174 thoughts to “Open Thread Non-Petroleum January 24”

  1. The Case for Making Low-Tech ‘Dumb’ Cities Instead of ‘Smart’ Ones

    “There’s old, and then there’s old – and for urban landscapes increasingly vulnerable to floods, adverse weather, carbon overload, choking pollution and an unhealthy disconnect between humans and nature, there’s a strong case for looking beyond old technologies to ancient technologies.

    It is eminently possible to weave ancient knowledge of how to live symbiotically with nature into how we shape the cities of the future, before this wisdom is lost forever. We can rewild our urban landscapes, and apply low-tech ecological solutions to drainage, wastewater processing, flood survival, local agriculture and pollution that have worked for indigenous peoples for thousands of years, with no need for electronic sensors, computer servers or extra IT support…

    A few token green walls and trees won’t do it. Watson calls for a focus on permaculture: self-sustaining ecosystems. ‘If it’s an urban forest’, she says, ‘perhaps it’s in the centre of the city, perhaps it’s on the periphery, or it could be an interior environment – an atrium designed to have a complex ecosystem that’s also agriculturally productive.’

    There are hundreds of nature-based technologies that have never been explored. For example, Watson envisions stunning urban uses for the living root bridges of the Khasi hill tribe: ‘They could be grown to reduce the urban heat island effect by increasing canopy cover along streets, with roots trained into trusses that integrate with the architecture of the street – in essence, removing the distinction between tree and building.’ They could even retain their original use during seasonal floods – living, physical bridges over the water.

    In April, Greta Thunberg and Guardian columnist George Monbiot made a rallying video calling for more trees and wetlands and plant cover to tackle the climate crisis. Cities can be part of this push.

    The idea of smart cities is born of what Watson describes as ‘the same human superiority-complex that thinks nature should be controlled’. What’s missing is symbiosis. ‘Life on Earth is based upon symbiosis’, Watson says. She suggests we replace the saying ‘survival of the fittest’ with ‘survival of the most symbiotic‘. Not as catchy, perhaps. But smarter.”

    1. Caelan, your message desperately needs to get to some folks in Kingston, Jamaica. On Thursday January 30, a local television station will be hosting a “town hall meeting” under the theme “High rise Kingston. Too much, too fast” to discuss issues surrounding the boom in construction of multi-story buildings.

      The current construction boom suggests that those investing in the projects do not believe all the talk about Peak Oil or Limits to Growth or a climate crisis or any of the other doomerish stuff we discuss around here, assuming they’ve even heard such stuff. My concern is that there is nothing to indicate that these new buildings are being built with energy efficiency in mind. They will most likely require lots of air conditioning in the summer months and I don’t know how they will cope with restricted water supplies that are a common occurrence during long periods without rain. Don’t even get me started on Peak Oil.

      It will be interesting to hear if there are any people who share my concerns at the event on Thursday. I’m planning to be there.

      1. There are highrises going up here as well and probably ‘everywhere else’.
        We’ll learn the hard way.
        Best with the event.
        Bring an empty container in case there’s some free food there.

    1. Or it could be interpreted that China learned a lot from the SARS virus, and is being more aggressive on containment this time. Their response has been impressive.

      Just 10 days after a pneumonia-like illness was first reported among people who visited a seafood market in Wuhan, China, scientists released the genetic sequence of the coronavirus that sickened them.
      […]
      Purdue University scientists are preparing to scale up production of experimental drugs that they were initially developing to fight SARS, to see if they show promise against the new coronavirus. Twelve days after the genome was posted, NIH scientists published their first analysis, showing that the coronavirus used the same door to get into human cells as SARS. About 12 hours later, a Chinese team of scientists who had isolated the virus from patients showed, using the actual virus, that the team was correct.

      https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2020/01/24/scientists-are-unraveling-chinese-coronavirus-with-unprecedented-speed-openness/

          1. I have been able to open article in another browser.

            This article says nothing about how serious the virus is, how quickly it is spreading. Chinese government has said it has already mutated.

            They have quarantined a city the size of New York and an area with 50 million people.
            They have ordered all tours to be cancelled.
            sounds serious to me

            1. I should have structured my comment differently. Of course it is serious. Whether or not it is more serious than SARS is not yet clear. The aggressive response may be pre-emptive due to what they learned from that prior outbreak.

              The link wasn’t meant to refute your point, or support mine. The rapidity of identification of the virus, sequencing of its genome, identification of its vulnerability, commencement of vaccine tests, and open sharing of information between scientists globally was interesting and impressive to me, and related, so I shared it.

              Sorry for the ambiguity.

              In other related, but not necessarily relevant Corona articles, here’s a good one from Spiegel, which does elucidate the lethality of the virus compared to SARS and MERS thus far:

              Strict quarantine and hygiene measures were necessary to stop the SARS virus in the summer of 2003. The related MERS coronavirus — which appeared in the Middle East in 2012, is transmitted from dromedary camels to humans and kills more than one-third of the people it infects — has not yet been completely contained.

              “The Situation Is Very Serious”

              Nevertheless, the new virus is killing far fewer people than its two predecessors, with mortality currently estimated at 4 percent. SARS killed around one out of 10 patients.

              https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/fresh-viral-threat-emerges-in-china-a-d7076d78-06dd-4dbc-93da-0c1e37691a0c

            3. Bob

              Much depends on the incubation period. If someone has virus, but no symptoms, they can spread it to many people.

              We will know in the next couple of weeks how bad it will be.

            4. Good point, and one raised by this Bloomberg article:

              While influenza tends to spread most readily when people first get sick, before the peak of their symptoms, SARS becomes most transmissible during or after symptoms hit their peak. It’s a lot easier to quarantine people who are or have been sick than those who have yet to notice symptoms.

              https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-01-25/coronavirus-cures-are-already-in-progress-thanks-to-nih-funding?srnd=opinion

              Hopefully it proves to be another trial run to The Big One that helps us further strengthen our strategies of containment and treatment, rather than The Big One itself.

  3. The Chinese government is well known for presenting itself as capable of dealing with all problems.

    If Xi makes a statement saying. “China is facing a grave situation and the virus is spreading”

    then you know it’s bad

      1. Very small—
        But it is when Mauna Loa went on line.
        Hint:
        “Carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations have skyrocketed far higher than any levels in more than 800,000 years, according to data from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California-San Diego, and levels have not been this high for millions of years, Holthaus said.”
        https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2019/05/13/climate-change-co-2-levels-hit-415-parts-per-million-human-first/1186417001/

  5. Here is the chart for 800,000 yrs Tony.
    Its only a small part of earths history, but its the only part that matters for humans.

    1. Like most Republicans, I can’t deny there may be fluctuations in CO2 over time (geologically) but it is doubtful that man has any major role in the cause when the quantity was fluctuating even before man appeared on earth. It is also doubtful that anything economically can really be done about it.

      1. The scientists are coming to the realization CO2 isn’t going to decrease, but will continue to increase until at least 2040 or 2050 when many of the 100% renewable energy mandates will be in full effect.

      2. Richard,

        CO2 was fluctuating and probably causing cyclic glacial and inter-glacial periods. But look at the rate of change . That is what is concerning scientists and generally people with some scientific or educational background.

        It is quite obvious that such a radical change in CO2 levels coincides with the industrial revolution. So applying Occams razor without reading any scientific literature would tell you that human activity is the cause.

        If you think there is some other cause for the steep exponential climb of CO2 please enlighten us.

      3. There are multiple lines of evidence that the recent extreme rise in CO2 in the atmosphere is from human activity.

        https://skepticalscience.com/co2-increase-is-natural-not-human-caused.htm

        also:
        https://skepticalscience.com/CO2-emissions-correlation-with-CO2-concentration.htm

        https://skepticalscience.com/Murry-Salby-CO2-rise-natural.htm

        https://skepticalscience.com/essenhigh_rebuttal.html

        There is also some stuff on there about the cost of going renewable energy,
        many studies show it will be ultimately cheaper to do so.
        And given that most oil producing nations are post-peak, doing nothing is a recipe for collapse. Coal and natural gas will follow in due course.
        https://crudeoilpeak.info/2005-2018-conventional-crude-production-on-a-bumpy-plateau-with-a-little-help-from-iraq
        https://crudeoilpeak.info/world-crude-production-outside-us-and-iraq-is-flat-since-2005

        also see the renewables posts on:
        https://scienceofdoom.com/

      4. Like most Republicans, I can’t deny there may be fluctuations in CO2 over time (geologically) but it is doubtful that man has any major role in the cause when the quantity was fluctuating even before man appeared on earth.

        Richard, please get someone who is not blind to explain that chart to you. That line that looks like it is straight-up actually represents about the last 100 years. (I know you cannot see it or you would not have made such a silly statement.) That spike was obviously caused by the industrial revolution dumping all that CO2 into the atmosphere.

      5. Another way we know what contribution is from hydrocarbon emissions is through the isotopic signatures of CO2.

        Different carbon reservoirs “like” different isotopes, so the relative proportion of the three isotopes is different in each reservoir – each has its own, identifying, isotopic fingerprint. By examining the isotopic mixture in the atmosphere, and knowing the isotopic fingerprint of each reservoir, atmospheric scientists can determine how much carbon dioxide is coming and going from each reservoir, making isotopes an ideal tracer of sources and sinks of carbon dioxide.

        As an example of these isotopic fingerprints, and how they can help scientists, consider this: fossil fuels do not contain 14C. By studying how the concentration of 14C has changed in the atmosphere, scientists have determined that the atmospheric increase in carbon dioxide is dominated by fossil fuel emissions. While terrestrial plants “dislike” 13C, ocean exchange does not prefer 12C or 13C. This creates a difference in the relative ratio of terrestrial versus oceanic uptake of atmospheric carbon dioxide isotopes.

        https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/outreach/isotopes/

        Also, why does political party affiliation have any relevance to acceptance of science findings?

