaching-reality/

    1. There’s a time coming when we must either find uses for substantial amounts of wind and solar juice that won’t be needed immediately, real time, or see it gone to waste.

      It’s here already in a few places a day now and then, but not even remotely on a scale big enough to build any sort of industrial infrastructure that would be DEPENDENT on intermittent cheap electricity, so far as I know. Could be wrong about that, but I read just about all the links posted here and at a couple of renewable energy news sites.

      Limited amounts of hydrogen can be mixed in with natural gas, and that would extend natural gas supplies any place near such a hydrogen plant.

      I haven’t read anything recently about progress in building affordable hydrogen tanks suitable for use in automobiles or trucks, but if such tanks were standardized, it might be possible to use them to run highway vehicles equipped with fuel cells, swapping them out, which could take as little as a couple of minutes plus any standing in line for service time, etc. That might be a BIG THING, even if the tanks remain costly.

      The key to economic success of some technologies is using it every day all day. Batteries are already cheap enough that they are cost effective using them as little as half an hour a day in automobiles, and at two hours or more a day, a new electric car is already cheaper to own and run than a comparable conventional car.

      Once manufacturing capacity is scaled up, battery companies are going to put a real hurt on oil companies, because not only cars and pickups but half or more of all the new trucks right on up to eighteen wheelers will be electrics…… because big trucks are used all day most days, and there’s still ample time for charging them between shifts or overnight, or at loading docks.

      There ISN’T any hydrogen distribution infrastructure, and if battery costs continue to fall, there may never be any, beyond a few pipelines running a few miles between hydrogen plants and electrical generating plants, etc.

      Electricity is EVERYWHERE now, even places where there aren’t any roads. I have electricity half a mile from the nearest public road on my place. Ditto many of my neighbors.

      But it’s for damned sure somebody is going to come up with a practical use for off peak wind and solar power, and for all the excess that will eventually be available even at peak demand, on days with good generating weather. This is a GIVEN, given ff depletion, because we are going to have to overbuild wind and solar by at least a factor of two, in order to have enough electricity on days when production is marginal.. cloudy and mostly calm.

      Once such intermittent capacity is available, using it to produce hydrogen might be one of the best uses for it…….. or maybe ammonia will be a higher priority. Ammonia is a key industrial feed stock, and used in HUGE quantities already.

      There are probably other key industrial feedstock chemicals that can be efficiently produced with electricity as the primary input , cost wise, as well, but I don’t of know of any, right off the bat.

      For now a battery bank big enough to run a house for a week or longer wouldn’t cost more than a rather minor fraction of what a comparably sized hydrogen storage system and fuel cell would cost.

      1. OFM

        Wind and solar over production are already a major headache in countries like Germany.

        https://www.energy-charts.de/power.htm?source=import-export&year=2019&week=33

        Germany can export this excess because they sell it so cheaply, but if countries like Poland and France install the same amount of wind and solar they will have excess at the same time.

        Pressurized tanks have been in existence for decades, why do you think a tank storing hydrogen is particularly different.

        https://worthingtonindustries.com/Products/Alternative-Fuels/Hydrogen-Fuel-Tanks

        https://www.nproxx.com/capabilities/type-4-pressure-vessels/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIxfzWhKyj5AIVSOh3Ch3HUw0fEAAYAiAAEgL_-fD_BwE

        Batteries can be used in cars and houses, how environmental is the process?

        How many batteries would you need to power New York or London?

    2. Would be good. There is a huge amount of ‘stranded asset’ in wind and solar, meaning that there are spots of incredible wind capacity or solar capacity that is far from electrical transmission, and thus does not get built.
      Additionally sometimes you have too much of this energy production from these sources and the grid ‘curtails’ the amount it will/can accept from particular sites.
      These would both be great situations to produce hydrogen to store the energy.
      You do need a water source, and the expense of the electrolyzing equipment.
      One water molecule for for each H2 produced.

      1. You might be right.

        But the Worthington company ONE HALF kilo capacity tank is sixteen inches by one hundred eight inches and they DON’T post any prices, lol. I’m willing to guess this giant cigar costs five grand, yankee.

        I’m not an engineer, but I do know a few things about hydrogen, having used it from time to time. It leaks right thru steel for instance. You can’t really ship it in any existing pipelines, except in very small percentages. You can’t buy it at your local friendly industrial gas dealer, except by special order.

        From what I read, no body yet knows how to store hydrogen at low cost.

        But you might be right, and H2 could be the NEXT BIG THING, commercially, a few years down the road.

        There are other ways, other than making ammonia or other chemical products, to use lots of otherwise surplus solar energy. In new residential construction for instance, adding thermal mass to absorb heat and release it when needed, or water to be frozen when juice is cheap, and absorb heat when cooling is needed, might be the cheapest way to make good use of it.

        In any case, the low hanging fruit for now mostly consists of improving energy efficiency.

        Maybe somebody knows about some projects underway in places such as Germany which are based on using surplus wind and solar power. They wouldn’t be selling it dirt cheap if they had a better market for it.

          1. Back atcha Hugo

            I’m willing to believe that H2 may be THE solution, or one hell of an important partial solution, to the intermittency problems associated with renewable electricity.

            But as you say, it will take quite a bit of time for it to scale up. The battery industry may never scale up except for transportation and home and office sized applications…… but otoh….. there are such things as flow batteries, and it’s impossible to know, for now, how much they would cost if built on the grand scale.

            For now it’s very much both a technical problem, due to storage and distribution issues, and a chicken and egg problem. Nobody wants to build the hydrogen infrastructure because there isn’t enough surplus electricity to use it often enough, and nobody wants to build out wind and solar farms YET to such an extent, because fossil fuels are still too cheap and too many people are focused on short term CHEAP, rather than long term survival.

            1. OFM-
              “Nobody wants to build the hydrogen infrastructure because there isn’t enough surplus electricity to use it often enough, and nobody wants to build out wind and solar farms YET to such an extent, because fossil fuels are still too cheap”

              Exactly.

          1. Hi Hickory,
            I ‘ve been following this for quite some time.

            I don’t think it’s likely to pan out at the individual farm level, at least not any time soon, because the equipment is expensive.

            But it might work later on, at the farmer’s coop level. The Southern States Cooperative, where I buy most of my necessary stuff, operates feed and grain mills, etc, and sells fertilizer in bulk quantities. They are also already set up to work with ammonia, but not to actually produce it.

            It’s worth noting that people who need ammonia to manufacture various black market drugs make a habit of stealing it from farmers who use it as fertilizer, lol.

  2. Hi Hickory,

    I didn’t get a chance to answer you in the last thread before it closed. I do believe you on the advantage natural gas has right now. I am dreaming, though, of utility scale batteries being a significant contributor to getting off of any fossil fuels for utility scale power generation. This article illustrates how quickly the technology is improving and Tesla is not the only ones doing it.

    https://www.tesla.com/blog/introducing-megapack-utility-scale-energy-storage

    “Using Megapack, Tesla can deploy an emissions-free 250 MW, 1 GWh power plant in less than three months on a three-acre footprint – four times faster than a traditional fossil fuel power plant of that size. Megapack can also be DC-connected directly to solar, creating seamless renewable energy plants.”

    1. Agree, the deployment of battery storage is a great/necessary step.
      The big project at Moss Landing CA is in my neck of the woods.
      Its is at the site of a very big Nat Gas power plant, with two of the newer efficient units there totally just over 1000MW capacity, with the ability to ramp up from zero to 100% within an hour.
      The batteries will be able to compliment the stations current capacity very well, using much of the pre-existing substation interconnection equipment. Additionally, there is quite a lot of solar capacity on line in the surrounding counties, with more to come.
      Maybe offshore wind in the next decade as well.

      What I’m really hoping for is affordable personal energy storage, whether it be stationary or part of the car. That will really be a big boost.

      Thanks for the info/followup

      Here is photo of the Moss Landing site I took. They no use the big 500ft towers, from older units that have been retired.

  4. After finding that only about 6 percent of the US is developed land, I wondered what was going on with the rest. Certainly most of it was unavailable to citizens, so who owns it and what is it used for.
    I think the cows and the trees won, at a very high price.
    https://www.arespectfullife.com/2018/08/05/41-of-u-s-land-is-used-for-livestock-production/

    Sure, the 11,583 square miles lost to oil and gas development between 2000 and 2015 seems small but it’s larger than the area of Massachusetts. Meanwhile coal used up about 3200 square miles.

    1. These maps are very interesting way to display land use. Think of how the USA and European maps shifted from away grazing once the auto replaced horses.
      Or think of how much additional land (and of what use) countries would add to their map to account for the imports they bring in.
      Or think of what is going on in Brazils map over the last 40 years, burning forests to carve out grazing and cropland.

      1. I look at the amount of public land available and the amount of preserved land. Even though the US is not overpopulated compared to many countries it has only a small portion put aside. That portion is under heavy attack from fossil fuel interests and other corporate interests.

        No wonder people like virtual worlds more than the real world.

  5. Dennis or Ron,

    You may want to delete this since it’s so long, but I’ve trimmed it substantially from the original Quora answer already. I believe it’s likely that Trump will be impeached, and that so much dirt will be exposed that he will lose the election, assuming he runs again.

    This of would mean a really major shift in national policies involving the environment in general and energy in particular.

    What is the truth about Trump’s ties to Russia?
    Roland Temmerman
    Roland Temmerman, masters Social Sciences & Political Science (1990)

    Well, today we,the American people will know more. Because Deutsche Bank and Capital One have until Tuesday afternoon, today, to tell a New York appellate court if they are in possession of President Trump’s tax returns, according court order issued Monday. If the two banks cannot answer the question by Tuesday at 4 p.m., they will have to explain why “in detail[.]” Here’s the link to the full story; Court Orders Deutsche Bank, Capital One to Disclose Whether They Have Trump’s Tax Returns
    Deutsche Bank faces action over $20bn Russian money-laundering scheme

    Luke Harding, The Guardian — April 17, 2019

    Germany’s troubled Deutsche Bank faces fines, legal action and the possible prosecution of “senior management” because of its role in a $20bn Russian money-laundering scheme, a confidential internal report seen by the Guardian says.

    The bank admits there is a high risk that regulators in the US and UK will take “significant disciplinary action” against it. Deutsche concedes that the scandal has hurt its “global brand” – and is likely to cause “client attrition”, loss of investor confidence and a decline in its market value.

    Deutsche Bank was embroiled in a vast money-laundering operation, dubbed the Global Laundromat. Russian criminals with links to the Kremlin, the old KGB and its main successor, the FSB, used the scheme between 2010 and 2014 to move money into the western financial system. The cash involved could total $80bn, detectives believe.

    […]nveniently for Trump, those years coincide very well, with the years the Trump’s sons admitted they got “all the funding they needed out of Russia” … (between 2008 and 2014).
    Deutsche Bank loaned more than $2 billion to Trump over two decades: NYT

    Yen Nee Lee, CNBC — Mar 19, 2019
    Deutsche Bank loaned more than $2 billion to Donald Trump before he became president — despite multiple red flags surrounding his business dealings, The New York Times reported Monday.

    The Times interviewed more than 20 former and current executives and board members at Deutsche Bank for the report, which outlined how Trump managed to secure financing from the German bank for nearly two decades despite his bankruptcies and being considered a risky client by other lenders

    According to the newspaper, in some instances, Trump exaggerated his wealth and promised to reward bankers with a weekend at Mar-a-Lago — his private club in Palm Beach, Florida — in order to get loans

    Sylvan Lane, The Hill — Aug 19, 2019

    The Department of Justice (DOJ) on Monday asked a federal appeals court to block House subpoenas for President Trump’s personal financial information.

    Trump has sued to prevent Capital One and Deutsche Bank from turning over records of their business with the president to the House Financial Services, Intelligence and Oversight and Reform committees.