      6. Richard- “Like most Republicans,”
        Enlighten me Richard.
        Why do republicans choose to be intentionally ignorant?
        My impression is simple that they find the truth inconvenient.
        “You can’t handle the truth”
        Just like with the Trump Abuse of Power.
        “You can’t handle the truth.”
        Its very inconvenient.
        Easier to deny.

      8. “but it is doubtful that man has any major role in the cause when the quantity was fluctuating even before man appeared on earth.”

        Look Richard. If there were other major contributions then you would be able to tell us which and provide a model that explains the raise of temperature, wouldn’t you?

        In the current situation – more than 70% of the temperature increase can be explained without any problem with CO2 and the humans are the source you have to provide more than an uneducated presonal opinion…

  6. Plastic bags have lobbyists. They’re winning.
    By SAMANTHA MALDONADO, BRUCE RITCHIE and DEBRA KAHN

    https://www.politico.com/news/2020/01/20/plastic-bags-have-lobbyists-winning-100587

    No one likes the sight of plastic bags snagged in storm drains, drifting from tree branches, or tangled around sea turtles. But beyond the bag, governments are feeling the financial pinch of plastic waste writ large.

    As the plastic has piled up, so has the plastics legislation. Nationwide, state lawmakers introduced at least 95 bag-related bills in 2019, including bans, fees, and improved recycling measures, according to data from the National Conference of State Legislatures.

    Still, the bag and its cousin, the pouch, are a $22.2 billion global business and growing, according to BCC Research. U.S. plastic bag sales are projected to reach $1.4 billion this year.

    Leading the charge against bag bans is the American Progressive Bag Alliance, which represents the plastic bag industry, which employs nearly 25,000 workers in 40 states.

    The alliance has held bag bans at bay by sticking to the scientific merits, Executive Director Matt Seaholm said. The group touts studies that show plastic bags are more environmentally sustainable than paper.

    And Seaholm pointed to a 2017 Canadian study showing that 78 percent of plastic bags have a second life. People use them to pack school lunches or dispose of pet waste, for example.

    “Unfortunately, so much of our time is drawn to the efforts to ban our products or tax them,” Seaholm said. “That takes away from an opportunity that would be really fantastic if we could work together to promote recycling.”

    So while bag bans in states like California and New York command media attention, industry groups say they still have the upper hand. Most of the nation hasn’t banned plastic bags, and likely won’t.

    “I’m happy to say a lot of cities and a lot of states have made the right decision,” Seaholm said. “Unfortunately, some haven’t.”

  7. 5G Is Going To Screw Up Weather Forecasts, Meteorologists Warn
    Dan Vergano

    https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/danvergano/5g-is-going-to-screw-up-weather-forecasts-meteorologists

    Deciding whether to pack an umbrella for a weekend away is going to get a lot more difficult in the near future. Next-generation “5G” wireless signals — promising faster, stronger cellphone service — are going to disrupt weather satellite forecasts, according to warnings by meteorologists, lawmakers, and federal science agencies.

    This year the FCC auctioned off 24-gigahertz radio frequencies for 5G transmissions, perilously close to the 23.8-gigahertz frequency at which water vapor molecules vibrate in the atmosphere. Weather satellites continuously monitor that subtle signal of humidity, which is an essential ingredient for accurate weather forecasts. Cellphone antennas transmitting 5G signals near that frequency could cause confusion for weather satellites, essentially pouring a firehose of misinformation into the supercomputer models of Earth’s atmosphere running around the clock at weather centers worldwide.

    The FCC did not reply to a request for comment from BuzzFeed News. In an April letter, FCC chair Ajit Pai said that NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which had asked that the auction of frequency bands be delayed, were making “exaggerated and unverified last-minute assertions.” He noted that the agency’s auction of the frequencies to wireless providers garnered the US Treasury almost $2 billion.

    In response, NOAA’s acting administrator, Neil Jacobs, told Congress that the interference would set US weather forecasts back to “somewhere around 1980,” reducing current three-day hurricane warnings to two-day ones.

    1. Just one more sign of a collapsing civilization.
      Prediction of solar insolation and wind magnitudes will be extremely helpful in operating a renewable grid system. However if prediction is hampered, so will the effectiveness and stability of the grid.

    1. Automation is an incremental process: autonomy within a very limited range is one way to slice up development into manageable pieces. The next step is piece-meal expansion of the operating area.

      1. Australia plans to quarantine its 600 returning citizens for two weeks on Christmas Island – some 2,000km (1,200 miles) from the mainland.
        BBC

      1. https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/coronavirus-contains-hiv-insertions-stoking-fears-over-artificially-created-bioweapon

        Corona Virus might have HIV insertions in it

        Like it was designed!

        Could the Chinese have been working on a bio weapon where

        1) They had the vaccine
        2) And they infect everyone else with HIV.

        But they by accidentally detonated it on themselves!.

        HOLY SHIT!!! if this is true….

        No one has any immunity to this and the R0 might be 4.1 ( 1 person gives it to 4.1 people)

        Zerohedge isn’t most reliable source IMO

  11. Reposting this originally posted by GF in the last open thread.

    https://phys.org/news/2018-09-iron-powder-alternative-fuel-industry.html

    It’s going to be expensive as hell, compared to gas, if implemented……. but let’s remember that if we once build out wind and solar farms to the max, there will be PLENTY of dirt cheap electricity available intermittently with which we could run the process….. making this into something along the lines of a defacto super battery.

    Energy efficiency DOES NOT MATTER if you have an unlimited input source of clean energy that’s CHEAP TO IMPLEMENT in terms of man power and materials…… and wind and solar energy fit this description, already, to a substantial degree.

    Later on they will fit it to a T.

    1. It looks very promising.

      It’s fascinating how many different ways there are to skin a cat: you can store power by smelting (reducing) iron, or aluminum, or magnesium, etc. Releasing the power by reversing the process (oxidation) is very, very straightforward, very old tech.

      The cost of storage is almost zero: it’s very cheap and easy to store metals. Compare that to over $100 per kWh for batteries or pumped storage: it’s tailor made for a seasonal backup, where a lot of GWh’s would be needed.

      It could also work for transportation. Large fleet vehicles are obvious, but this article suggests that it could work in light passenger vehicles as well. Pretty amazing.

    2. “Iron powder: a clean, alternative fuel for industry that replaces natural gas”

      Perhaps a useful storage mechanism (depending on roundturn costs),
      but such a misleading headline.
      The iron process described is for energy storage, which is always an energy losing process.
      Rust is not an energy source any more than an empty battery or an empty hydro dam.
      Just so it is understood, the energy input has to come from somewhere else.

      Nick- what you are not considering when you say “The cost of storage is almost zero”, is the energy cost for the roundtrip (reduced to oxided iron, and back again) process. This could be much more expensive than other storage mechanisms- we just don’t know because none of that data was presented.

      1. No question: this is a fuel that starts out “empty” (with iron ore or oxidized iron) and needs to be filled before use. But, this is a physics publication, the audience is educated, and the article makes this clear.

        And, yes, I didn’t discuss the cost of energy, because Mac had already addressed that. The cost of storage is a different factor than the cost of the energy input.

        Smelting (reduction) is a very old, familiar process, and is pretty efficient. The topic of this article is combustion (oxidation) of the iron in a powder form: that’s also a pretty familiar thing, and should be as efficient as any form of heat engine.

        Here’s more information for a similar process using aluminum:

        https://www.pv-magazine.com/2020/01/23/solving-seasonal-storage-with-aluminum-cycling/
        https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2590174519300157

        Efficiency looks like about 30%, which is more than enough for seasonal storage: about 50% for conversion from electricity to aluminum, and about 60% for al to el and heat.

        You want to minimize capex – exorbitant capex is the problem with seasonal storage, with batteries or pumped storage. This is an asymmetrical problem, where PV power capture happens throughout the year using cheap surplus power, and discharge is only needed briefly in winter. Most power is used directly or stored briefly in batteries, and only a relatively small portion needs to go through the seasonal storage. Inefficiency is unimportant, both because the surplus power is cheap, and because the overall percent that cycles through is low.

        The same logic applies to Wind-Gas.

        Finally, as Alimbiquated has pointed out several times, oil is primarily valuable because it provides portable storage, not because of it being an energy source. This article is primarily about finding new low-CO2 portable fuels.

      2. And more info:

        Metal powder, especially iron, could be used in external combustion engines for transportation or seasonal electrical generation backup.

        “The idea of burning metal powders is nothing new – they’ve been used for centuries in fireworks, for instance. Since the mid-20th century, they’ve also been used in rocket propellants, such as the space shuttle’s solid-fuel booster rockets… metal powders: when burned, they react with air to form stable, nontoxic solid-oxide products that can be collected relatively easily for recycling – unlike the CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels that escape into the atmosphere.

        The energy and power densities of the proposed metal-fueled heat engines are predicted to be close to current fossil-fueled internal combustion engines, making them an attractive technology for a future low-carbon society.”

        Iron could be the primary candidate for this purpose, according to the study. Millions of tons of iron powders are already produced annually for the metallurgy, chemical and electronic industries. And iron is readily recyclable with well-established technologies, and some novel techniques can avoid the carbon dioxide emissions associated with traditional iron production using coal… the use of low-cost metallic fuels, like iron powder, is a worthy alternative to petrol and diesel fuels.”

        https://phys.org/news/2015-12-metal-powders-potential-fossil-fuels.html

    3. OFM said “Energy efficiency DOES NOT MATTER if you have an unlimited input source of clean energy that’s CHEAP TO IMPLEMENT in terms of man power and materials…… and wind and solar energy fit this description, already, to a substantial degree.”

      You might want to look at the final EROEI of wind and solar (after taking into account all the systems and life spans of equipment that are needed to actually implement it). We will be lucky to get 8:1 and the rate is more limited as well as the availability.
      Right now we are running at about 15:1 and falling. But also consider that globally we are operating on past energy, materials and accomplishments when EROEI was 30:1 and higher. Once the past materials, developments, builidngs, infrastructure and resources fade away we will find out what it is like to operate at 10:1 and lower as chaotic weather and ecological collapse further stresses our systems.

      1. Yeah, Mac engaged in a little hyperbole there. Ideally he should have said that efficiency becomes “relatively unimportant”. But…what’s the fun in that?

        And, yes, energy payback/net energy/EROEI is a similar, and sometimes useful, measure of an energy source. Fortunately, wind and solar very likely have less than a 1 year energy payback, or well in excess of 30:1 EROEI.

        1. the highest end estimate (for thin film which is about 4% of install globally and fallinG

          I think you’re referring to the NREL paper. Keep in mind that this paper was prepared more than 20 years ago: the 1 year payback was for obsolete forms of thin film. Look at the analysis: it gives a maximum of 4 year payback in 2000, and projects a 2 year payback in 2010, based on the rate of decline at the time. Well, costs and inputs have continued to plunge since then, in fact the rate of decline is accelerating. Energy payback is much shorter than it was 10 or 20 years ago.

          estimates that do not take into account the mining and initial smelting/refining energy is just not right.

          That was a misreading of an article: it did indeed take into account mining and initial smelting/refining energy. That’s just basic.

          Keep in mind that the installation that you describe is a small residential installation, which is only a small percentage of overall PV installations. They’re a large percentage of the number of installations, but only a small percentage of the MWp capacity total installed.

          No, it doesn’t make sense to include food for the people involved: they have to live whether they’re installing stuff or not. People are an end in themselves, not an input to manufacturing.

        2. GF is altogether correct in pointing out that energy efficiency DOES matter, and that we are looking at a falling EROEI in terms of the big picture, the overall historical picture. This is a matter of the utmost concern.

          And Nick is right that I was engaging in hyperbole, in a sense. Now perhaps I ought to explain my contention that Energy efficiency doesn’t NECESSARILY matter.

          In emergencies, lots of otherwise critically important things are simply FORGOTTEN. The surgeon knows he may kill his patient …… but he cuts anyway. The general sacrifices some of his men, that the remainder, the large part of his army, may survive.

          The overall context I have in mind is not about the status quo, it’s about dealing with emergencies as they arise.

          First off, the part about a potentially ( from a practical pov) unlimited SOURCE of energy is obvious. There’s hundreds of times more direct solar and wind energy potentially available to us than we have any need for.

          The question that follows is whether we can capture and make effective use of this potential bonanza.

          This in turn depends on whether we can build out wind and solar farms on the grand scale, such that we can run MOSTLY on wind and solar juice DIRECTLY, as the fossil fuel supply dries up, as the result of both depletion and political considerations.

          I think the odds are excellent that we WILL collectively build out the wind and solar industries to this point, for the same reasons we build aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines, tanks, bombers, standing armies, etc……. because we feel COMPELLED to do so, not yet of course. Ten years from now, we WILL feel that compulsion, world wide.

          You won’t hear Germans saying much, publicly, about WWII and the Siege of Stalingrad, etc, but you can bet the farm that one of the most important reasons the German people are so gung ho on renewable energy and efficiency is that they KNOW the Russians could literally destroy their country ECONOMICALLY by simply shutting down gas and oil exports for a few months. You can bet the farm that the Germans know the Russians haven’t forgotten WWII.

          The REST of the energy importing world will come to the same basic realization within the next few decades…… the realization that being dependent on imported energy is a GRAVE risk, pun INTENDED, as EXISTENTIAL risk, literally. Renewable energy is going to become part and parcel of national security considerations, to the same extent as standing military forces, as this realization sinks in.

          I’m not arguing that this realization is going to come about because people are forward thinking and rational, for the most part, but rather because it’s going to arrive like the proverbial muggers broken brick upside their collective national heads. Hot resource wars in general, and energy war in particular, is baked in. And I do mean BAKED IN. Inevitable.

          Painting with a broad brush, to make the story a little shorter, people all over the world are going to be spending on wind and solar farms the way they spend now on tanks and planes, ships and rockets.

          Nobody who believes such things are needed gives a damn about what they cost. They just pay it, to the limits of their ability to secure the funds.

          Barring bad luck, the renewable energy industries WILL BE built out, the same way the MIC has been built out, and on a comparable scale.

          Therefore surplus juice will be available to run any sort of energy storage scheme that looks to be reasonably workable, in terms of capital costs and day to day operational costs. The EFFICIENCY, it terms of energy in versus energy out won’t be all that important, so long as it’s high enough to be WORKABLE.

          From what I read, it seems that most physicists and engineers, and at least some economists, believe that so long as EROEI is at least in the five or six to one range or better, it’s DOABLE.

          And as far as how we will collectively adapt to such EXPENSIVE energy……… we will do what we HAVE to do……… collectively…….. use energy far more efficiently, and use it far more frugally.

          Living standards will fall as far as necessary. Some industries will collapse, as for instance tourism dependent on long distance transportation perhaps. The people will insist that air travel be taxed at an impossible rate……. with good reason, if the many thousands of gallons of fuel it takes to fly a 747 a few thousand miles are needed for tractors and combines and trucks to deliver food and other essential goods.

          Ron and some others here believe, with good cause, that a world wide hard crash and burn scenario is baked in. I believed the same a few years back.

          But now I believe that there’s a good chance that SOME people in some places can pull thru while preserving an industrial civilization……… but it will be one that doesn’t look much like the one we have today in the USA. Six thousand pound personal vehicles won’t be a thing. Mass transit WILL. Eight inches of insulation in walls and triple glazing and a foot in attics even in places where it never gets very hot or cold WILL be a thing.

          Groceries delivered WILL be a thing…….. Amazon will continue to be a thing, because it’s going to be far more energy efficient for that delivery truck to run thru your neighborhood than for twenty or thirty people to drive to the mall and super market.

          The population problem won’t be a thing…… not after piecemeal collapse wipes out most of the people in most of the places that are overpopulated already.

          The shit IS going to hit the fan.

          Ron and people who think the way he does MAY be right. Maybe even places as fortunately situated as the USA and Canada will crash and burn. But I may be right too. Maybe collapse will be piecemeal over time and geography. There’s a substantial chance, in my professional opinion as an ag guy that things will play out this way, assuming we avoid a hot WWIII, etc.

          The people in places where famine is one crop failure away will starve or die of exposure, disease, thirst, and violence in place. Not more than one out of twenty of them will make it to a national border where they WILL be stopped with men behind fences……… men who WILL shoot to kill.

          Any body who believes otherwise hasn’t studied history or war.

          The more things change, the more they stay the same, in terms of the behavior of naked apes.

          Anybody who believes he can predict the future in detail is equally certain not to have studied history or war.

          I’m pointing out what I think are the most likely likely future scenarios, given some luck.

          No guarantees. Just my personal opinions.

          1. Good points OFM.

            When you say- “I think the odds are excellent that we WILL collectively build out the wind and solar industries to this point, for the same reasons we build aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines, tanks, bombers, standing armies, etc……. because we feel COMPELLED to do so, not yet of course. Ten years from now, we WILL feel that compulsion, world wide. “,
            I get tripped up on that.
            Its about timing. If we wait for 10 years to feel ‘compelled’, we will be playing a very tough game of catch up. The shortfall of energy will force a painful economic contraction in many places. And that is a very painful way to force population decline.

            btw- interesting read on the honeybees last week, thanks

          2. Two things OFM,
            1) most of the green movement is pointed at thirty to 50 years in the future. In thirty years we might have a renewable electric power system and mostly EV’s. In 50 or more years, most energy might come from renewables. In 50 years new tree plantings might be pulling down enough CO2 to make a difference.
            This is problematic to disastrous at best since there is no guarantee that over generations we will continue in the same path or not have other factors get in the way of trasnsistions. The buildout might stop, the trees might be burned, cleared or lumbered.
            The timeline for action needs clear decisive action and successful over the next decade. Beyond that there be dragons!

            2) I know a lot of numbers such as EROEI are thrown around, some with fantastic claims, but there is a huge difference between the very large source of real time solar energy and solar energy stored in the ground from millions of years of collection.
            Fossil fuels are storable and dispatchable right now. You can get back the energy invested in minutes not months and years (as in PV and wind). Just that difference in rate scale means all of our systems need to be rethought and reworked to fit the new reality. Trying to Band-Aid renewables to the old system is a waste and will cause many problems/failures.

            Summary:
            There are other major differences such as lack of easy cheap storage that need to be realized.
            Basically, with a whole new system one needs to rethink the whole system. Also minimization up front will pay huge dividends down the road. The road forward has many potholes and crevasses to negotiate or fall into, not taking a systems approach means creating more problems and dead ends in a world that will steadily become more energy constrained.
            Who does not get the energy when the energy needs to be used for the transistion of energy systems and there is not enough to go around? Somebody gets shorted. Who gets destroyed and who gets to live?

            1. Hi GF,
              You are dead on when you talk about physical restraints on what can be accomplished, and time lags on such accomplishments as well.

              The entire house of cards that is modern fossil fuel powered civilization may crash and burn. I’m not predicting that it will survive, but rather that portions of it might.

              This belief may be no more than wishful thinking on my part.

              And failing to get our collective ass in gear NOW, rather than ten years down the road, is another GRAVE pun intended potential problem.

              But lets not forget that once a LEVIATHAN, a nation state, comes to understand that its very survival as such is on the line, and the people get behind the state, things that are “obviously impossible” from a conventional thinking point of view suddenly become possible.

              Nobody would have believed that Germany, a literal train wreck of a country in the mid thirties could have built the world’s most powerful to date war machine in three or four short years, but the nazis succeeded in doing so.

              The Brits managed to fight them off, which also looked to be impossible.

              And we Yanks did what was considered impossible prior to Pearl Harbor…………. we got our own economy going like a house afire with flames erupting from every window within a year.