    This answer is attributed to everyone linked in the text.
    5.8k views · View Upvoters · View Sharers

    1. It would be very interesting to hear some of the high level discussions going on behind the scenes between Nancy Pelosi and other grownups in Washington, regarding the strategy in regard to all of this.
      Push fast vs push slow- to complete a process prior to election, or go slow to keep the issue alive during the election.
      Push hard to remove trump, or push soft to keep him as the opponent rather a competent republican replacement.
      Steer the process toward impeachment, or more towards discovery of info that can be used for criminal prosecution of financial crimes after election.

      I would very much like to see an outcome where the precedent is set for the required release of 5 years tax documents, and bank records, at least 3 months prior to a presidential election.

      1. Where would impeachment go? To the grim Reaper. Nothing would happen and it may well empower Trump to get a second term. The Democrats need to keep fixed on the ball and go for a trifecta, after that then the courts.

        NAOM

        1. You are not going to impeach the Fat Boy with the current Senate.
          There is nothing he could do that would have that happen.
          The process may have positive (or negative) consequences, so it is a option.

          1. True. The house can collect evidence for future prosecution, but until Mitch McConnell is gone from the senate, impeachment in a not going to happen.

            1. The D’s real strategy, if the current leadership can make it stick, may be to delay the start of impeachment proceedings until closer to election time, so as to not peak too soon, thereby expecting to not only beat Trump at the ballot box, but also to take down a bunch of Republicans local state and federal who have supported him, and put Democrats back in their place.

              I personally think this is why Pelosi and her leadership team are holding back, that they think it’s too soon, and also that the longer they wait, the more people are turning on Trump anyway.

              At least five or ten percent of his former base is gone, now, in my opinion, as far as actually voting for him is concerned, although these voters aren’t likely to say so in public. I meet lots of them regularly, and some of them are getting to be very defensive and testy when his name comes up.

              There’s still a full year to go, as far as more dirty laundry coming to light even without impeachment. My bet is that actual impeachment proceedings will be started within six months or so of the election, but no soonerthan maybe June or so, unless Pelosi loses control in this one particular respect, of the D’s in the house.

            2. “At least five or ten percent of his former base is gone, now, in my opinion, as far as actually voting for him is concerned, although these voters aren’t likely to say so in public.”

              You think they are willing to vote whichever Dem is nominated, or particular ones? For me, that is the biggest question I would like to know the answer on, your insight on this is appreciated.

            3. Hi Hickory, I agree with ofm about Pelosi and timing. Dragging Trump though impeachment during the hight of the election will put a lot of pressure on the senators up for reelection and keep kicking Trump in the face. Also, you don’t want to give the Republicans time to reset with another candidate to replace Trump.

              Regarding your question, notice the polls when the top 5 are pitted against Trump over the last month. Only Biden seems to get Republican percentage one lower than the other 4. My guess is that ofm’s 5 to 10 percent is more like 2 to 4 percent and would vote Democrat.

              I think it’s going to be all about turn out and if 2018 is an example. It’s going to be a tsunami.

            4. Hi Hickory, HB,

              MY personal gut feeling is that at least ten percent of Trump voters of the sort I know personally, socially conservative, working class, and rural, will stay home, rather than vote for him again.

              They didn’t really vote for HIM, as much as they voted against HRC, and FOR what he SAID he stood for. These people didn’t know shit from apple butter about him, THEN, but that ten percent knows better NOW than to vote for him again.

              The ninety percent still believe he’s a morally upstanding Christian man, and that anything that comes out against him is FAKE NEWS.

              Only a few of this ten percent of rural voters will actually vote D. Most of them will just stay home, rather than vote for either Trump OR any liberal Democrat.

              Ninety percent of his core still doesn’t get it, nationally, but around eight to ten percent of the OLDER ones who voted for him in sixteen will be either dead or in nursing homes in twenty twenty.

              Farmers around my area are small timers, and don’t produce much for export, but farmers in other parts of the country are very fast turning on Trump, and will take a good many of their family, friends, and employees to the polls with them. Any farm state that’s remotely competitive in normal times will be in play for the D’s this time, because there are cities that will go D in every state.

              My personal view is that the R party is acting like a bunch of Vikings who know that they are engaged on their last great raid, that their victims are getting stronger and stronger, and that in the future, they won’t be attacking the peasants, the peasants will be actively HUNTING THEM.

              So it’s a scorched earth policy, for them, get all they possibly can, knowing their time is up.

              Demographics virtually guarantee this outcome, and it won’t be more than ten to fifteen years happening, and it might happen sooner.

              The R party, as it exists today, will be history, within our lifetimes, except maybe in the rural south, and even HERE, the people who think religion will continue to dominate rural southern politics have another think coming.

              There are MANY more churches that are virtually empty on Sunday than are well filled.

              A hell of a lot barely have enough members to just keep the electricity on and the building in working order.

              The ten to fifteen percent, max, of young women who DO go to church once they move out from their parents home pay damned near zero attention to the preacher when it comes to their personal lives. The kids laugh at their lessons about arks and whales once out of sight and hearing of their parents, and look at spicy video and play dinosaur games on their cell phones riding home from church.

              People tend to vote their wallet, and the economy IS doing very well, in terms of factory jobs opening up in this area over the last couple of years.

              They make the mistake of believing that correlation is causation, and therefore they will vote for Trump. A hell of a lot of them have told me, face to face, that Trump has saved their ass, job wise. They don’t know any better. Hens believe the sun comes up because their rooster commands it !

              A local self made multi millionaire told me just a couple of days ago that gasoline is cheap because TRUMP got the drillers going again, lol. He really and truly believes it.

              I don’t know anybody in the industrial states such as Michigan or Illinois so I can’t say from personal experience just how his core is holding up in such places.

              HB, you may be a lot closer in your estimate than I am, in national terms.

            5. Thanks for the perspectives.
              Those Trump voters staying home works for me.
              I just hope the Democrats don’t give them too much reason to go to polls.

  6. Swapping out batteries in electric cars and trucks hasn’t worked in the past.

    But I’m wondering if it might work in the future, in a country that’s really pressed for money, if the country is big enough to MAKE it work.

    Suppose it’s mandated that electric cars be sold, and that the battery packs be standardized and located in the trunk or frunk, and very easily and quickly swapped out. There would need be only maybe three or four standard sized batteries, and swapping them wouldn’t necessarily take more than ten minutes or so. Maybe even less.

    This would mean nobody who owns a car would really ever need to actually pay for a battery, he could simply pay for the time and kilowatt hours he uses it, measured with a clock and a watt hour meter built right into the battery…… AND into the car. No cheating!

    The batteries could then be charged without putting such a big peak usage load on the grid, and much better use could be made of wind and solar power by charging batteries….. the car could be sitting at work or the store, where there’s no charging station, but the SPARE battery could be juicing up from solar panels located in the former hay field behind the service station all day.

    Sure this would be inconvenient, but consider that a battery big enough to run a car just fifty miles would be ample for ninety percent of the drivers in a country such as the USA…… and the driver could still charge up at home, paying time rent only, if he has his own solar panels, etc.

    This scheme might be a hell of a lot more practical than paying thru the nose for imported oil which might not be available at all if a war, hot or cold, or even just a trade war, breaks out.

    How would Islandboy get diesel fuel if his lovely and lovable little country were to lose the tourist trade ?

    It could happen, and will happen, if the many people who believe in catastrophic economic troubles down the road are even half right. Ya gotta have money to take a tropical vacation, and fuel for the boat or plane.

    Standardization can be and often is a LOVELY solution to problems.

    1. I would be much more likely to purchase a vehicle that could have the battery swapped out.
      Dedicated EV design is shifting to a configuration where the battery is a big slab.
      It seems straightforward to make it so that the slab could be mounted on a track for easy removal.

      VW is opening its chassis design to other manufacturers, and has announced a big agreement with Ford along these lines. It looks ripe for this kind of battery swapping idea (out the vehicle side)

      https://cleantechnica.com/2019/07/06/convergence-in-auto-industry-continues-ford-to-share-volkswagen-meb-electric-car-platform/

  7. https://www.thedailybeast.com/democrats-sound-alarm-trump-is-carpet-bombing-us-in-key-battlegrounds

    The Democrats as a whole, party wise, and HRC in particular, were so awesomely stupid as to basically ignore the worries, fears and frustrations of the working class last time around. Trump is in office because they fucked up on several fronts, but this may be the biggest one of all their mistakes.

    It looks as if the party may focus on touchie feelie stuff again, catering to well educated middle class voters with secure jobs who are pissing in their briefs and panties for fear that they will be massacred by some nut case, and ignoring the real core of the party, AGAIN.

    Let us pray that they don’t make this mistake again.

    NOTE, this is NOT to say that the environment, sexual privacy rights, the arts, etc, aren’t important. But what’s MORE important, between now and election day, is to win back the loyalty of tens of millions of Democrats who felt and still feel like they were taken for granted, and ignored, by the party, in recent times.

    They went for TRUMP because he at least LOOKED like he might really do things differently.

    Of course they weren’t well enough informed to know better, and they got what they wished for….. change.
    But it wasn’t the change they wished for.

    Be careful what you wish for, because you may get it.

  8. Hey, questions to all of you TESLA/EV fans, especially in California.

    1. Can anyone of you charge your EV from your own PV installation? Just wondering whether EVs could function in a non-grid scenario.
    2. Did gasoline/diesel usage noticeably fall due to EVs in California, or somewhere else?

    1. I live in Calif, and plug in my car to charge. The electricity comes from my roof PV panels, or from the grid. Depends on the time of day, and the cars come with a scheduling dashboard app that allows you to choose charging times to coincide with best time of day electrical rates.

      For my scenario (which is typical here in Calif), the pricing incentive is such that it is a big advantage to allow the solar energy to flow to the grid in the daytime (when state electric demand is high), and to charge the car from the grid at night (when the state electric demand is low). It is a very big price advantage to operate in this fashion, and the capability and sophistication of the pricing system interplay with real-time state electrical supply/demand is allowing for rapid shifts in the incentives.
      But, if I choose to, I could charge my vehicle entirely with the roof PV. If I added battery storage, I could do that at night, but the cost scenario for having a personal battery pack is not favorable at this time. In effect, the grid is a big battery.
      And the car is your battery.

      Second question- Calif liquid fuel demand peaked just before the 2008 economic crises, dropped off and then has begun to rise again. Overall, the total is not significantly changed since 2003 level. This is despite much bigger economy and more miles driven by the state drivers. Several explanations for this are plausible- better mileage petrol vehicles, and more electrification (hybrids, PHEV, EV) of vehicles. So, some petrol use has been offset, but that trend is just beginning. Its a hard thing to measure, since the consumption factors are not static, and the data collection is not aimed at deriving this info.
      The Calif gross GDP has just about doubled since the time that liquid fuel consumption in the state peaked (about 2003), for what thats worth (a lot).
      https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CANGSP

      1. Thanks,
        it looks like the only problem is the integration of all that incremental PV input, so it goes en masse where it is needed.

        1. “is the integration of all that incremental PV input”

          Good point, and it is an an area of very active innovation competition in the electric utility management field. And its not just PV, but wind, batteries and peaker Nat Gas plants, etc. In case you don’t know- peaker plants are ones that fire up rapidly to keep the grid electricity in close match to demand on a minute by minute basis. Batteries are even quicker to respond- instantaneous.
          The grid is a very complex thing to manage, and the expertise level is very high. Like space program command, or air traffic control for example.

          At a home or business level, companies are developing equipment and software to be the manager of the on site electric flows. Vehicle-Grid-Home-Batteries
          All with ability to consider load, pricing, and supply.

          Its all a very dynamic area of innovation happening now.

      2. If it weren’t for the pollution controls and mileage standards Democrats support, and Republicans resist, in general, cars and light trucks would be burning half again more gasoline.

        Between the pollution regs and mileage standards, the manufacturers had no choice but to go to computerized fuel injected engines.
        The market would have eventually brought them to the same place, but probably ten years later.

    2. Yes, we can and do charge our Leaf and Volt from our solar panels.

      We have grid-tied inverters (dual Schneider/Xantrex 6048) with battery backup. On a sunny day, our 12 KW of solar produces more than we use even if charging a car. We can also charge from 120v (slower, 5 miles of range per hour of charging) if the grid is down.