              There will be plenty of money, plenty of material, plenty of manpower, to giterdone, in terms of actually building what’s needed, because spending can be diverted from other programs, and new spending can be financed. Resources can be seized, men can be forced into uniform.

              The real question, in my own opinion anyway, is what will have to happen to get the energy importing countries MOVING.

              It sounds hard hearted and contradictory, but the best thing that could happen NOW, or within the next couple of years, might actually be a moderately hot energy war.

              Anybody can propose a dozen schemes whereby we would act rationally, but rational forward thinking schemes of that sort just aren’t POLITICALLY VIABLE without some sort of catalyst.

              A sharp hunk of brick upside the collective head move such schemes from the academic question sphere to the action sphere.

              War is such a brick. I’m not sure there’s any other such brick that will get the job done.

            2. OFM, a century ago or so major changes could be accomplished along with major growth. Look at how much easy energy and materials were in the ground in 1900. They had the biggest battery the world might ever see to tap on and a much smaller job to make global changes.
              Now that battery is getting depleted and the rate of recharge is slower than the rate of dissipation.

              Presently we are clamoring for substitution and barely getting a response. Not major growth, not doubling and tripling energy in a few years, just substitution to more efficient systems. Limits to growth is happening and limits to change are in the pipeline.

              Make most of your changes now, ones that are simple and long lasting. I do not see any guarantees of continued growth of anything in the future, although it will appear that way as major efforts are pursued with diminishing results.
              A transistion can be made, but if it is mostly technological and industrial, it will come up hard against natural limits as the biosphere dies and climate continues to change.

              BTW, some 150 American companies were involved in the rearmament of Germany in the 1930’s. Money to be made, then more money during the war. Then money in the rebuild.

            3. Yeah, energy transitions aren’t a technical or resource problem, they’re a political problem.

              And it’s not a problem of lack of awareness on the part of professionals, or a lack of long-term thinking. It’s a problem of active resistance to change by investors who would lose vast amounts of money if the FF industry were to be recognized as obsolete.

              If there are a trillion barrels of oil in the ground that oil companies (both private and national) are hoping to sell, that’s $600 trillion that could be lost if everyone is allowed to recognize that the emperor has no clothes.

              This is an industrial conflict. It’s an generational, massive, basic conflict like the fights in centuries gone between farmers and merchants, and between slave owners and manufacturers. It’s Koch vs Bezos.

              Let’s hope the service and information industries win the crucial fight with extractive industries for control of the wheel, and very soon.

              It’s very possible that an energy war, say between Iran and KSA would the shock needed, but I wouldn’t vote for that – wars are unpredictable, and can be great tools for demagogues and reactionaries.

  12. OT:
    1945 — Ukrainian division of Soviet Army frees surviving Auschwitz prisoners.

  13. What happens as EROEI reduces as we go over the energy cliff?
    Let’s hear from Dr. Charles Hall in his reverse look at what energy can do from the source up.

    “Drill, baby, drill” has become a slogan of those who want to produce more oil and gas and who scoff at alternatives to petroleum. But rarely mentioned is the expense required to get that oil and gas—and still more rarely mentioned is the energy required to access those resources.

    Charles Hall, an ecologist at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse, has spent most of his long career trying to get fellow researchers and the public to take a serious look at the energy required to get the energy we use. He is given credit for creating a measure known as the energy return on investment, or EROI—the ratio of energy output over energy input. (With oil, for example, the energy output would be the crude oil produced, and the energy input would be all that required to find the oil reservoir, drill the well and pump the oil out of the ground.) EROI is a crucial metric, Hall argues, because it helps us see which energy sources are high quality and which are not.

    Hall and his students did pioneering work in this area, including a 1984 paper on the cover of Science. For many years, however, interest in the topic languished. But recent soaring oil prices and increasing difficulty of accessing new supplies have helped create economic hardships, leading to resurgent interest in EROI. Scientific American asked Hall to explain the basis of the EROI and how it pertains to our economy.

    You’re a self-described “nature boy” who became an ecologist. So how did you create the idea of energy return on investment (EROI)?

    I had this unbelievable doctoral advisor, H. T. Odum of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. He said, “Well, Charlie, I don’t think anyone has thought about fish migration from a systems perspective.”

    I went down to the coast of North Carolina, looking for a place where I could do this research. And I found one: in this freshwater environment, where fish weren’t supposed to be migrating, they were migrating like crazy.

    And you approached this migration mystery from an energy-use perspective. How did you do that?

    I measured the ecosystem productivity by the free-water oxygen technique. I measured it at five different places, upstream and downstream, and found some very clear patterns. The energy available to the fish was much more concentrated as you went upstream, and I developed this theory that the fish would migrate to capitalize on the abundance of energy for the first year or two of the life, and then the young fish would migrate downstream into a more stable but less productive environment.
    The study found that fish populations that migrated would return at least four calories for every calorie they invested in the process of migration by being able to exploit different ecosystems of different productivity at different stages of their life cycles.

    So from studying fish migration, was it a big leap to think about people and fossil fuels?

    No, probably because Howard Odum was evolving in his thought processes. He wrote a book Environment, Power and Society at about that time. An amazing thing working with Odum was, for him, there are just systems. It doesn’t matter if it’s a forested system or a stream system or an estuarine system, or whether people are there or not. It’s just a system—and systems have many similar patterns and many similar processes of consumption and production, and they often even have similar controls on them.

    So, it was not difficult for me, because I was trained that way from Howard Odum. Also, when I was a graduate student there were a lot of very exciting things going on. Ecologists were much more involved—not just in biodiversity, which is where much of the focus is today, but in dealing with important issues of the relation of humans to resources. Paul Ehrlich [author of The Population Bomb (1968)], Garrett Hardin [known for his 1968 Science paper “The Tragedy of the Commons”], George Woodwell [founder of the Woods Hole Research Center], many other people—these were very influential to me as a graduate student.

    For society’s energy sources, is it important to consider EROI?

    Is there a lot of oil left in the ground? Absolutely. The question is, how much oil can we get out of the ground, at a significantly high EROI? And the answer to that is, hmmm, not nearly as much. So that’s what we’re struggling with as we go further and further offshore and have to do this fracking and horizontal drilling and all of this kind of stuff, especially when you get away from the sweet spots of shale formations. It gets tougher and tougher to get the next barrel of oil, so the EROI goes down, down, down.

    Is there some minimum EROI we need to have?

    Since everything we make depends on energy, you can’t simply pay more and more and get enough to run society. At some energy return on investment—I’m guessing 5:1 or 6:1—it doesn’t work anymore.

    What happens when the EROI gets too low? What’s achievable at different EROIs?

    If you’ve got an EROI of 1.1:1, you can pump the oil out of the ground and look at it. If you’ve got 1.2:1, you can refine it and look at it. At 1.3:1, you can move it to where you want it and look at it. We looked at the minimum EROI you need to drive a truck, and you need at least 3:1 at the wellhead. Now, if you want to put anything in the truck, like grain, you need to have an EROI of 5:1. And that includes the depreciation for the truck. But if you want to include the depreciation for the truck driver and the oil worker and the farmer, then you’ve got to support the families. And then you need an EROI of 7:1. And if you want education, you need 8:1 or 9:1. And if you want health care, you need 10:1 or 11:1.

    Civilization requires a substantial energy return on investment. You can’t do it on some kind of crummy fuel like corn-based ethanol [with an EROI of around 1:1].

    As we bump up against limits we will depend heavily on past energy and accomplishments and consumption will slow down as future “progress” becomes more limited.

    To get a view of power needed to maintain a system, a typical human runs on 100 watts. The United States operates on 10,000 watts per capita.
    Another way to look at it is the number of solar panels it would take per capita to produce that much energy (sans storage). It would take about 200 PV panels per capita or a total of 65 billion panels.
    Due to the inherent efficiency of direct electric over combustion and forced efficiency (operating against growing population and advancing technology), it might only take half of that or maybe three quarters as many panels. Then again, we can’t predict energy demand in an increasingly chaotic and damaged world.

    1. As we bump up against limits we will depend heavily on past energy and accomplishments and consumption will slow down as future “progress” becomes more limited.

      Yeah, there might be a bit of a bottleneck where we’d need to cut down on low-value energy consumption temporarily.

      Car pooling. The Horror.

    2. I wonder what the EROI of cutting down and burning a 20 inch diameter oak/teak/mahaogany/hickory/willow is?
      I suspect we are going to find out on continent level scale, once again, and again.

      I read an interesting thing recently related. Cyprus was the primary source of Cu for copper and then bronze, before iron casting, throughout the Mediterranean/Mesopotamia region. They have calculated that over the 3000 yr period, the entire tree cover of Cyprus would have had to been completely harvested at least 16 times to provide the energy for ore smelting.

      1. Fortunately, wind turbines and solar PV are cheaper and more efficient energy sources than wood, in most places.

        It won’t be that hard, relatively speaking, to replace gas and coal for electrical generation, and to replace oil with EVs. Wind and solar are now much cheaper than gas and coal ever were. For instance, US electrical generation would only have to increase by 20% to replace all light vehicle oil consumption. Do that over 20 years and it’s only 1% growth per year, less than the traditional 2% per year that utility executives used to rely on, before LEDs screwed things up for them.

        1. We will not get anywhere close to this comfortable transition energy goals you mention in the next 2-3 decades if GF is anywhere close on this projection-
          “To get a view of power needed to maintain a system, a typical human runs on 100 watts. The United States operates on 10,000 watts per capita.
          Another way to look at it is the number of solar panels it would take per capita to produce that much energy (sans storage). It would take about 200 PV panels per capita or a total of 65 billion panels.”

          1. That number is very roughly 3 times too high.

            Why? Because that relies on converting primary energy into electricity, which you can’t really do. It’s a reasonable error: the US EIA publishes overall statistics on the amount of energy used by the US economy, and they tend to put it in terms of heat. Last time I checked, they reported that the US economy used 97 quadrillion BTUs, or 97 quads.

            And a quick Google search will tell you that 3,412 BTUs equals a kilowatt hour.. But… That’s not really true. Really about 3 times as many BTUs is equal to a kilowatt hour. That’s because electricity is generated with heat engines that are roughly 33% efficient. Also, transportation uses heat engines which are at (or below) the same level of efficiency. And, any sensible person who’s going to heat their house with electricity will use a heat pump, which has a coefficient of performance in the range of 4:1.

            Bottom line: energy in the form of electricity is about 3 times as useful as energy in the form of heat.

            And, wind turbines and solar panels produce electricity, not heat.

            P.s. don’t forget efficiency gains, which as GF has pointed out, have enormous potential.

            1. Transport is more efficient as it converts to direct electricity from PV and wind power, which could take 40 to 50 years. Also bio-energy will most likely still be in play so the efficiency gets shot to hell there.
              Much of the energy in the US is for agriculture, industrial and commercial heating. Heating is near 100 percent efficient now, so no real change there. Please don’t try to tell me that industrial and commercial process heat will come from heat pumps.
              Residential heating can be heat pumps but I have better ways so that houses won’t need most of the PV for heating, they can put their 30 to 40 panels on for their cars. Of course the cars don’t need that much either, but stupid keeps happening.

              The number is high if one does not take into account time and growth. We are talking about a nation of entitled self-serving over-consumptive people who do not really want any limits.
              That means that by the time that enough PV and wind is installed to take over just the electric power needs of today, the power needs will have doubled, the transport near doubled and the other energy needs will be near doubled making a huge gap.

              Unless drastic measures of degrowth and efficiency are taken. Or the population and economy drops due to collapse (more likely).

              Globally transport is only 10 percent of the GHG source while electric power is another 25%. So completely replacing those would cut about 1/3 of the problem. By the time that is done another 2 billion people will be on the planet (at least) and another 2 billion more will have risen in carbon footprint … so say the projections.

              Not sure how 1 or 2 percent of anything can catch up to that kind of growth in any reasonable time period without totally trashing the planet.
              The most likely scenario is that renewable energy will act as additional energy for the next 40 to 50 years and higher efficiency will increase use. Until the wall is hit.

            2. “That number… 3 times… primary energy… electricity… error… overall statistics… amount of energy… heat… 97 quadrillion BTUs… 97 quads… 3,412 BTUs… kilowatt hour… 3 times as many BTUs… equal to a kilowatt hour… heat… 33%… heat engines… heat pump… coefficient of performance… 4:1… 3 times…” ~ Nick G

              Many people were number-crunching awesomely and with great confidence too, way back when, on all manner of things, and yet here we are:

              Wastelands.

            3. Too true, twisted mentalities build twisted worlds. Historical baggage drags everyone down.

    3. That next to last paragraph, beginning, “If you’ve got an EROI of 1.1:1,” is a work of absolute brilliance.

  15. Self-driving cars will not fix our transportation woes

    “The prevailing belief is that a system of self-driving cars will solve several environmental and social problems without us needing to worry about messy stuff like politics, activism or changing our travel habits.

    Unfortunately, this future will almost certainly never come to pass. Self-driving cars, left to their own devices, will likely do more harm than good…

    …In short: Autonomous vehicles will not automatically drive us to a better transportation future. We’ll have to take the wheel ourselves.”

    1. No they won’t fix everything all by themselves, but self-driving cars combined with 100% renewable energy, battery-powered airplanes and a reduction in single-use plastics in packaging would immediately solve most of our biggest problems.

      1. William

        Unfortunately hydrocarbon liquid consumption is still increasing by over a million barrels per day each year.
        Coal consumption remains near all time highs and gas consumption is increasing at record rates.

        Renewable energy makes up 1% of the energy the world uses.

        https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics

        The trouble with global warming is the worst effects will not happen for 50 years.

        Unemployed hungry people can start revolutions today,

        https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/09/situation-dire-argentinians-protest-food-crisis-190913062627019.html

        That is why China is creating more jobs in coal mining because coal is very cheap and produces lots of power, it is not dependent on it being windy or sunny. When is is pitch black and freezing cold, coal will warm peoples houses.

        https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-china-coal-climate/china-coal-mine-approvals-surge-despite-climate-pledges-idUKKCN1UW0EM

  16. I did some calculations using realistic assumptions and real-life data regarding issues of energy cost for Electric vehicles (EV) vs Gasoline, and Solar (Photovoltaic (PV), that some of you may find of considerable interest.
    First I will list some of the conclusions, then the assumptions underlying the calculations, followed by a more detailed run-through for those who want to wade through the mire themselves. If anyone wants me to do the calculation for their particular state, I be glad to.

    First, some results-
    -An average EV sedan will utilize 4,200 kWh/yr to drive 14,600 miles. At national average grid price (11 cents/kWh) that is total of $462 of electrical energy/yr.
    -Gasoline would have to cost less than 95 cents/gallon to be a better deal than average electricity rates in this country to beat the EV energy cost, if the electricity comes from the average grid.
    -For the cloudier states like PA or VT you would need 12 panels (330W) to provide the full annual electricity for the EV to travel 14,600 miles.
    -Using average PV purchase and installation costs for the nation ($3.18/watt year 2020), the 12 panel system would cost $8,815, which equates to less than $0.03 /mile over a duration 25 years
    -Gasoline would have to average $0.88/gallon for the next 25 years to give you such a good deal on energy/mile.
    -For 22 sunnier states, a 9 panel system would suffice, and the system cost would be $6611, and gasoline would have to cost $0.66 over 25 years to as good a deal for fuel cost.
    _______________________________________________________________________

    Some assumptions used for these calculations, and qualifications-
    -$3.18/watt installed PV system USA average for 2020, can be beaten. I got my system for $2.43, for example
    -assumption EV sedan gets 3.5 miles/kwh, and gasoline sedan get 30 mph
    -federal tax credit 30% for PV residential system is in play
    -the PV output data is average for a particular state full sun for 6 hours. Variations within a state not accounted for in this data.
    -PV system degradation is accounted for [results in a 25 yr annual mileage equivalent of 12,000 miles rather than the 14,600 the system can initially produce]

    I will add a followup note immediately following that may not look pretty- but has more on the calculation process and background used for these conclusions. I’m pretty such this analysis is reliable and reasonable, feel free to correct me on any points you find off the wall.

    1. Notes for the above-
      This can be totally ignored if you are not interested in hashing through the details.

      Calculating Solar PV requirements and cost vs gasoline for a sedan going 14,600 miles/yr-
      EV- Miles/kwhr
      Hyundai Kona 3.75
      Tesla 3 3.94
      Nissan Leaf 3.95
      Average American drives 29 miles/day or 10,698/yr

      Let round down to 3.5 miles per kwhr and round up to 40 miles/day [14,600 miles/yr]
      1). How much solar energy needed to account for your EV vehicle miles purchased from the grid?
      4,200 kwhr/yr electricity needed. [calculation 14,600 miles/3.5 miles/kwhr]
      National average price is 11 cents/kwhr or $462 of electrical energy/yr. [calc 4200 x 11 cents]
      2).Lets compare this to gasoline. Lets say your sedan averages 30 mpg , then 14,600 miles would use 487 gallons/yr. Gasoline would have to cost less than 95 cents to be a better deal than average electricity in this country. [calculation $0.95 x 487 gallon= 462]
      3).How many panels(330W) to create enough electricity for 1 sedan for the yr (14,600 miles)
      Calif 7.7
      Colorado 8
      FL,GA,TX,MO- 8.6
      The cloudiest lower 48 states- 12
      Note these are average output numbers for a state, and some locales may be better or worse than others within the state.
      [calc- using the data on the map- https://www.solar-estimate.org/solar-panels-101/how-much-do-solar-panels-produce ex- PA 3.0 kwh/day x 365 = 1095 kwh/yr/kW panels installed. We need 4200 kwhr production, so we need 4200/1095 or 3.84kW of panel installed. Each panel is assumed to be 330W like I have (Panasonic) . 3.84kW/330W= 11.6, or 12 panels total]
      For the worse states
      12 panels (330W times 12 = 3.96kW) x $3.18/watt 2020 USA average installation cost = $12,593
      After 30% Fed tax credit equals $8,815 [calc 12,593 x 0.7= 8815]
      So $ 8,815 PV solar can provide 14,600 miles/yr in the cloudier states for 25 years. Lets say its 12,000 miles over 25 yr (accounting for some PV degradation) = 300,000 miles, or 2.94 cents/mile. Yes, that is less than 3 cents/mile for fuel.
      Gasoline would have to be 88 cents a gallon for the next 25 years to match that.
      [calc 300,000 miles / 30 mpg = 10,000 gallons $8,815 / 10,000 = 88 cents/gallon]

      1. If we stick with current designs a two car house will need at least 24 PV panels plus a large battery to charge cars at night. In some places, like where I live and north of there, the winter insolation is much lower than average so PV would have to be more than two times the average to drive around in that season. Unless one wants to depend on the grid (coal, natural gas, bio, nuclear, renewable) as the main power source and just feed the grid during the day with grid tied solar.

        However, the numbers of are much better than you think Hickory, or at least they can be.
        The latest version of the Aptera goes 100 miles on 10 kWh giving it a 1000 mile range on a 100 kWh battery.
        Cars are being built with super capacitor assist, in-wheel motors and solar panel assist making a sedan twice as efficient as a Tesla. Soon we will see cars that need no charging if driven in town (where lower speeds give twice the rated range) and not for long range on the highway, just solar panels will be enough.
        Lightweight carbon fiber body cars can make vehicles more efficient and stronger.