  9. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/05/pew-research-gen-z-millennials-turnout-2018-2020-boomers.html

    It’s hard to say whether older Trump types will turn out in really high percentages, even as they are dying off in significant numbers, to offset the rising number of younger voters who lean very hard to the D side.

    But I’m thinking it looks good for the D side, and I’m thinking the idiot box and shows such as SNL are playing a really major role in the younger people moving left.

    Never in my wildest dreams would I have guessed twenty years ago that TV would possibly be the net positive influence it is today, imo, politically…… even AFTER allowing for Fox Fake News.

    1. Trump is in deep shit electorally. He never would have been elected without external help last time. It took a perfect storm of a boatload of ignorant old FOX news viewers in formerly democratic strongholds who’s only knowledge of Trump was from a cartoon show on TV where he played a smart business man, eight years of pent up racial animus towards the first black president, the agonizingly slow recovery from the worst economic meltdown since the Great Depression and a massive disinformation campaign mounted by a foreign intelligence service using data supplied by the highest levels of the Republican Party. This time around, he has been in the spotlight for going on four years. And despite the parade of apologists, he has revealed himself for what he is. Nuts. Of course there is a hard core of nuts who still support him or claim to. But they will never be able to recreate that aura of competence that he cloaked himself with during the campaign. Even his biggest supporters know that is bullshit and need to find other reasons to support him. He is a minority political figure, representing a fringe of the population with no interest in broadening his appeal. He will pay the price next November. Any conventional politician will beat the crap out of him.

      1. Let us all pray that SW is a true prophet.
        In the meantime,

        https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-insurance-launched-price-details/

        The comments indicate that while some people are getting bargain quotes from Tesla, most aren’t…. but otoh, old customers with bundled home owners policies often get a considerable break on their rates.

        Personally I think liability insurance in particular ought to be and will be a money maker for Tesla.

    1. I generally have steered clear of the grist after seeing some crappy writing there, but this guy Adam Sacks whos article you shared “The fallacy of climate activism” is spot on. Although the title doesn’t match the message, since many ‘climate activists’ know damn well that its the relentless march of the human machine that is the problem. He spells it out well.

    2. It’s probably too late, maybe for dead sure too late, to prevent climate change on the grand and catastrophic scale……

      But giving up is NOT an option.

      We may yet save some portion, maybe even a substantial portion, of the biosphere and even a good bit of industrial civilization as well.. if the cards fall favorably.

      Lifeboats sometimes make it into port when ships sink.

      IF we get the WAKE UP CALLS that I often mention, it’s at least possible that a few major countries will embark on a wartime level economic program designed to save as much as possible of the environment that supports us.

      LEVIATHANS can work de facto miracles, given sufficient time and motivation.

      Maybe most of the world will descend into chaos. When that happens, maybe the smaller portion remaining will recover, to some substantial extent.

      If something kills off most of the people in Asia, there won’t be a lot more coal or oil burned in Asia after that. War or an uncontrollable fast moving fatal infectious disease could wipe out hundreds of millions of people in very short order these days. A FAMINE could wipe out hundreds of millions of people, even a billion, in a single year, if the weather turns really nasty, over a large enough area, and that could happen within the next twenty or thirty years, maybe even within ten years. The world climate seems to be turning more volatile, more chaotic.

      There isn’t any big surplus stock of food available anywhere in the world any more, although it might be possible to convince the American people to give up eating meat, except temporarily when we slaughter most or all of our cattle and hogs, and eat bread and beans, so a billion starving people elsewhere can also eat American bread and beans. I wouldn’t count on us doing that on the grand scale.

      Maybe we have already passed tipping points such that recovery is impossible, other than over time scales measured in millennia , rather than generations of men.

      I don’t know.

      I don’t think anybody can say for SURE that the cards can’t fall in such a way that at least some of us naked apes, and some significant portions of the biosphere , can pull thru overshoot.

      1. I’m pretty sure that certain pockets will be solid, as you have said.
        But I’m far from sure these pockets will have a culture that any of us here would find to our liking. For example, during times of disruption, fragile institutions like democracy, functional hospitals, and bill of rights freedoms could be swept aside quickly. Perhaps not an important point in the big scheme of things.
        But most of us will not like to witness such chaotic times ahead that seem likely.
        For most people, these factors could be much of a threat than changes in climate they personally experience.
        Maybe the animals still living in the scrub shadows will be applauding.

        1. Well, out of control populations of feral animals that outrun their natural support systems are usually brought down, in the end by disease. We are becoming primed for a major viral event that will probably create another bottle neck in the specie’s genetic history. The overcrowding, the interconnected nature of our populations, the rise of drug resistant diseases and the resurrection of ancient diseases with the changing climate. The planet will recover. Fevers have a purpose.

          1. Certainly possible.
            This year about 1/4 of the worlds pigs are projected to die from a viral hemorrhagic fever, in China and neighboring countries.
            I see no reason to think that humans are less susceptible to this kind of viral wildfire.
            Perhaps even more so, since we have a considerable number of unhealthy people around the world kept alive by artificial means.

            https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2019/08/15/751090633/swine-fever-is-killing-vast-numbers-of-pigs-in-china

        2. I don’t expect to be here too much longer myself, so I won’t ever know how the cards fall.

          It is likely, if some pockets of industrial civilization survive, that most of them will not be very pleasant places, in terms of their governments, compared to say Western Europe today.

          But even in Stalinist Russia, there was electricity, and there were doctors, and grocery stores, and running water, etc. Ditto nazi Germany.

          I would prefer to live in such a society than be dead in a better one. There’s always at least a glimmer of hope for change for the better, and to be part of that change.

          1. OFM

            Once global warming really takes effect, not a single country will have excess food to export. India, China and the US are depleting aquifers that feed 2 billion people.

            As deserts and droughts spread, the carrying capacity of the world will fall to less than 1 Billion. 7 out of 8 people will die from disease, heat, water shortage, hunger.

            The permafrost is melting faster and faster, so is every other ice mass.

            We would have to reduce CO2 emissions to zero to have any chance of reversing this.

            1. Hi Hugo,
              I agree, totally, so long as it’s with the emphasis on the “really takes effect”.

              As I see it, the odds are high that countries such as the USA and Canada will still have AMPLE food, for domestic purposes, for quite some time, decades, maybe even indefinitely, AFTER other countries that are catastrophically over populated and desperately short of farmland and water, etc, are in REALLY DEEP SHIT, with people starving and migrating en masse only to be met at national borders with razor wire, machine guns and land mines.

              Such countries include India, Pakistan, most of Africa, Indonesia…… China of course.

              Other countries such as Mexico may be in really big trouble too, depending on how fast the climate heats up, and how fast population peaks.

              Fortunately for them, Western Europeans are either there or will soon be there, in terms of their own population versus resource problems, in terms of farmland and water….. assuming the climate doesn’t go haywire too fast.

              There are technically viable ways a country such as Germany can produce substantially more food, given that Germans are rich enough and sophisticated enough to make use of them. Such food won’t be cheap, but Germany can cut back on other things, such as cars, in order to make ends meet.

              I am not predicting that the climate won’t get bad enough that even the USA and Canada won’t have MAJOR problems producing enough food, eventually, but there’s a hell of a lot of land at fairly high altitudes and far enough north in the USA that we will likely be able to produce enough staples such as grain for a LONG time, presuming we back off on the meat.

              If the weather here in southwest Virginia, a generation down the road, turns into today’s weather in southern Georgia, well, I could still grow peaches, and I could switch my bottom land from corn or hay to rice, lol.

              I could give up apples, and grow pecans, and switch from Angus to Brahma cows.

              And with tens of millions of people in deep shit, job wise, I could put three or four of them working on twenty acres, using high labor methods to grow twice the usual yield of almost any veggie per acre that will grow in Georgia today. The pay would be peanuts, by the usual standards, but peanut pay is better than no pay at all.

            3. Back atcha Hugo

              All good points. But we don’t really have to depend on irrigated farm land to produce far more food than we actually need here in the USA, and what we import from Mexico doesn’t really amount to much, except fresh fruits and veggies, which are of course VERY important.

              But we can live ok without importing any food at all, by expanding domestic production and going to canned and frozen fruits and veggies for the off season.

              There’ big difference between living high on the hog and getting by.

            4. OFM

              No body will reduce the amount of food they eat for the good of all. They will go to the shops and buy what they want for their children and themselves. This will lead to shortages, which in turn will lead to theft of food. People are already stealing avocados because they are expensive.

              and meat

              https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/co-op-forced-hide-steak-10000533

              The only way there will be enough food for all will be ration cards.

              I hope you realise that.

            6. Hugo, for now about 30% of food is wasted. If it doesn’t look perfect anymore many people and supermarkets throw it away, at least in countries like the U.S.
              Expensive food like avocados and meat one can do without.
              The situation changes with oilprices above let’s say $100, because of affordability, not because of food shortages.

            7. Hugo, you are certainty correct about aquifer problems- in certain areas.
              We have some lands in the usa that are heavily irrigated from aquifers, and they are risk with, even without climate change. Places like western great plains and some patches of calif. To compound that issue, higher fuel prices make it tough financially for the farmers to afford the diesel for the pumping from greater depths.
              And some countries have much worse problems with this. I did not mean to minimize it. But most usa production is not via aquifer pumping.

              And in decades beyond 2040-50, climate change could grow to be devastating to harvests in very important areas. Most of the heavy changes are projected to be in the second half of this century. Hell, I don’t know.

            8. Hugo,
              Some countries will do well with food production in relation to their internal needs for along time yet.
              US for example uses a huge swath of prime farm land for corn ethanol (about 40% of the total corn acreage). And grows plenty of food without aquifer help. And could cut livestock in half, freeing up much more production for direct human food (and still have plenty of meat).
              Canada and Russia both will likely see increase grain production capacity in most years, according to projections I have seen.
              Argentina is in great shape for food production.

              Longer term, who knows. But the problems with food supply will be far from uniform over the next 5 decades.

              For these countries, and many others, I think a bigger problem for food production, rather than climate change in the next 2-3 decades, will be loss of cheap petrol for soil prep, fertilizer, harvest and processing.

            10. We all tend to come at issues with a lot of preconceived notions and opinions, and often parrot many of the things we have heard others say, many of which are often opinions as well.
              I’m just as guilty with this tendency, but there are very good sources of solid info out there to find.
              As a simple example, I find digging into reports like these very educational-

              https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-desertification-and-the-role-of-climate-change

              https://www.chathamhouse.org/publication/chokepoints-vulnerabilities-global-food-trade

          2. Russia, late 80s. We had a group of Russians training with our company. One of the things that totally amazed them was the variety of goods in our supermarket especially that there were multiple choices for the same item. They were totally fazed by there being pet food on the shelves and more so that there was a choice.

            NAOM

    1. It is beginning to sound as if Amphenol may be in trouble as it seems to be their connactors that are not up to snuff.

      NAOM

  15. https://electrek.co/2019/08/29/egeb-epa-methane-emissions-regulations-5-governors-lobby-feds-offshore-wind-power/

    There’s more at this link, including a piece on the biggest floating tidal turbine ever.

    Now you talk about electricity, if you could anchor a fleet of these out in the gulf stream, we would have it MADE, except during major storms.

    And maybe there’s a way to giterdone.

    Say filling an old ship with ballast till it will barely float, attaching carbon fiber cables to it, sinking it, and using it for an anchor? The cables don’t exist yet, but the scrap ships DO.

    1. The trouble with the Orkney’s tidal program is that it is supported by the EU. If Brexit occurs then they will lose funding and go in for a crash landing.

      NAOM

        1. Sorry, but the UK government has a crap record at supporting this sort of work, unlike the EU. They are also going to be scraping the barrel to try and make the commitments they are promising at present. It will not go well for the UK.

          NAOM

      2. I’m not an engineer, in the sense of having formal qualifications, but most farmers are good BACK YARD engineers.

        I can see how such things work, and where the money goes.

        Floating tidal turbines are eventually going to cost peanuts, compared to the cost of wind turbines, either anchored or floating, in my estimation. If a CHEAP anchor fails, you just send a tug boat to retrieve your FLOATING machinery. Old ships are free, or damned near free. You might even get paid to TAKE THEM, lol.

        And given that currents and tides are highly predictable and extremely regular in their cycles, the out put of floating turbines can be dispatched with damned near one hundred percent reliability, meaning you can ramp up or ramp down other generating equipment meaning gas and coal fired to the minute.

        Power out put from floating turbines placed in ocean currents will be very close to steady around the clock around the calendar, and the capacity factor will be in the nineties at least, even after allowing for repairs and storms.

        And next to nothing will be needed to put them in place, compared to giant wind turbines. A couple of ocean going tugs will be about all that’s really needed, other than ships to lay the power transmission cables.

        The component parts won’t be outrageously huge, meaning they can be built in ordinary fab facilities, and using ordinary rather than exotic materials, saving a ton of money on building costs. The only real problem in this respect will be corrosion proofing,and that’s a problem in ANY case at sea.

        1. I don’t understand why its taking so long to get wave and tidal power up and viable. So many failed experiments. Seems like a big winner.

          1. Solar and wind power have a huge advantage in that people who are in favor can argue about local taxes, local jobs, local control. It’s sexy as hell, all the talking heads mentioned it on a regular basis for years, along with flying cars and eternal life, lol.

            Solar power scales up from next to nothing, making it very useful even in cases where the installation is less than a hundred watts….. if there’s no grid. That helps or helped enormously in getting the industry off the ground. Wind has been around forever, and so had the advantage of being well established in the minds of the people.

            Tidal power just hasn’t worked, technically, until very recently, due to a lack of suitable materials, problems with storms, etc. I’m just rambling, but maybe these thoughts are relevant.

            Tidal power just does not work at the small scale. Chicken and egg. Got to start with a very big and very expensive chicken.

          2. The CEGB got its numbers wrong on the early experiments and turned away from it, others took that as a sign too. Falling oil prices were a factor too. Now, with a new look at the numbers, new tech and a new need they are doing the work that should have been done decades ago.

            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salter%27s_duck

            NAOM

    1. I looked at that seeking alpha article you referred to on the other thread-
      https://seekingalpha.com/article/4225153-evs-oil-ice-impact-2023-beyond

      I think the concepts/trends are legit, but the assumptions the author has used I find to be wildly optimistic. Pie in the sky. Deliberately so.
      For example, he indicates that he chose to assume that 2 ICE buyers would be eliminated from the new car market, for every one EV car sold.
      “But because I expect ICE sales to drop first and EV sales to grow later, I expect that EV sales will make up >90% of all (ICE + EV) new car sales by 2027.”

      We could debate the timing, but if you want to enjoy the most optimistic scenario, he makes a good comprehensive discussion out of it.
      This graph he presents has been posted previously and has big implications.
      Car companies are going to be in for a severely disruptive period this coming decade, and the effect on the general economy , and things like politics, will be very unpleasant.
      I see the graph playing out differently. The EV sales will rise slower, and the total sales will be much lower, out to 2030. The economy is going to be very severely challenged by this transition. The pie will shrink [ie the number of vehicles replacing retired vehicles will be less, and people will hold on to old ICE vehicles for a long time], I expect.

      1. The author is very clear about all the assumptions made in his scenario. If cars as a service takes off along with autonomous vehicles then this scenario might right on except less cars would be needed. Or it could take longer.

        The point being this is directly related to peak oil, which is why it was placed on that side of the blog. Whether people want to admit it or not, the ramifications of peak oil can be met head on with electrification of transport and other methods. This takes the wind out of the apocalyptic peak oil stories and allows us t move on to other apocalyptic occurrences while happy motoring.

        1. “Whether people want to admit it or not, the ramifications of peak oil can be met head on with electrification of transport and other methods. This takes the wind out of the apocalyptic peak oil stories and allows us t move on to other apocalyptic occurrences while happy motoring.”

          I suppose, however thats just a not a storyline that I buy into. The assumptions the author of that post uses are pie in sky in my opinion, and the timing and magnitude of his chart is far off I as a result, in my estimation.
          Not because its impossible, but because its very unlikely.
          Peak oil is very likely to hit many places extremely hard, since overshoot adjustments and renewable deployment has been so poor and slow as of yet.
          If not for fracking, the world economy would have been hit upside the head for the last decade with energy insecurity. We arn’t anywhere close to being out of the woods on that. As I see it.

          1. I agree we are not out of the woods as far as the overall picture of global predicaments. Electrification is not one of them, it is a choice.
            If not for fracking we would be much further ahead in advancing renewables, efficiency and things like EVs than we are now. More oil, more damage, less beneficial progress in society.
            Same old, same old got us down the same old path. Toward your view of hard landings.

            1. I must admit to being heavily conflicted.
              On one hand I desire stability.
              Chaos and disruption are the great enemy of chance for a peaceful life, and the pursuit of happiness.

              But on the other, I am well aware that a stable path is one of great destruction.

              Its a schism. And the middle road is an illusion.

            2. Lots of good points though your stable path is starting to crumble and crack, soon to shatter. I will discuss some of those later.

              Sure, EV’s are like putting band-aids on leprosy sores. But let’s take a closer look under the Band-Aid at some of the puss and rot there to see the kind of planetary leprosy we have actively attacks the Band-Aid.

              Jack Rickard’s “The Tesla Conspiracy” | In Depth

              https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfILTM_xcOE

          2. In the petroleum thread I have floated the idea that Peak Oil is in fact history, since LTO is not “conventional” oil by any stretch of the imagination and according to the Hirsch Report, things like Enhanced Oil Recovery and oil from Tar Sands were actually considered as mitigation factors for Peak Oil. What has happened is that the petroleum industry has lumped all of the available liquid hydrocarbons into the category of “crude oil” and with increasing production, more or less declared that Peak Oil is a non issue. IMO that has exacerbated the challenge of Peak Oil because, instead of saying “Oh shit! We need to do something urgently”, the position is more like “Nothing to see here, move along” and just continue as you were.

            It needs to be pointed out that Peak “conventional” Oil is definitely history and what we are experiencing now is the result of remarkably successful mitigation efforts in the form of fracking! Many of the predicted effects of Peak Oil, particularly the rise of despots, can be observed if one looks very closely but, the remarkable success of the petroleum industry in the US to squeeze the last bits of hydrocarbons from the source rocks, has obscured the view of the peak.

            Fracking presented our civilisation an opportunity to transition away from oil before adverse effects of Peak Oil become painfully obvious, to “leave oil before oil leaves us”, as the IEA’s Fatih Birol has been quoted as saying. That opportunity is largely being squandered thus far.

            1. True.
              Also consider that biofuels are lumped into that ‘total liquids’ category as well. This adds to the notion that peak oil for far out in front.
              It is not an insignificant amount- about 6 mbpd oil equivalent.
              It is a huge ecological footprint- prime land that could be used for food production, or water shed, forests, biologic preserve. etc.

              In the IEA projections, they have a SDS category [Sustainable Development Scenario]. In that scenario the assumption is growth in biofuel production from 88 Mtoe currently, to 252 Mtoe by 2030! A tripling in 12 years.
              Some people thing that would be a nice thing to achieve.
              They don’t think clearly beyond the human.

      2. The author is very clear about all the assumptions made in his scenario. Too bad it took us 30 years to get to the point of even thinking about this.

        The point being this is directly related to peak oil, which is why it was placed on that side of the blog. Whether people want to admit it or not, the ramifications of peak oil can be met head on with electrification of transport and other methods. This takes the wind out of the apocalyptic peak oil stories and allows us t move on to other apocalyptic occurrences while happy motoring.

      2. A woman with Biden’s more or less acceptable resume and equally familiar to the country, without being scary to centrists and right leaning people, would be PERFECT.

        Biden doesn’t scare people. That may be his biggest strength.

        I’m afraid the women who are out front may be perceived as a little too far to the left by too many people, but if one of them gets the nomination sewn up early enough, and she has political savvy enough, she can run a centrist campaign and beat Trump or any other Republican, barring bad luck.

        The thing that scares me is that the D’s this time around may run a campaign advocating too much change too fast and so scare too many voters into either staying home or voting R.

        They don’t need to heavily emphasize such issues as civil rights, sexual freedoms, or the arts AT ALL, because any voter primarily motivated by such issues is ON BOARD ALREADY, and WILL vote D.

        They can spend their money and time more effectively on issues that matter to more people of every political stripe, such as jobs, education, worker safety and rights, etc.

        Personally I don’t think they need to heavily emphasize the gun control issue either. The voters who are motivated by this issue are going to vote D ANYWAY, you can bet on it. Emphasizing it heavily will however motivate a very large number of people to vote R.

        But I might be wrong on this last point, because emphasizing it might motivate more women who DON’T vote to register and vote D than results from men voting R due to backlash on this issue.

        This is one of the issues where the voter doesn’t believe in, and is not generally interested in a compromise solution, it’s either one way or the other, like abortion is to hard core feminists. They don’t want ANY regulation of abortion, just as hard core gun nuts don’t want any regulation of guns.

        We live in interesting times.

        1. I completely agree with your points here.
          The biggest risk to the democratic election chances are if they needlessly push away from centrist positions.
          I’m still uncertain if E. Warren or K. Harris (the two females with the highest polling results), can ‘run a centrist campaign ‘ that is genuine and effective.

          I think both Biden and Trump could flame out before the election, for very different reasons.

  18. Looks like it might be better to have an EV to get away from Dorian. Shades of the 1970’s

    “Miami resident Marion Wilkinson Scott told CNN on Friday he saw 12 cars that were left Thursday night at a Chevron on 152nd Street, five at a Mobile station in the Hammocks and two at another Chevron across from his house.
    He posted on Twitter a picture of one of those cars with a note on the dash: “I live close by. My car is out of gas. Please call me when more arrives!” A phone number was included.”

    https://www.cnn.com/2019/08/30/us/florida-gas-stations-hurricane-dorian-trnd/index.html

    1. Provided, of course, it doesn’t spontaneously combust, or there are no blackouts as the ostensible result of non-renewable renewables messing with the power-grid.

      Tesla Spontaneously Combusts In A Repair Shop In Hangzhou, China

      “just another patsy @jzanotherpatsy

      5/ A $TSLA car owner who lives nearby, Mr Wang, came over in the morning after hearing about the news in his WeChat group. “I brought my car in on Monday for service & was supposed to get it back yesterday, I was busy & unable to come, didn’t expect a fire to happen.””

      Bookburner [@ 9:14]
      Lyrics from ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’, by Oscar Wilde

      “It seemed to him that in exquisite raiment, and to the delicate sound of flutes, the sins of the world were passing in dumb show before him. Things that he had dimly dreamed of were suddenly made real to him…

      Things of which he had never dreamed were gradually revealed…

      He fell into a form of reverie, a malady of dreaming, that made him unconscious of the falling day and creeping shadows…

      He read on until he could read no more…

      He could read no more…”

      1. Another anecdotal story of a single EV car fire. With your great fascination about car fires why not post the statistics on ICE versus EV fires? I assume you think EV fire frequencies exceed the ICE ones. If that is true, show me the data.

        1. We’ve had 2 ICE cars go up in flames in the last 5 or 6 days. We get one or two every week.

          NAOM

        2. Ok, guys, now let’s go over, if only in our heads, all the problems with cars in general, and vis-a-vis the historical development of the car, industrialization, the crony-capitalist plutarchy, nature and community, etc.. Go ahead, try it as a personal thought experiment. Try to leave as little out as possible.

  19. Last year, Tesla initiated ‘Project Titan’ — a stealth nationwide program to replace solar-panel parts that could cause fires

    Wait, what?

    “Last summer, Tesla initiated ‘Project Titan’, an attempt to quietly replace defective solar-panel parts across the US, according to documents viewed by Business Insider.
    Specifically, Tesla was replacing connectors and optimizers, parts that are meant to regulate the amount of energy flowing to a solar panel. Too much energy can cause a fire.
    Walmart sued Tesla earlier this week, claiming that the energy company was negligent in managing its solar panels on the roofs of more than 240 Walmart stores. Fires have broken out on seven of Walmart’s solar roofs.”