        So maybe those 10 to 15% of people who can take advantage of solar panels on the roof and buy EV’s will not need much of their roof area to charge two cars. The cars may even be powering the house part of the time.
        The rest will have to depend upon the grid for most or some of their charging. It will be decades before the grid could be converted to mostly renewable energy, if power demand does not increase. Wind and PV will have to increase even more rapidly as heating and industrial/commericial production convert more to electric power.
        Global energy demand increased by over 2 percent just in 2018 which is about twice the total wind and PV output for all existing. It’s going to be a while.

      2. Hickory

        Did you price in the cost of a new electric car compared to a new petrol car?

        https://www.hyundaiusa.com/venue/index.aspx?intcmp=in-page%20cta;vehicles-2020%20venue;image;;

        The Venue starting price $16,850.

        The Kona electric starting price at $37,190

        https://www.hyundaiusa.com/kona-electric/index.aspx?intcmp=in-page%20cta;vehicles-2020%20kona%20electric;image;;

        The $20,340 price difference is quite considerable. Many people could buy the Venue with little or no finance, a Kona electric on finance would cost another $3,000 to $5,000 in interest.

        I have heard talk of electric vehicles coming down in price for years and it has simply not happened.

        Getting back to your solar panel and electric car scenario costed over 25 years $12,593 for the solar panels. How much does maintenance cost?
        The average age of a car is 11.5 year, let say 3 Konas over that time = $111,000 + $12,593
        $123,000

        Compared to the cost of 3 Venues at $17,000 = $51,000 + $48,000 for fuel = $99,000

        If I had $20,000 saved up. would I buy a Venue for cash, pay for my insurance cash and still have $2,000 spare or do I buy half a car and the rest on finance?

        1. Hi Wayne.
          No, car cost not factored in here.
          This exercise was purely designed to consider the energy operating costs.
          The Hyndai Kona has both an EV version and petrol version (that conveniently gets epa 30 mpg) so I used these comparable cars for rough purposes. These two Hyndai Konas are obviously otherwise similar in most other aspects.
          It will be interesting to do this analysis in a few years when we have comparable pickup trucks to analyze.
          And it will be interesting to do this analysis in mid decade after oil has peaked.

          Maintenance costs with EV are much lower than with petrol vehicle.
          The average longevity of the EV battery pack is an unknown as of yet, although some people have been doing well out to ten years.
          Maintenance for PV array on a home is minimal. The only significant factor is the inverter. This may need replacement – average longevity is 10-15 yrs.

          Another way to look at this data is ‘projected money saved over 25 years (a reasonable minimum lifespan of a PV system), by using EV with home charging vs petrol’.
          Of course we don’t know the average cost a gallon of petrol over the next 25 yrs.
          But here are a few examples, using the same factors as prior-
          Average cost over 25 yrs of gas/PV charging in a cloudy state savings
          $3.00 / $27,710
          $4.00 / $39,885
          $5.00 / $52,060
          $6.00 / $64,235
          Obviously this assumes that you can still purchase gas over the entire 25 yr period, and that ICE replacement vehicles over the 25 period are available.

          Also note- in 6 years of driving a petrol Hyundai Kona getting 30 mpg for 14,600miles/yr, you will use 2,922 gallons of gas. If gas is $3.00/gallon, in 6 yrs you will spend more on gas than the whole PV system would cost. The avoided cost could have paid for your system with about 2 more decades of energy at close to zero cost. And this pertains to a cloudy state, better equation in a sunny one.

          1. Hi Hickory

            It will be interesting to see how prices change over the next 5 years. I do not see much of a fall in the cost of a new electric vehicle. They will have a better range for the same price.

            I do not see oil prices going that high.
            In 2008 when oil prices hit $148, petrol prices reached $4.40 before falling back.

            For a gallon of petrol to hit $6 a gallon, oil prices would have to be $220 a barrel. Much of the world could not afford anything like that price, so demand destruction would occur well before $200.

            If electric cars do become substantially cheaper, then electric vehicles will start to sell in large numbers. I hope that happens.

            1. Yes it will be interesting to see where the price of batteries go, and gas.
              I am not as optimistic as you on gasoline being cheap and readily available after peak, which will be pretty soon.

            2. Are you worried about shortages, and people waiting in line at gas stations for gas?

              If the balance of supply and demand shifts reasonably slowly (see below), it will mean that prices rise until enough people reduce their consumption and put supply and demand back in balance.

              The best response, of course, is for transportation to electrify: people would shift to hybrids and EVs, freight would shift to rail and electric trucks, etc. But, if price pressures were strong enough there would be a “rush to the exits” and there would be a delay in ramping up production to the levels needed. In the meantime, conservation would be the rule: that might include trucks and light vehicles slowing down; container ships slowing down; people shifting to more efficient vehicles (parents put the SUV on ice, and commuting is done in the Corolla that used to be driven by the teenager in the family); shopping shifts online; carpooling and trains; etc.

              I think a lot of people who worry about shortages are remembering the lines at the pump that happened in the summer of 1979. It might help to remember that those lines were the result of people panicking and filling up their tanks. 150 million vehicles attempting to go overnight from half full to all full emptied out the gas stations, and presto, lines and shortages! Those shortages lasted for weeks, but they were completely artificial.

            3. Globally, crude oil use is huge and over the next 20 yrs, supply will have peaked and significantly declined.. Meanwhile the population will reach about 9.2 B. Thats like adding another China.
              Yes, I do think that oil shortage will come much faster than electrification of transport.
              An equilibrium will come subsequently, the very hard way.
              Some places will fair better than others.
              The miraculous version of events- a smooth transition- has a very low likelihood of being achieved, in my view.
              To expect a smooth transition allows a very lackadaisical approach to change.
              That is the stance of the world currently.
              And no this is not a 1970’s story.

              You may see it playing out in a more pleasant scenario. Time will tell.

              ex. S.Korea has a very big industrial economy, importing over 90% of total energy consumed. I don’t see a smooth down path. Energy shortage will likely force economic contraction. You are not going to want to witness it.

            6. Oil production will definitely decline and those countries who produce oil will have the better of the collapse event as it plays out.

              Countries that import virtually all their oil will have a terrible time. South Korea, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, Bangladesh and dozens of others will see famine, riots and horrible unrest. And the haves will be invaded by massive swarms of people from the have-nots.

              It has all been portrayed in the novel, The Camp of The Saints, by the Frenchman Jean Raspail.

              Many people complained that this novel is racist. And it is. But racism and every form of xenophobia will raise its ugly head during the collapse. It won’t be pretty.

              This book was written in 1973 yet it describes exactly what is happening right now across Europe, the invasion of the have-nots from Africa and Eastern Asia. And of course there is Trump and his wall with the attempt to keep the have-nots from Central America out.

              Those who think the transition from fossil fuel to a scarcity of fossil fuel will be relatively painless are simply living in a dream world.

            7. Hickory,

              This is a large topic which could wander all over the place, so I’ll just throw out a few thoughts that seem relatively important.

              If you’ve followed my comments over time you’ll know that I advocate moving away from oil ASAP. There are a lot of reasons why oil is harmful: it’s expensive, polluting (both conventional and GHG), causes war, causes corruption and inequality, etc., etc. And that leads to a basic question here, a basic point of view that helps shapes one’s expectations and ideas about the best public policies:

              Is oil essential? Or, is it mostly obsolete?

              If you think oil is essential then Peak Oil seems like a disaster, an inevitable cataclysm that will leave everyone worse off. Believing that oil is essential tends to lead to pro-oil polices ( “drill, baby, drill”), not policies leading away from oil.

              On the other hand, if you think oil’s time is over, then PO can look like an opportunity to do what we should have done already: move away from oil ASAP.

              I would argue that every day that we stick with oil causes enormous harm. Forward looking public policies away from oil are the optimum thing, of course: that would be the path of least pain. But, if we’re forced to transition away from oil by a geological peak, that would be better than if there were unlimited oil, even if it’s somewhat chaotic.

              And the level of chaos that we expect from an unplanned, forced move away from oil depends on what we think of oil. If we think oil is essential, we’ll tend to expect the worst. If we think oil has substitutes, ones that are mostly superior to oil, we’ll be less worried.

              There’s much more to say (like the importance and relative easiness of efficiency and conservation to handle short term problems), but I think that’s enough for one comment.

            8. Nick,
              “Is oil essential? Or, is it mostly obsolete?”

              I see it like this.
              Oil is absolutely essential, right now,
              and for, at minimum, until its energy provided is replaced or no longer critical for operations.
              Until then , yes, essential.
              Maybe not for you, but for most of the 7.8 Billion, soon to be 7.9
              To the tune of about about 90 Millions Barrels every day.
              Picture how big a stack that is.
              By all means yes, lets replace it.
              We are late to that task, and
              now depletion is at the doorstep.

              Lets remember, this isn’t theoretical.

            9. Hickory,

              I think we agree on the important stuff:

              1) It’s possible to transition away from oil and FF in general; and

              2) We should transition away from oil & FF ASAP!

              It’s nice to put that out there, clearly and succinctly. Now…on to quibbling over smaller things, like adaptation to oil shocks.

              The history of oil is a long line of applications which have been replaced by better and cheaper alternatives: the first 30 years of oil was basically kerosene for illumination, which was replaced by electric light; Edison’s first electric generation plants were oil-fired, and 20% of US generation was oil-fired in 1979; space heating was big for a long time;, etc.

              Some perceptions of this question have been shaped by out dated assumptions, such as the idea that only liquid fuels can replace oil, or that the only viable replacements are biofuels. A faulty study several years ago (Robert Hirsch) concluded that mitigating Peak Oil would be expensive and slow, but it completely excluded EVs and hydrogen from the analysis!

              A lot of what we’re discussing about oil shocks comes under the heading of “demand elasticity”: the measurement of the impact of oil price changes on consumption. This is a straightforward topic of mainstream economic analysis.
              Here’s an example. which provides some background: https://www.federalreserve.gov/econresdata/ifdp/2016/files/ifdp1173.pdf

            10. Hickory

              Did I say oil would be cheap?