    LOL…

    But at least they are doing it quietly, since probably not too many appreciate the noise, especially on their rooftops at home, such as when they are trying to sleep or, naturally, after a solar panel rooftop fire. ^u’

    1. Hickory already posted this problem with the solar panel installs on the Walmart stores. I am glad Tesla is taking responsibility and fixing it.

      Hopefully they won’t be so cavalier about their installation methods and materials in the future. Shelling out a bunch of money to fix it will help them focus on better procedures and parts.

      But, regardless, it is a rare problem in the world of solar panel installs and will not affect the market at all.

      1. Amphenol connectors were originally used, that should have been a good choice. They are being replaced with MC4 connectors. I don’t think Tesla can be blamed for Amphenol’s bad product. If I was at Amphenol and involved in these connectors I would be worried.

        NAOM

        PS I have used many Amphenol connectors in the very long past and it was a catalogue kept at hand.

        1. “If I was at Amphenol and involved in these connectors I would be worried.” ~ notanoilman

          Shshsh NAOM! Remember; stealth!

      2. Lots of ‘rare problems’ add up.

        “Say, is that yet another ‘rare problem’ I see over there? Well, let’s deal with them stealthfully and hope nobody notices and that they don’t create other ‘rare problems’. Maybe there will be other related, semi-related or unrelated ‘rare problems’ to deal with, but let’s deal with these first and call them ‘rare problems’ while we’re at it so that the general public won’t think they are common.”

    1. My loyalties are with nature and its best interests, not this sick joke for a culture.

  21. My personal traditional way of spending the Labor Day weekend is to hit as many of the traditional nearby flea markets as I can. There are great deals to be found, and old friends to be seen, and new people to meet, and to hell with traveling and holiday traffic and that sort of thing. I can travel next week, when there won’t be a crowd any place I might want to go.

    I’m not sure what if anything it proves, but last year I saw a Trump hat on one person out of every fifty or so, and every tenth vendor had something to do with Trump for sale. This year I didn’t see a single person wearing a Trump hat, at all, and not over one vendor in thirty or forty had any sort of Trump or R party merchandise for sale, and none of them seemed to be selling any of it.

  22. https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2019/09/03/not-making-the-connection-fires-electrical-balance-of-systems/

    The industry has not yet gotten it’s act together in terms of standardizing all the components so that they are all truly compatible, from one manufacturer to the next.

    Somebody at Tesla dropped the ball, and didn’t respond fast enough, when the first couple of fires were reported.

    Somebody at Walmart dropped the ball. Walmart management should have had a couple of engineers going around to inspect these installations, after the first two fires, on WALMART’S dime, because such a precaution is simply good sense.

    Such problems are usually history within a few years, because the cost of fixing such problems, once they are known to exist, is so high that contractors and customers are very careful not to repeat them.

    But sometimes the lawyers and bean counters think it’s cheaper to pay off victims who can prove their case and cover up. Sometimes that works, but it seldom works when the victim has deep pockets and decides the settlement offered is less than justified.

  23. OFM, What do you make of this?

    Food crops do better in the shade of solar panel

    It’s not all about crops

    Previous studies have spelled out the benefits of ‘agrivoltaics’ for solar panel performance and the University of Arizona researchers observed the cultivation of crops under PV created temperature conditions ideal for avoiding overheating, as the crops underneath emitted water through transpiration.

    “All told, that is a win-win-win in terms of bettering how we grow our food, utilize our precious water resources and produce renewable energy,” Barron-Gafford said.

    Could this provide some relief for struggling farmers by providing some reliable income (lease) while improving their yields?

    1. Hi Islandboy,

      It’s not going to work well, and probably not at all for staple crops that can be grown in large fields and transported in bulk to market, because working under and around the panels and mounts will mean a good bit of extra labor is needed. Even coolie wage labor can’t compete with a mechanized farmer with room to do his thing.

      And so long as the hotter days aren’t so hot a crop CAN’T be grown in a given location, the general rule is that the more sun the better, so long as you have enough water. You will not get yields that are as good growing any important crop in partial shade, as you do in full sun, except if the local climate is simply hotter than suits a given crop.

      Having said all this, when labor is reasonably cheap, and water is available but not plentiful and cheap, and vegetables have to be hauled in from far away………… there’s a very real possibility that growing some vegetables, and maybe even some grain, between and under the panels can be a profitable undertaking, given that the solar farm operator will be paying SOME rent.

      The real question is how much the land under and between panels is worth to a local person who wants to work it intensively. There’s certainly an opportunity to make at least a working wage, and maybe a GOOD working wage, if a landless wanna be farmer can rent it cheap.

      My neighbors can’t grow potatoes and get yields as good as guys up in Idaho, but considering THEY have to pay two bucks a bushel in shipping to compete with us in our LOCAL market, my neighbors profitably grow potatoes.

      If you can ship tomatoes in cardboard boxes twenty miles to a store that retails them, you can pick up the empties when you deliver, and reuse them. Used boxes are worth from fifty cents to a couple of bucks, depending on where , when, and what size. Getting used bags or boxes home from a hundred or a thousand miles away is not always possible.

      There’s no reason to think this can’t work for farmers who are suitably located. It might also work for some farmers way out in the boonies, if the owner of the solar installation is willing to pay a reasonable rent, to help offset the extra labor involved, or rent the land cheap to a wanna be farmer, if the solar operator owns the land.

      I have never understood why solar and wind farm operators here in the USA pay simply outrageous rents, long term, for farmland. They could buy it WAY cheaper. It must have something to do with getting the local people behind the industry, and getting permits issued, lol.

    2. This has been studied for about three years now here in Germany.

      Results: better yields for some crops, worse yields for others.

      https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/press-media/press-releases/2017/harvesting-the-sun-for-power-and-produce-agrophotovoltaics-increases-the-land-use-efficiency-by-over-60-percent.html

      https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/press-media/press-releases/2019/agrophotovoltaics-hight-harvesting-yield-in-hot-summer-of-2018.html

      http://www.agrophotovoltaik.de/english/agrophotovoltaics/

      And it’s backed up by independent research that proposes planting trees in the fields to keep good yields despite climate change.

      1. What I could have and would write, doing it again, is that so long as relatively cheap labor is available, so as to compensate for the lack of access with the usual machinery, mixed use solar plus crop farming can work.

        There’s every reason to believe it WILL work any place farmland is in short supply and relatively cheap labor is available, especially for selected crops that do well when intensively cultivated, or crops that do better in cooler weather, when growing them in places where it’s hot enough that yields suffer.

        Where I live, kale is a spring or fall crop, but I can grow it successfully three or four weeks longer into the early summer by putting it in a place with a lot of shade and or relatively little midday sun. Yield can still be satisfactory.

        It works like a charm on wind farms, because the towers are far enough apart that there is little to no serious interference with using typical equipment. The loss of yield due to shadows thrown by wind turbines is negligible.

        Old timers used to fence in land with a few apple trees on it. The cows would get whatever was within reach, including leaves and buds, but they also kept the grass short and undergrowth down, so whatever apples were harvested were basically a free bonus crop. The loss of graze was negligible, in relation to the value of a bushel or two of apples.

        My maternal grandparents barns were shaded by black walnut trees. They got very welcome cooler working conditions plus bushels of walnuts.

        They called such practices common sense. Caelan calls them magic. A lot of people new to farming and gardening are like teenagers when they first get old enough for sex, when discussing such methods. They think they invented them!

        1. “Caelan calls them magic.” ~ OFM

          No I don’t call them magic. If you want to distance yourself from Trump, bullshit or fake news and stuff like that for examples, you might want to think about what you write, such as whether it’s truthful or accurate, etc..

          Also, farming is a bastardized concept that practically any shmuck can claim they can do.
          For examples, drizzling toxins over everything, mining fertilizers and by distance, or drawing down soil viability for bigger yields short-term/unsustainably isn’t my idea or a good one of ‘farming’.
          That’s in part why I posted, in one of the recent threads, the comment/article about termites that have been farming for 25 million years or why I post info about stuff like permaculture.

    3. One of the easiest ways to reduce plant growth is to limit the light available to it.
      There are a few exceptions, where there is too much light.
      By that I mean that sunlight and heat driven evapotranspiration (loss of water by a leaf during its normal function associated with gas exchange), can sometimes exceed the available water uptake.
      This imbalance causes wilting, or death of a plant cell. Of course, yields can suffer in this situation.
      This is much more likely in desert and semi-arid environments, and during times of low rainfall elsewhere.
      Not surprising that the article you highlighted was from Arizona.
      Here in the western states, you learn quickly as a gardener that some afternoon shade for 3-4 hrs can really help your vegetables, most of which have not evolved in desert climes, to get through the scorching conditions in better shape.
      Other than arid conditions, plants generally want as much sun as they can get, and have evolved to get their solar collectors out into the pure sunshine as best they can.
      If highest yield is not a critical concern, than achieving optimal plant growth is not a problem, such as grazing under PV. The plants need enough light to be healthy, but not necessarily achieve their maximum yield. The higher up and farther apart the PV array, the more light can get down to the plant surface. Remember, leaves are solar collectors.

    1. You can do a lot of things to speed up the natural progression of farmland back to climax forest.

      I love a woodland with as great a passion as anybody. I keep a substantial portion of my property in LIGHTLY managed woodland. IF I were rich, I would buy every acre of woodland that’s for sale nearby, and donate it to the state park system, or to the national park system.

      But after the koom bi ya high fades out, you are left facing a stubborn fact. Such management practices are wonderful SOUL medicine, and absolutely GREAT, for the environment, but they’re next to worthless when it comes to filling empty bellies.

      Ten acres in grass will produce many times as much beef as ten acres in trees will yield in venison and squirrels. Once cultivated apple tree will produce four or five times more fruit than all the fruit trees that naturally occur in an acre of woodland in my part of the world.

      And when I farm using manufactured fertilizers and various pesticides and herbicides, etc, I can produce two or three times or even four or five times as much per acre as I can using the sustainable methods my great grand parents used.

      This means we can collectively get by without destroying what’s left of the natural landscape by plowing it under.

      We’re damned if we do, and we’re damned if we don’t.

      We’re hung up in a hard place between the devil and the deep blue sea, between a rock and a hard place.

      There ARE ways to farm more sustainably, but they just don’t scale up to anything like the necessary extent to feed seven billion people, given current technology and current economics.

      There’s already a viable way to cut back by half on oil, the electric car. But it will take a couple of decades to make the transition from oil to electrics, and that transition is already well started. The transition to truly sustainable farming methods capable of scaling to feed us is by comparison still an early stage lab experiment.

      This is NOT going to end well for most of the our species, and it’s a fucking disaster ALREADY for most of the natural world.

      But there IS some reason for optimism. We can bring back the chestnut and we can learn to like acorns, lol, and we could harvest large quantities of both using little more than gloves and sacks plus some liniment for sore backs.

      1. Wonder what the Union of Concerned Scientists says about your industrial agriculture.

        Industrial Agriculture
        The outdated, unsustainable system that dominates U.S. food production.

        No matter what methods are used, agriculture always has some impact on the environment. But industrial agriculture is a special case: it damages the soil, water, and even the climate on an unprecedented scale.

        Intensive monoculture depletes soil and leaves it vulnerable to erosion. Chemical fertilizer runoff and CAFO wastes add to global warming emissions and create oxygen-deprived “dead zones” at the mouths of major waterways. Herbicides and insecticides harm wildlife and can pose human health risks as well. Biodiversity in and near monoculture fields takes a hit, as populations of birds and beneficial insects decline

        https://www.ucsusa.org/our-work/food-agriculture/our-failing-food-system/industrial-agriculture

        But I guess those 200 mph gusts and 70% of the Grand Bahama island being covered with water is not enough of a heads up for the dimwitted humans. Guess we will have to wait and see what will wake them from their self-indulgent stupors.
        Maybe they will continue their vegetative states of mind.

        1. “Wonder what the Union of Concerned Scientists says about your industrial agriculture.”

          They say about HALF of what I have to say about it.

          THIS is what I say about it.

          “We’re damned if we do, and we’re damned if we don’t. ”

          “This is NOT going to end well for most of the our species, and it’s a fucking disaster ALREADY for most of the natural world. ”

          The difference between what I say, and what the Union of Concerned Scientists has to say is basically negligible, except that I go on to say what the UCS avoids saying.

          We don’t HAVE any economically and politically viable solutions to the industrial agriculture problem.

          There are technically viable solutions, or at least potentially viable solutions, but only an idiot could possibly believe we can solve the political and economic aspects of the problem, within any meaningful time frame, and therefore workable technical solutions are for the most part basically only academic questions. FOR NOW.

          Various regulars here poke a little gentle fun at me for believing that at least some of us have a fair shot at pulling thru the baked in collapse that’s going to hit like an earthquake sometime within this century……. saying I should be allowed my little fantasy, because it comforts me and doesn’t do any harm.

          I say what I say because I believe it’s TRUE, that some pockets of industrial civilization may survive, AND because I believe it’s a colossally dumb mistake to just GIVE UP.

          The UCS, or at least a number of people associated with it, have their own little fantasy too. It’s that we can successfully transition from industrial farming to sustainable farming in the real world, within a meaningful time frame, meaning sometime within say the next twenty or thirty years.

          It’s just not going to happen. The vast majority of even college graduates don’t have a fucking CLUE as to just how big the TECHNICAL end of this problem IS, and the VAST MAJORITY of people in the environmental community apparently don’t have a fucking CLUE as to the fact that the political and economic aspects of the problem are such that there’s a NEAR zero chance of our making more than a token effort in that direction.

          UNLESS…..

          Unless all those sky mommies and sky daddies and magical snakes and rocks and mountains send us the series of WAKE UP BRICKS upside our collective head I mention so often.

          GF, you are one of the handful of regulars in this forum who command my RESPECT on the basis of your grasp of physical realities, and especially of environmental realities.

          I don’t know what your beliefs are in respect to political realities, in terms of whether a radical reorganization of modern society is possible, given the number of people who are locked into the current BAU paradigm, and afraid of change.

          Establishing a single payer health care system is not radical in the sense I’m using the word. Switching to electric cars is not radical. Throwing Trump and the R’s out…. not radical.

          Radical is telling Joe and Suzy SixPack that they will be FORCED to give up their F250 and beef on the table every day. Radical is telling them that chicken legs are rationed, and that they can have one each for Sunday dinners, no more.
          Radical is telling your wife she can’t buy cat food any more, starting next year.

          Can you visualize an economically and politically viable path from our HERE and NOW to a sustainable agricultural future that does NOT involve gut wrenching changes in the way we live, changes that will be fought tooth and nail by anywhere from ninety to ninety nine percent of the population in a country such as the USA?

          If you can, I am ALL EARS, believe me.

          I have been racking my tired old head about this for years, and I can’t see it happening until after most of us are dead and gone, ASSUMING some of us survive the coming hard crash.

          UNLESS GOD ( sarc) acts in mysterious ways, and fires off that often mentioned series of WAKE UP BRICKS upside our collective head…….. enough of them to get and hold our collective attention, but not so many that we aren’t able to go proactive and actually WORK at solving some of our worst problems.

          I think the odds of a major human die off within this century are at probably at least eighty percent and maybe as high as ninety nine percent.

          But it’s not inconceivable that birth rates might continue to fall faster and faster and that by some incredible stroke of luck most of us pull thru as the population peaks and declines.

          Maybe there’s a nut case biology major working right this minute on a highly contagious virus that will spread around the world before we are even aware of it and render any woman or man who is infected permanently sterile.

          Or maybe a virus will escape a military lab someday and kill just about everybody.

          Who remembers TUBE NECK and CAPT’N TRIP?

          1. The Concerned Scientists response was due to your BAU agriculture declaration.
            “And when I farm using manufactured fertilizers and various pesticides and herbicides, etc, I can produce two or three times or even four or five times as much per acre as I can using the sustainable methods my great grand parents used. ”

            Basically farming is now a huge extended business dependent on many industries, sources, chemical reactions, and long transport.
            I do wonder how prepared these monoculture farmers are for reduced arrival of shipments or late arrivals, even none at all at times. Do they have lots of seed and fertilizer ready for the next year or is it so capital intensive they run on short time frames? Are they all prepped up to move to actual human food instead of monoculture animal food if needed? Will the soil be good enough without intensive chemical additives? Where will the vegetable seeds or their monocrop seeds come from if shipments are delayed or never arrive?
            I know most of the farms around here are for producing animal feed.

            I just mention this because the long tower of Babel we have set up seems to have covered up realizations made quite long ago. One of them is we have put ourselves out on a limb and are merrily sawing away the limb on the wrong side.
            I don’t see that changing, in fact there are more saws at work and a heavier load now, decades later.
            So who is prepared?
            Who is prepared to hand pollinate everything?

            1. Why would deliveries be delayed or never arrive? Are you thinking that diesel shortages would disrupt trucking and rail?

            2. “Why would deliveries be delayed or never arrive? Are you thinking that diesel shortages would disrupt trucking and rail?”

              Of course it would, in the real world.
              I know that you, Nick, like to operate in world of ‘wishful thinking possibilities of a future world’, and that is why you are so very misunderstood by many.

              Your message would be so much better received if you prefaced your remarks with a standardized statement, something like this-

              ‘The following comment regards a theoretical construct of a world in future decades where civilization has completed a grand transition from fossil fuel to renewable energy. This should be in no way misconstrued as a reality opinion or analysis of the status of the current situation.’

              Then people would know its more a pep talk.
              Some people like that kind of thing.
              Others are more into reality, and an opening qualifying statement would allow them to take your comments for what they generally are.

            3. Well, no. That’s not what I”m aiming for. I try to identify what can be done with current technology and economic systems. I try make clear arguments and provide supporting examples or references, rather than just make arm-waving arguments.

              For instance, I’d argue that diesel shortages are unlikely to disrupt freight transportation because it’s relatively easy for trucks and ships to reduce fuel consumption (just by slowing down, improving the mix of vehicles, changing aerodynamics, routing, etc., etc), and in general they can out-bid passenger transportation, which is substantially larger and much less valuable.

              Americans often think of the shortages in 1979, and people waiting in line for fuel. An interesting thing to know: much of that event was caused by a onetime event: 200M drivers filling up their tanks all at the same time: 10 gallons each adds up to 50M barrels, which is more than enough to empty all of the gas stations and their suppliers.

              Why is this important? It’s helpful to know that our economy is somewhat flexible, and that it can handle more change than we might expect. Like…a transition away from oil and FF’s…

            4. Back atcha GF,

              All the questions you raise are entirely legit and as the saying goes, as serious as a heart attack.

              And I can’t answer any of them in a positive fashion, because the industry is, as you say, entirely dependent on the incredibly complex and incredibly extensive supply chain that allows it to work.

              And even if the supply chain holds up, we are burning thru nature’s one time gifts of fossil irrigation water and good soil faster than ever, even as the remaining stock of water and soil grows smaller.

              We’re changing the climate for the worse.

              We’re disrupting and destroying the various parts of the overall or grand natural ecosystem that provides essential services such as flood mitigation, by draining and developing wetlands. We are damming rivers that used to replenish soil down stream, with soil which is now trapped in reservoirs, and which prevent fish from migrating. We’re fast killing off useful wild creatures, from spiders to wild bees to bats that help us produce food without using pesticides.

              The failure of industrial agriculture on the grand scale at some point is not quite a GIVEN , but it’s not far from it.There’s a slim chance the industrial agriculture house of cards might last until the population peaks and starts declining.

              But

              We are damned if we DON’T do what we are doing now, in the short to medium term, and we’re damned if we continue to do what we are doing now, in the long term. By long term I mean within the next couple of generations, no longer.

              You know it, and I know it as well as you do.

              The only difference is that maybe you have your little fantasy, which comforts you, just as mine comforts me.

              Maybe you want to believe there’s a way, short term, that we can quit forcing involuntary sex on Mother Nature, and save the environment and thus save ourselves.

              I’m willing and even eager to share that fantasy, to the extent that I believe some people have a shot at pulling thru the coming crash while preserving an industrial civilization.

              But I’m convinced that most of humanity is going to die hard before this century is out, barring extraordinarily good luck on several fronts.

            5. Strangely, the battle against renewables and EV’s continues onward. Renewable energy and EV’s are solely intended to keep BAU up and running. Still, a turf war is proceeding as to who will run the energy and transport segments in the future.
              Future?

            6. As an educated member of the old guard, you probably know that massive change is coming. First unplanned then the bandwagon will fill.
              The old days of new war fronts, meat eating, wrecking forests, massive fishing, industrial agriculture, expansion by threat are gone. It’s all coming to an end. Much of the world is and will embrace these changes long before the US. The tribal politics, driven by greedy industrialists, in the US is keeping this country back in the 1800s mentally. But it too will come kicking and screaming into the new world order as it loses it’s leadership.
              The US is the biggest threat on the planet, yet it could be a strong helper and leader, a friend to much of the world.

              Choose well, the leaders of such a nation. Think carefully about each and require them to reduce the threat and become part of the greater world. Staying with the old system is dangerous and stupid.

      2. “But after the koom bi ya high fades out, you are left facing a stubborn fact. Such management practices are wonderful SOUL medicine, and absolutely GREAT, for the environment, but they’re next to worthless when it comes to filling empty bellies…

        Ten acres in grass will produce many times as much beef as ten acres in trees will yield in venison and squirrels. Once cultivated apple tree will produce four or five times more fruit than all the fruit trees that naturally occur in an acre of woodland in my part of the world.

        And when I farm using manufactured fertilizers and various pesticides and herbicides, etc, I can produce two or three times or even four or five times as much per acre as I can using the sustainable methods my great grand parents used.” ~ OFM

        I have already previously written hereon, with linked support, to the effect that the industrial agricultural system wastes a lot food, along with generally helping to trash the planet. Hunger/Having enough food to eat appears far less about the quantity the system can produce than about the quality of the system.

        Incidentally, while you might post some of the comments you do out of a desire for attention, even if it’s negative, kindly consider that there may be other readers who might take them seriously.

    1. If they produce 1/3 more electricity but cost twice as much?

      NAOM

      1. It depends on your situation where you have space available.
        If you’ve got 100 acres, go for the cheapest panel/kwhr produced.
        If you’ve got a very small but valuable space, like the roof of your van or small roof,
        by all means spend for the most kwhr/sq in.

        1. Besides which in ten years these thirty percent efficient panels may sell for no more than twenty percent efficient panels sell for today.

      2. The article says that these folks expect the higher efficiency system to be competitive immediately.

        The PV market is brutally competitive, so it would pretty much have to be.

        And it makes sense: 50% higher efficiency means 2/3 as much racking and cheaper installation. Those Balance of System costs are now higher than the panel costs…

        1. Some people make a big thing out of pointing out that the South is religious, redneck, racist, and Republican. They get off this way, the way poor white religious racist rednecks get off on feeling superior to XXXXX’s. (Fill in the blank to suit yourself.)

          Personally I’m utterly convinced that EVERY human being, when you get right down to the nitty gritty, is so CONSTRUCTED that he or she MUST necessarily feel superior to SOME other group, tribe, faction, race, or culture. Otherwise, how could we judge right and wrong, better and worse, good and bad? How could we distinguish THEM from US?

          My OPINION, for what it’s worth, is that anybody who believes otherwise is NOT AS SMART as I am, and therefore I am SUPERIOR to HIM. I shouldn’t have to add a sarc alert, but I will, because not ALL the people in this forum ARE as smart as I am, lol.

          While both observations may be true, MINE, and THEIRS, the fact remains that people in the South, as evidenced by my own eyes, get along with each other about as well as they do in other parts of the country, and better, in lots of cases. Nobody bats an eye these days in MAYBERRY, the semimythical old time southern town so famous on television, when they see a white girl holding hands with a black guy on Main Street. I know, because I go to “Mayberry” often to buy hardware and groceries. I have eaten many times in the Snappy Lunch, and I have even patronized Floyd’s barbershop, lol.