              Firstly you have to understand oil production will not suddenly stop growing. As more countries hit peak production, the ability of the world to increase production will diminish.
              I think oil production will increase at a slower rate, with increasing prices over 7/10 years.
              Growth could fall to 900 thousand, 800 thousand and so on until every country is producing at maximum.
              Higher prices in 3/4 years will bring on more Canadian oil, shale oil etc. This will slow decline rates to less than 0.5%.
              Iran can come back on line, China could buy PDVSA. The way the Chinese do things, they could reverse production decline in a couple of years. Venezuela has vast reserves of heavy oil that has already been proved to be viable at $80.

              The gradual increase in oil, will incentivize the increase in sales of electric cars. Perhaps 10 million per year will be sold in 2025 and 20 million by 2030.

              If oil prices are consistently over $150 then sales of electric vehicles could be double that.

            11. I saw a new video (posted 4 days ago) from Tony Seba:

              Future of Transportation / Keynote: 2020 NC DOT Transportation Summit (youtube video)

              He is doubling down on his claims that the internal combustion engine will be essentially obsolete in most forms of ground transport by around 2025. In this video he claims that next year, 2021, will be a tipping point where electric cars come down in price to make them competitive with their ICE powered counterparts. He also claims that by 2025 there will be EVs with a single charge range of 200 miles priced as low as $12,000. (34 min. 3 secs. in)

              There are certainly quite a few interesting things happening in the EV space. It will be interesting to see what the state of play is at the end of this year.

    2. That’s perfectly fine. Thoughts:

      the average passenger vehicle on the road in the US (as opposed to new vehicles) only gets about 23MPG. FWIW.

      EVs have much lower maintenance costs, ranging from 1/3 as much brake wear to no oil changes. That’s a very big reason dealers hate, hate, hate EVs, and why Tesla can’t ever sell through dealers: dealers make the majority of their profit on repairs and maintenance, and EVs just aren’t a profitable business model for them. This means that Tesla has a very large advantage over legacy car makers: the old companies have to sell through dealers, and the dealers are going to fight EVs every inch of the way. We see this over and over: EVs are on supposed to be on the floor, and salespeople are supposed to sell them, but the EVs are impossible to find and the salespeople steer customers away from them. Dealers are an enormous problem and barrier for legacy car makers.

      EVs are quieter and safer. And…EVs are faster and much more fun to drive.

      1. That is why I suspect that fleet sales will dominate early EV sales. Fleet cars travel more, and fleet managers have more experience and better numbers than private buyers, so the can do the math.

        1. That makes sense.

          I’ve seen some corporate fleet managers resist new ideas. And I have the impression that in Europe (and Germany especially) that personally assigned corporate cars are an important perk for employees – they also may resist new things, especially the Germans who seem to be are afraid of EVs threatening their national status symbols (Daimler, VW, etc).

          On the other hand, many fleets are used in a relatively small geographical area and use a central refueling depot, which is perfect for EVs. Utilities especially love eating their own cooking.

          We’ll get there eventually. Sooner would be better…

      2. EVs are quieter and safer. And…EVs are faster and much more fun to drive.

        Quieter….not only fun for cyclists for example. I experienced that with an electric bus in a city in Switserland. It could have costed me my life. That’s why they consider of letting EV’s make artificial noise.

        1. Yeah, I’ve seen proposals like that to help visually handicapped pedestrians hear oncoming EV traffic. I wonder if anyone has proposed that for bicycles?

          1. Cyclists are required by law to have a bell in many countries. Ringing the bell when they see someone in their path usually is usually enough at the slow speeds involved.

            Depends on the pedestrian being accustomed to the bell. My brother was run over while standing in the middle of a bike path in Berlin. He heard the bell but didn’t make the connection and didn’t know he was standing on a bike path. He wasn’t hurt, but the cyclist was. The police blamed the cyclist for riding too fast in a busy area.

        2. If you drive an EV, you need to be conscious of a couple of things. One is the vehicle is very fast and you can surprise other drivers who don’t know how quickly you can get beside or in front of them. And the other, of course, is how quiet they are. The solution is to recognize this and give everyone a break/brake so as to not cause any unexpected encounters. Patience is key.

          1. I had a minor accident in an EV because I didn’t realize how responsive it was, and I accelerated too fast…

  17. Is Meat Now a No-No on the Awards Show Circuit?
    by Sharon Swart

    https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/is-meat-now-a-no-no-awards-show-circuit-1271575

    As the Globes, Critics’ Choice Awards, SAG Awards and WME opt for plant-based menus, pressure is on Oscar-season events to send the right message: “Everybody is concerned about the environment.”

    The 2020 Golden Globe Awards sparked a sea change when the Hollywood Foreign Press Association switched the dinner menu to all plant-based ingredients, a first for a major awards show. The Critics’ Choice Awards and the Screen Actors Guild Awards then followed suit, as will WME for its Oscar weekend party (catered by vegan restaurant Nic’s on Beverly).

    Other awards-season soirees are now feeling the heat in the kitchen as organizers scramble to figure out what will send the right message. So far, the Academy has not declared whether its Governors Ball will go all-vegan. Last year, it presented 15 vegan dishes, along with meat and fish, courtesy of chef Wolfgang Puck.

    Not everyone can go vegan, some organizers say. “Our meal will include a vegan option, but as this is a fundraiser, we provide all meal options for guests purchasing tables,” a rep for the Elton John AIDS Foundation Oscar party says. In-N-Out burgers have been served at Vanity Fair’s Oscar party for several years. A magazine spokesperson says plans for 2020 are not yet finalized.

    “We are seeing a lot of changes and I think it is because of people making big bold strokes,” musician Linda Perry told The Hollywood Reporter on Jan. 15 at Sean Penn’s Core gala. “Being vegan really means it’s better for the world. The dairy industry kills the ozone. There are so many things that meat and dairy do to the planet that’s not good. So being vegan is helping.”

  18. Creationist to lead Brazil’s higher education
    “Electrical engineer Benedito Guimarães Aguiar Neto, the former rector of a private religious university, has been tapped to lead the agency that oversees Brazil’s graduate study programmes. Aguiar Neto advocates for intelligent design and has said that it should be introduced into Brazil’s basic education curricula as “a counterpoint to the theory of evolution”.

      1. Not really. When Pence becomes default president the last sentence will read like this-

        “advocates for intelligent design and has said that it should be introduced into America’s basic education curricula as “a replacement for the theory of evolution”.

          1. Mike Pence is an idiot. We have known for decades that there were many lineages of the Hominidae Familly. They have all gone extinct except one. The fact that Mike Pense thinks it is a new theory just shows what a dumb fucking idiot he really is.

            Homo sapiens are primates of the Family Hominidae and are the only living species of their genus. This lineage originated 200 thousand years ago in Eastern Africa and have since spread to all corners of the world.

        2. “There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”

          ― Issac Asimov

          1. Highrekker

            I take it you believe in evolution?

            The theory of evolution says. Simple celled creatures evolved.
            That is a nice simple phase to teach children. However when you break it down you have to believe that DNA started to construct itself over time. During that time, contrary to modern scientific experiments this incomplete DNA did not break down. Somehow it remained intact adding more information to itself.
            Then of course mRNA came along which somehow knew how to decode the DNA.

            What do you think stopped the DNA breaking down and enabled it to be decoded into a living single cell.

            1. I believe in evolution as does just about everyone who has not been brainwashed by the religious establishment. Religion creates bullshit that dumbasses like Pence and Trump. You are talking about Intelligent Design, which Christians and other religious people believe because they cannot imagine slow evolution.

              If RNA is in fact the ancestor to DNA, then scientists have figured they could get RNA to replicate itself in a lab without the help of any proteins or other cellular machinery. Easy to say, hard to do. But that’s exactly what the Scripps researchers did.

              Of course, DNA evolved from RNA because the translation and transcription processes run around RNA. with that, viruses and other small microbes are found to have RNA as their genetic material.

              DNA evolved!

            2. Ron

              Actually

              The scientist who believe in creation almost all started off as evolutionary biologists.

              The fact is your statement that rna evolved should be provable. Many many scientist have tried to show spontaneous evolution. and the come up with the exact opposite.

              You have a belief, nothing more and nothing less.

              As for religious brainwashing. I think believing there are eternal consequences for good and evil is a very frightening concept.

            3. Wayne, get over it. DNA is decomposed by enzymes and bacteria, When other life didn’t exist to break it down, it has a half life of over 500 years and is completely disintegrated in 7 million years ( and that is from sample preserved while other ancient life existed).

              In the “primordial soup”, today’s degradation conditions did not exist.
              “It is often said that all the conditions for the first production of a living being are now present, which could ever have been present. But if (and oh what a big if) we could conceive in some warm little pond with all sort of ammonia and phosphoric salts,—light, heat, electricity present, that a protein compound was chemically formed, ready to undergo still more complex changes, at the present such matter would be instantly devoured, or absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed […].”

              — Charles Darwin, Letter to Joseph Dalton Hooker on February 1, 1871

              “When ultra-violet light acts on a mixture of water, carbon dioxide, and ammonia, a vast variety of organic substances are made, including sugars and apparently some of the materials from which proteins are built up. […] before the origin of life they must have accumulated till the primitive oceans reached the consistency of hot dilute soup.”

              — J. B. S. Haldane, The Origin of Life

              Now life eats up any organic molecules that form, and life eats up other life so complex molecules exist in organized protected forms.

            4. I’ve viewed documentaries about nature’s reactions to the Chernobyl nuclear accident, and in some examples, if recalled correctly, the pronounced radiation in particular areas caused biological decay to slow because there were less living microbiota to decompose the biologic material. Nevertheless, it seems that many animals are doing ok in some ‘exclusion zones’, if with some possible genetic damage.

              In A Beautiful Place Out In The Country

            5. Gonefishing

              Get over it.

              RNA nor DNA form spontaneously, no matter how many complex molecules there are.