          And change is coming, and coming fast, in historical terms, although it may seem agonizingly slow to an impatient individual.

          https://www.thenation.com/article/north-carolina-gerrymandering-2020/

          North Carolina in my estimation will be a reliably blue state within ten years.

          “After the high court’s decision, foes of partisan gerrymandering shifted their focus to state courts. And on Tuesday, they scored a victory that’s significant not just for North Carolina but for the many states where biased maps have compromised free and fair elections. The panel of three judges ruled unanimously in Common Cause v. Lewis that the Republican-control North Carolina General Assembly had violated the state constitution when it gerrymandered legislative maps with an eye toward thwarting serious competition for state house and senate seats. The judges order that the districts be redrawn in time for the 2020 election.

          The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s student newspaper, The Daily Tar Heel, noted after the 2018 election that “while Democrats received 50 percent of the votes for the N.C. Senate, they received only 42 percent of seats. And while they received 50.5 percent of the votes for the N.C. House, they received only 45 percent of seats.”

          I pointed out up thread that I didn’t see a single person wearing a Trump hat over the holiday weekend while cruising flea markets in NC and Virginia, but there were lots of MAGA hats for sale. They weren’t selling.

          And insofar as the preachers go, they go with the flow. I don’t attend church except on certain occasions, but I go often enough to enough different churches to know what the preachers talk about.

          Evolution is something they generally AVOID talking about these days. It’s still part of the program for the little kids though. They generally avoid talking about sex, except to praise women and insist that men honor and cherish them. I can’t remember the last time I heard one insist that women should be denied leadership roles.

          They learned the hard way about women leaving and taking a substantial percentage of the congregation with them to another church, or a NEW church.

          And the kids laugh about the Creation story, quietly, in the back seat, on the way to Sunday lunch after the service, while playing dinosaur movies and games on their phones. Some how the rule about working on Sunday doesn’t apply to people in restaurants and stores. I see preachers in restaurants and stores about as often on Sunday as on Monday, and they seem to think it’s perfectly ok to collect a salary and bennies for THEIR work on Sunday, lol.

          Another thing they seldom mention, in my experience, is abortion, during actual services. There are too many women in the pews who have taken their daughters someplace to take care of a little problem along that line you see, and everybody knows who they are, as a rule. Young women don’t move away these days, they just go on diets, lol.

          Like I said, preachers go with the flow.

          Times are changing. FAST.

    2. The system of moving lenses to concentrate sunlight on high efficiency mult-layer photovoltaic cells was invented in the US at least five years ago, maybe more. It allows very expensive cells to be minimized in size to lower costs. However, it is dependent upon focused light, meaning diffuse light does little to nothing.
      My view on this, it is good for low humidity regions with little cloud cover. I would like to see a side by side comparison of the best silicon PV and this focused system in a more typical environment such as 50 percent cloud cover.
      Otherwise the focused multi-cell may only be advantageous in arid regions with lots of direct sunlight.

  27. Is anybody here willing to hazard a guess how long it will be before you can go to an industrial supply and buy a more or less state of the art modular electric car battery, with the necessary bits and pieces such as the cooling system and connectors built right in, including a little computer for charging management, etc?
    Maybe getting a package deal on both the computer and an electric motor and gear reduction combo designed to hook up to the existing rear axle in let us say an older supposedly worn out F150?

    Unless they rust away, I can say without a shadow of a doubt that modern pickup trucks are good for upwards of a million miles, excepting only the engine and transmission. Every thing else can be repaired or replaced for peanuts, considering the cost of repair versus just the DEPRECIATION ALONE on a new truck, never mind financing, taxes, insurance, etc. Never mind the OPPORTUNITY cost involved in buying a new truck versus the money that the prospective owner could make otherwise.

    Such a battery pack could be dropped right onto the floor of the cargo box, and a nice sturdy new layer of flooring installed over it, or it could be built so as to fit under the hood and into the space currently occupied by the transmission, once the IC engine and transmission are removed.

    Converting pickup trucks would be WAY easier, faster, and MUCH MUCH cheaper than converting cars because there’s way more room to work, and because there are SO MANY of them , and because they are all VERY MUCH ALIKE, in terms of the layout of the mechanical components. GM trucks from the sixties can be retrofitted with engines from new model wrecks with hardly ANY modifications at all, other than to the wiring associated with newer computerized engines. Ditto Fords and Dodges.

    What this means is that you won’t be dealing with each installation coming thru the door as a new and different animal.

    What bolts into a Ford will bolt into a Dodge or Chevy, using only a very few different brackets and braces.

    Such conversions may be VERY BIG THING a few years down the road.

    1. I am very hesitant to even try and guess this one but, under the right conditions, demand will be huge. I have attached below a picture of what are probably the most popular (numerous) light commercial vehicles outside of markets with a significant vehicle manufacturing base, where locally manufactured vans dominate the respective markets. The van on the left is a Toyota and is by far the most sought after vehicle as a 15 seat passenger vehicle in my neck of the woods, so much so that they are the most frequently stolen van on the island. The one on the right is more popular with companies here as a light goods vehicle (with no windows as pictured) and is similar to what I drive. These are similar to US pick up trucks in that they exist in huge quantities and are very similar in terms of drive train layout, front engine with a drive shaft and a live rear axle with differential.

      With all of these vehicles, a rear axle with an electric motor and differential integrated into a sub assembly should be a fairly straightforward thing to develop. This sort of sub assembly already exists, if only in protype form, see:

      More Electric Axles on the Way – A Look at the Tech Your Next Car Might Have

      http://www.danaelectrified.com/products

      Bosch eAxle

      The issue as I see it is that there are no current designs for retrofits of existing vehicles on a large scale and these drive systems will require batteries, battery management systems and on board chargers to go along with them. At the moment, retrofits like that would be prohibitively expensive.

      I would of course, relish something like that being affordable for the vehicle I currently drive but, there are a couple of circumstances that I think will have to arise before we see that. Liquid fuels will have to become scarce and/or expensive while EV retrofits become more affordable and more or less available as standardised turnkey packages. As long as fuels for the existing fleet are available and affordable, the demand for retrofits is going to be too low. That could change.

      1. I couldn’t work out why the doors were on the wrong side … until I realised you lot drive on the proper side of the road, over there 🙂

        Will conversions even be that popular compared with moving to a new all electric vehicle? With all the enhancements on the new stock I can see people wanting to move on from the same old stuff that has been around for decades with just cosmetic updates.

        NAOM

        PS When is the next electric transport update, in the series, due?

        1. Yes, being a former colony of the UK, we drive on the left side which is the right side! 😉

          As far as the doors go, increasingly the light goods vans are coming with sliding doors for the goods compartment on both sides. The passenger versions tend to have a sliding door on the opposite side from the drivers door, for safety reasons is my guess. Since the Japanese vehicle manufacturing sector is geared for export, all Japanese vehicles are designed to be either left or right hand drive as are most vehicles designed and manufactured outside of North America.

          A used Nissan eNV200 light goods van, the only vehicle of it’s class that has been available as an EV since 2014, can be found on the UK market for as low as about ‎£11,000 and in Japan for as low as US$11,000, freight not included (links are to used vehicle web pages). For somebody like me to convert my 2006 vehicle to electric, the conversion would have to come in under the cost of an equivalent EV and therein lies the rub. Used EVs and even some new ones, are currently selling for less than it costs to to do the average conversion especially if you factor in the cost of the donor vehicle (body). At the end of the day what you’ve got is a one off conversion, as opposed to a factory built EV with all the bells and whistles.

          As for the rest of the Electric Commercial Vehicle series, the first three parts were relatively easy in that history doesn’t change much. Current and future situations are a fast moving target, changing daily to the point where something written today can be outdated next week. I have been thinking more about it over the past few days. I’m currently focused on the next Electric Power Monthly report.

          1. Good point on 2nd hand, which will become increasingly available – possibly ex-lease. An electrified IfCE vehicle would , basically, be a 20th century level of utility while a new or second hand EV would carry the 21st century features. Built for the purpose.

            Thanks for the update.

            NAOM

        2. I personally believe the potential for the conversion of light trucks and vans is ENORMOUS….. simply because such vehicles are used for BUSINESS purposes.
          Even in the case of a typical suburban or urban driver, a pickup or van is quite often the most practical choice of vehicle, because although it may burn a little more gasoline, this extra expense is WAY more than offset by being able to haul stuff as little as once a month, or even less often.

          And relatively low paid people are always looking for opportunities to make a few extra bucks, or save a few bucks. Trucks and vans are wonderful tools, in this respect.

          And if you are short of money…. how about a converted pickup that costs you fifteen or twenty grand, total, versus a new one that will cost you FORTY or more?

          The OPPORTUNITY cost of that extra twenty grand is simply ENORMOUS.

          It could be the difference between putting your kid thru university and telling him to just go hunt a job, or the difference between buying a house of your own and continuing to pay rent. I know a BUNCH of people whose house payment, piti, after ten years, is only HALF what it costs to rent a similar house right across the street from their own.

          When the day comes that you can drive or haul your reasonably sound, meaning not rusted too badly, Ford or Chevy pickup to a conversion shop and get it back a week later, turnkey, with a good warranty, at a reasonable cost, people will be LINED UP waiting their turn.

          I repeat myself, but the ONLY things that typically ever really cost a lot to fix on a domestic fullsize pickup are the engine and transmission and associated parts. The REST of such a pickup is good for a million miles, with some more or less routine maintenance work.

          I foresee such conversions being done by the MILLIONS, because new trucks, electric or conventional, as so expensive these days.

          1. I refer you to @islandboy’s response and my response to his.

            NAOM

  28. How to restore a rainforest – Willie Smits

    “By piecing together a complex ecological puzzle, biologist Willie Smits believes he has found a way to re-grow clearcut rainforest in Borneo, saving local orangutans — and creating a thrilling blueprint for restoring fragile ecosystems.”

    What are your thoughts about permaculture as a form of sustainable agriculture?

    “Can it feed large populations? The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation seems to think small-scale agroecology has to be the answer to global food shortages. (July 2014)
    As for the previous suggestion that there is zero empirical studies into the efficacy of permaculture, it seems there is a fundamental misunderstanding of what permaculture is; permaculture is nothing more than an interconnected system of not-particularly-revolutionary techniques, linked to complement each other in terms of input/output. Permaculture did not invent the swale, or humus-building, or soil microbiology, for example, but it makes use of all of them. If you can find evidence for the efficacy of improving conditions of the soil food web and subsequent nutrient availability in plants (many thanks, Elaine Ingham), you can find evidence for the efficacy of permaculture. If you understand that humus is a stable carbon-based substance made of decomposed organic matter, and that a permaculture fundamental is humus-building, then you can only conclude that permaculture helps to sequester carbon as humus (Dr Ingham might at this juncture point out that this also tends to expand and enrich the soil-food web). If you understand that water moves at right angles to a contour, then you understand that placing obstacles (e.g. swales) on contour will slow the flow of water. Once you understand that slow-moving water deposits sediment rather than erodes, and that sediment contains nutrients and organic matter to further the soil-food web, you can only conclude that swales are good for the soil-food web. That swales increase the infiltration of rainwater into the soil, subsoil and eventually parent rock, is perhaps an even more significant benefit, of course!
    If you need a quick overview of the improvement of degraded land and the lives of the people who live there through other permaculture techniques, I suggest Willie Smits’ TED talk ‘How to restore a rainforest’.” ~ Hendrik Bower, Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz

    “If you still have a job, get everything in order, and quit. Do it as soon as you can, because we’ve never had a more important work to do.” ~ Kyle Chamberlin

  29. How Cars Divide America
    Car dependence not only reduces our quality of life, it’s a crucial factor in America’s economic and political divisions.

    “Urbanists have long looked at cars as the scourge of great places. Jane Jacobs identified the automobile as the ‘chief destroyer of American communities’. Cars not only clog our roads and cost billions of dollars in time wasted commuting, they are a terrible killer. They caused more than 40,000 deaths in 2017, including of some 6,000 pedestrians and cyclists…

    I’m not trying to blame the car for everything that’s wrong in America. But it is increasingly clear that in addition to wasted time and productivity, reduced quality of life, and even fatalities, the automobile takes another toll. It may be that cars are not only the chief destroyer of our communities, but are tearing at the nation’s political and social fabric.”

    I was happy then (book)
    Bureau For Open Culture

    Quote from book:

    “Gramsci voiced his critique of capitalist society through a concept called ‘cultural hegemony’. Cultural hegemony, he claimed, is the way in which economic interests of a bourgeois class are validated by perpetuating societal activities and belief systems via folklore, popular culture and religion…

    A mistake made by all city planners is to consider the private automobile… as essentially a means of transportation. In reality, it’s the most notable symbol of the notion of happiness that developed capitalism tends to spread throughout society… The automobile is at the heart of this general propaganda, both as supreme good of an alienated life and as essential product of the capitalist market.”

  30. Anybody else having a technical issue with postings failing to revert to white status after having been seen?
    On my system, new posts are staying ‘blue’, for about 5 days now.
    Firefox. Has been closed and restarted.
    Thanks.

    1. Have you installed the most recent update? Are you blocking cookies – may need to exempt POB.

      NAOM

      1. Thank you for the suggestions NAOM.
        No luck though.
        Hopefully the problem will just disappear, as it appeared.
        Apparently, its not a site specific problem that others are having.

        1. Might well be related to the latest FF upgrade. I have upgraded since posting that. After reading your response I went to read an article then returned to POB and opened this thread again. All comments I had read before are still blue. It is probably due to changes to the tracking cookies so I will look at that, probably tomorrow as it is 2 FIRKIN hot at the moment and I have to put stuff ready for baking bread tomorrow.

          NAOM

        2. Ok, looking at this. It seems to apply to this thread only, which suggests something is broken at the server end, Just put a comment on the new Open Thread and the blues updated correctly. Will post a call to Dennis.

          NAOM

          1. Hickory and NAOM,

            I use Microsoft Edge and Chrome for browsers, not problem on those.

            1. Downloaded and tried Firefox, that works also. I am using Windows 10 version 1903.

              Tried Opera browser also, that worked as well. I don’t have a Mac to test Safari.

            2. Nope, not working on this thread. ‘Climate Variability vs AGW’ seems to have caught it too. Just looked at the cookies and they do not seem to have updated their dates. As for more detail on the problem, it appears as the blue background and ‘new’ tag still showing up after viewing the thread, going away and then returning. I will see if I can edit the cookie and see if the blue goes away but I need to close this first so I will update below.

              NAOM

              Firefox 69.0 on Debian 10 Buster AMD64

            3. Yep, upped the expiry date by a few days and all is well. Now the question is why is the expiry date not updating – I will take a look tomorrow afternoon.

              NAOM

  31. https://www.politico.com/story/2019/09/06/republicans-cancel-primaries-trump-challengers-1483126

    The more things change, the more things stay the same.

    HRC didn’t manage to get a tight enough old time machine style politican’s grip on the D party machinery that she was able to get primaries CANCELLED, but she sure as hell had a tight enough grip that she pretty much scared everybody else in the country out of running, except one retread old SOCIALIST who would probably have beaten her, had he gotten an earlier start in a fair race.

    How many people have ever given any SERIOUS consideration to the fact that Obama, who was virtually unknown on the national stage a year or two before he was elected, may have gotten so many votes in the D primaries in some substantial part because he was “anybody but…. “.

    Let’s hope Republicans who are for anybody BUT Trump and company are so pissed at being frozen out that a hell of a lot of them just stay home on election day 2020. A few of them may even vote D, lol.

    They aren’t admitting it publicly, but I know quite a few people who voted for Trump hoping for change got it, but it wasn’t the change they wanted, lol.

    At least a quarter of the ones known to me personally will either stay home or vote D in 2020.

    And let us pray that the D’s run somebody this time who actually gives a shit about the working class people of this country, because while they may not know much science or anything else, they still know when they are looked down on as “deplorable”, and resent the hell out of it.

    The LAST thing we need is another D candidate making secret speeches to Wall Street types THIS TIME, rather than campaigning in places where people are SCARED with GOOD reason for their jobs and their future.

    1. I am really surprised that the Republican party hasn’t launched a all out effort to take back the party from Trump. Its a huge failure for that party, and reflects horribly on their values.
      If the democrats had someone so lame take over that party, I sure as hell hope they would fight back at every inch, every day.

      1. They’re all, as individuals, “scared shitless” (hillbilly vernacular for scared so bad they have pooped and peed their pants) of Trump and his base.

        They KNOW that Trump will sic his hard core followers on them, if they disown him, and at that point, their careers are OVER. And besides that, since they see the writing on the wall, in respect to not only this next election but demographic destiny, they figure they might as well grab all they can for themselves and their friends, while the grabbing is still good.

        Trump and his base would much rather see a congressional seat, or a governors office, filled by a Democrat than for anybody to get away with defying HIM.

        Scorched earth tactics are mother’s milk to Trump and his sort of people. It’s all lovey dovey,” the best people”, until somebody turns on him, and after that…….. they’re the worst sort of scumbags.

        There’s not a month that goes by these days that I don’ hear about another likely Trump voter’s funeral via the community grapevine. They average a funeral per month at the church my parents used to attend these days, and that’s just ONE local church. Within ten years, a substantial chunk of his base will be history.

        If the R’s could get together, they could defy Trump. But there’s not a single R politician in the country today that has the balls and the backing of his voters to the point that he’s willing to risk his career on rebellion.

        As Ben Franklin once said, we must all hang together, or we will assuredly hang separately.

        The many Republicans who would LOVE to be rid of Trump don’t know how to go about doing it, because they KNOW that unless the rest of the party goes “over the top” with them, they will surely be massacred individually.

        They’re like a field full of slaves that were afraid to rush one man with a shotgun sitting on a horse. Nobody wanted to be the first one to die.

        And suppose the R party DOES disown Trump….. the D’s will make so much hay out of THAT scenario that they wouldn’t quit laughing about it for the next hundred years.

        I can HEAR Democrats making fun of their Republican opponents for having been such fools.

        Personally I’m coming around to the opinion that the D’s are going to mop the floor with the R’s next time around, barring unfortunate accidents spoiling their chances.

        But I’ve been wrong before.

        1. I’m thinking ahead to a time when we get a tyrant gaining power, from the right or left. We need to get much better at seeing the warning signs, and moving hard and fast against them. Trump has tyrannical tendencies, but he seems very incompetent, and more money/accolade driven than ideological.
          The next one to come around may be a true terror.

  37. Planting a forest, or protecting whats already there?

    Ive been trying to say this, but this article does a much better job getting the point across-
    “Any expansion of natural forest area is best achieved through allowing degraded forests to naturally recover. Allowing trees to regenerate naturally, using nearby remnants of primary forests and seed banks in the soil of recently cleared forests, is more likely to result in a resilient and diverse forest than planting massive numbers of seedlings.”

    https://phys.org/news/2019-08-trees-substitute-natural-forests.html

    1. Enhanced Mutual Inclusion & Natural Symbiosis?

      Having a relatively-large population, good and available food and enough of it to eat, and a balanced, healthy ecosystem to boot, including WRT AGW, does not have to be a mutually exclusive proposition/endeavor, nor rocket science.

      “As for the trillion-tree-plant subject of a recent article quoted by myself hereon in a previous thread, part of my thoughts on this is about planting not just trees, but a variety of other native plants, with the idea that we nurture and enhance nature and work with it, rather than against…

      …If we had 1 billion people planting in 10 hours or so, 1000 trees (and/or a diversity of plants that echoed their locales) each, then we’d have, at least as a start, something pretty cool. Literally. And it would positively influence the fauna, as well, incidentally, as what and how much we can eat.” ~ Caelan MacIntyre

      Given that we are a part of nature, not apart from it, it’s crucial that we listen to and get to know it and understand and respond to it– and fast– and learn how to enhance it and integrate ourselves with it. That kind of idea. Forest seed banks? Sure! Enhancing it will enhance us.

      From The Archives (2015)

      ““Paul Wheaton explains the benefits of creating a permaculture system. He describes that, once constructed, this system essentially runs itself according to nature, allowing the farmer to relax until harvest season.

      Douglas Gayeton: What is your definition of permaculture?

      …Permaculture is a symbiotic relationship with nature so that I can be even lazier. If I do things today, I could give a gift to my future self. For example, one of the techniques I can use is the build a hugelkulter bed. This is basically a large mount with soil on top of wood. If I build it large enough, I don’t need to irrigate, fertilize, worry about pests, or plant seeds. I only need to harvest. Therefore, I saved my future self a great deal of annual effort. For me, permaculture is about how I set up a system that will continue to pump out food without further interaction on my part.

      Douglas Gayeton: Why do you emphasize the term laziness when you talk about permaculture?

      Paul Wheaton: When I talk about permaculture, I use the word ‘lazy’ because producing food in a traditional garden strikes me as a lot of work. It turns out that you can create a system where it takes no effort at all, with the exception of harvesting, to get the same food…

      Douglas Gayeton: What is the difference between permaculture and organics?

      Paul Wheaton: My favorite example is the Colorado potato beetle. In an organic system, when you have the Colorado potato beetle, your first job is the panic. You will need to do something now to save your crop. You will usually sprace[sic] something organic or you’re going to smash bugs individually.

      In a permaculture system, you’re not going to be growing things in rows of monocrops. You’re going to add a lot of texture to the landscape and have your potatoes growing in all kinds of odd places throughout this bizarre landscape. If you see a potato plant that has Colorado potato beetles on it, you don’t acre[sic]. Clearly that potato plant shouldn’t be there and Mother Nature, acting through the Colorado potato beetle, is going to take that plant out. Once that potato plant is gone, something else will do really well there.

      In the meantime, in another patch, there is a potato plant that doesn’t have any Colorado potato beetle on it and it won’t get any. That’s a healthy thriving plant. It won’t succumb to the Colorado potato beetle. When you have a long row or a field of potatoes, everything is homogenous. The soil has roughly the same pH, the amount of sunshine the plant gets is roughly the same for all plants, all the conditions are the same. If those plants get hit by the Colorado potato beetle, they’re all going to be equally susceptible to the pest…”

      Permaculture Is Greening The Desert

      “Today, drylands are inhabited by more than 2 billion people, which means that almost 40% of the world’s population is living in areas of high water stress and desertification is increasing worldwide. But with careful design, we can demonstrate permanent productivity and landscape rehabilitation.”

      “Forests precede us, while deserts dog our heels.” ~ Derrick Jensen

  38. https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikescott/2019/09/02/economics-of-electric-vehicles-mean-oils-days-as-a-transport-fuel-are-numbered/#24a2f2135102

    ““For a given capital outlay on oil and renewables, how much useful energy at the wheel do we get? Our analysis indicates that for the same capital outlay today, new wind and solar-energy projects in tandem with battery electric vehicles will produce six to seven times more useful energy at the wheels than will oil at $60 per barrel for gasoline powered light-duty vehicles, and three to four times more than will oil at $60 per barrel for light-duty vehicles running on diesel,” says Lewis.

    Today In: Money

    As a result, the report says, the long-term break-even oil price for gasoline to remain competitive as a source of mobility is $9 – $10 per barrel, and for diesel $17 – $19 a barrel .”

    Make what you will of it, but I believe depletion will reduce oil supplies fast enough that the price of oil won’t fall to such low levels. There are not yet any really good substitutes for oil in the fields of construction, agriculture, and aviation.

    So I think the price of oil will average fairly close to whatever it costs to produce it, if the electric car industry really does take off Tony Seba style, assuming legacy fields decline as fast or faster than electric cars replace conventional cars.

    It seems very unlikely, from my layman’s pov, that any new oil can be brought to market for less than forty to fifty bucks per barrel.

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