              That is why sterilized meat, fish or plant matter do not give rise to new forms of life.
              Even though they contain vast amounts of complex carbohydrates, amino acids etc.

              Simply never happens. That is why scientists who worked all their lives trying to work out how life began. Do not have a clue how it happened.

            6. RNA nor DNA form spontaneously, no matter how many complex molecules there are.

              Wayne, you need to get over it. It is just so damn obvious that you understand absolutely nothing about evolution. “Spontaneously” is a word an evolutionary biologist would never use. Nothing ever happens spontaneously in evolution. Evolution means change over time.

              The RNA molecule evolved, very slowly, over time. The DNA molecule evolved, very slowly, from the RNA molecule. The first RNA molecules were so simple they likely would hardly be recognized as RNA. In fact, there was likely no first RNA molecule just as there was never a “first man”.

              Homo sapiens evolved from earlier hominids, that is erect, bipedal, primate mammals. But it was a very slow process. There was never a “first man”. Likewise, there was never a first RNA molecule and there was never a first DNA molecule. What the RNA molecule evolved from would not be recognized as an RNA molecule. Ditto for the DNA molecule.

              So just get over your “spontaneous” bullshit. That word is never used when describing evolution.

            7. Wayne childishly moaned:
              “Gonefishing

              Get over it. (copying my words exposes you)

              RNA nor DNA form spontaneously, no matter how many complex molecules there are.

              That is why sterilized meat, fish or plant matter do not give rise to new forms of life.
              Even though they contain vast amounts of complex carbohydrates, amino acids etc.”

              That god in your head is a devilish one. Makes you talk gibberish.
              Well, if you actually comprehended the science, yes organic molecules do form in simulations of primitive earth conditions.
              But lets’ get down to the real reasons creationists refute the logical constructs of civilization and reality in general (beside thought suppression and thought control for a an agenda of societal control). Let’s go deeper.

              Having a persoanl god create the cosmos allows humans to delude themselves into believing they are superior, above all the other living creatures on the earth and have dominion over it. It allows the delusion of being little gods, kings and queens. It justifies the destruction of the ecosystems, the other living beings on this planet. It justifies the killing and enslavement of both humans and other creatures. It justifies acting like the devil who so many pretend to fear, when it is their god that supposedly will send them to burn in hell forever. The god and devil are just in the heads of people. Stories to frighten the less competent and use the concepts to falsely elevate human. Yet the actions of humans betray themselves. They are just the opposite of what they pretend to be.

              “But man, proud man,
              Dress’d in a little brief authority,
              Most ignorant of what he’s most assur’d—
              His glassy essence—like an angry ape
              Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
              As makes the angels weep; who, with our spleens,
              Would all themselves laugh mortal.”
              Shakespeare

            8. The scientist(s) who believe in creation(ism) almost all started off as evolutionary biologists.

              First of all, there are damn few scientists who believe in creationism. Almost all creationists, if they have any degree at all, it is in theology. The vast majority of creationists believe that bullshit because it was pounded into their head since birth.

              You want it proven that RNA evolved yet you offer not one shred of proof that Yahweh created it. (I take it that Yahweh is your god of choice.)

              Many many scientist(s) have tried to show spontaneous evolution. and the come up with the exact opposite.

              There is no such thing as spontaneous evolution. The word “evolution” means “change over time”. Therefore the words “spontaneous” and “evolution” are contradictions in terms. You are mistaken when you say many scientists have tried to show spontaneous evolution. They would not be that stupid because they know there is no such thing.

              But, if your question is, has RNA been created in the laboratory? Yes it has: Life As We Know It Nearly Created in Lab

              You have a belief, nothing more and nothing less.

              Bullshit. Evolution has been proven hundreds, nay, thousands of times. When a virus or bacteria mutate, that is evolution. We have thousands of fossils of the predecessors of humans and almost every other animal on earth. To say there is no proof of evolution requires one to be stone-cold blind of the fossil record as well as medical science.

              As for religious brainwashing. I think believing there are eternal consequences for good and evil is a very frightening concept.

              Oh, now I understand. You believe bullshit because your Bible promises that you will burn in hell forever if you don’t. Many people grow out of that threat when they become adults. Many don’t however if their childhood brainwashing was strong enough. Their fear of their vindictive god is that great. Pity.

            9. Ron

              Thanks for your diatribe.

              Firstly many scientist keep quite about the fact that they do not believe in evolution. Because vicious individuals would have them sacked. So much for open inquiring, scientific minds.

              The figure is quite high.

              https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13930-16-of-us-science-teachers-are-creationists/

              You think evolution has been proved, OK.

              What did the simplest multi celled animal evolve from?
              Post a picture of a 2 celled fossil animal or a 3 celled animal.
              There is a massive gap between single celled creatures and multi celled animals.
              So big even you could see it if you wanted to.

            10. @Wayne

              Not a fossil but a living species.

              Inform yourself about slime molds – they live as free single cell beings, and sometime meet together to form a specialized complex being.

              So a multicell organism can be a slime mold that simply forgot to resplit into single cells.

              Evolution is simply a fact, you can see Evolution at work with many things – for example bacteriums getting immune against antibiotica.

            11. “What do you think stopped the DNA breaking down ”

              Simply, the chemical and physical properties of that molecule (RNA actually) was stable in the local environment in which it was located.

            12. Hickory

              The only environment where DNA and RNA are not subject to total breakdown is in a cell.

              The DNA the RNA and the cell have all got to exist at the same instant.

            13. “The DNA the RNA and the cell have all got to exist at the same instant.”
              Wayne. That is just ridiculous.
              Easily as faulty thinking as the ‘flat earth’ notion.
              You sir, have been severely misled.

            15. Wayne,
              You obviously have an agenda (small brain).
              You are saying, in effect, that the earth isn’t completely flat,
              but that it is flattish.
              I don’t subscribe, and I am not volunteering to serve as your teacher.

            16. RNA probably predates DNA. But whatever. You incredulity doesn’t matter one way or another.

              Go take some beginning biology classes before you try to outsmart all the world’s biologists.

  19. A little knowledge is a terrible thing

    “ ‘To compare the WWII industrial effort with the global dislocation necessary to ameliorate some of the effects of climate change is surprisingly naive and proves that the three professors got Ds in their history electives, if they had any. This comparison also neglects to account for the human population that has almost quadrupled between the 1940s and now, and the resource consumption that has increased almost 10-fold. The world today cannot grow its industrial production the way we did during WWII. There is simply not enough of the planet Earth left to be devoured.’ [~ Tad Patzek]

    In other words, the effort needed to switch to some barely comfortable alternative economy which can run solely on renewable energy demands that we halt all non-transitional activity immediately in order to harness what few fuels and resources remain accessible to us. There is simply no means by which most of us can continue with our current activities – including writing and reading blog posts – if we are to have a serious coordinated energy transition. Fossil fuels are a finite resource; and we have already burned our way through the cheap and easy deposits. And to be clear here; this is not something we have a choice about. The energy cost of extracting the remaining fossil fuels keeps increasing; with the result that ever more of our energy (and resources) will have to be used to secure energy, leaving ever less for operating the wider economy. New technologies can maintain – and even temporarily increase – the rate of production; but only at an increased energy cost.”

    1. AND, there is growing evidence that Earth’s systems are heading towards climate “tipping points” beyond which change becomes abrupt and unstoppable. But another tipping point is already being crossed, humanity’s capacity to adapt to a warmer world.

      HUMANS ARE GOOD AT THINKING THEIR WAY OUT OF PROBLEMS, BUT CLIMATE CHANGE IS OUTFOXING US

      “Australia is not alone in facing these adaptation problems — or indeed in generating emissions that drive planetary warming. Only global action can address the problem. But when the carbon impact of Australia’s fires is seen in tandem with recent climate policy failures, the future looks very grim. We need radical and immediate mitigation strategies, as well as adaptation measures based on science. Without this, 2019 may indeed be seen as a tipping point on the road to both climate catastrophe, and humanity’s capacity to cope.”

      https://phys.org/news/2020-01-humans-good-problems-climate-outfoxing.html

      1. Meanwhile,

        CHINA HEALTH THREATS LIKELY TO INCREASE DUE TO HEATWAVES

        “People are already suffering from more frequent extreme heat in China, and this will only get more common in future due to climate change. It is particularly concerning to see high night-time temperatures becoming a growing threat. This gives no respite to people struggling to cope with searing daytime heat and can lead to deadly heatstroke, particularly for vulnerable people. Better strategies for adapting and coping with rising temperatures are vital to save lives.”

        https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-01/uor-cht012720.php

  20. In my neck of the woods its full speed ahead with BAU. The relevant parties don’t seem to buy into any talk about disruption (a la Tony Seba) and any such stuff.

    JPS $14b plan – Hunts Bay to be replaced, Old Harbour to power Kingston

    The new LNG-fired plant in Old Harbour, at 190 megawatts, is nearly one-third of the grid’s capacity and can channel enough excess power to compensate for the 68.5MW set for decommissioning this year at the B6 steam unit in Hunts Bay. Overall, JPS will retire some 290mw of power spread across the original Old Harbour plant and Hunts Bay this year, but will add 310MW in new capacity over the same time frame – for a net gain of 20MW – which will increase reliability, JPS stated.

    Then, JPS plans to build a “40MW plant at Hunts Bay using natural gas by the end of 2023”, and will replace another set of units totalling 40MW at Hunts Bay that are slated for decommissioning in 2023.

    “This US$60-million investment in generation replacement will enable the retirement of 40MW of automotive diesel oil-powered turbines with 40MW of gas-powered engines. This will deliver superior efficiency, longer maintenance intervals, significantly lower carbon footprint, and will be the first natural gas-powered plant in the Corporate Area,” said the JPS business plan.

    The overall investment and business plan was initially revealed in August, but the revised public document, released this month, contains more specific project information. JPS plans to spend some US$500 million on its upgrade over five years to 2023. This is higher than the US$416 million invested over the previous five years.

    The Hunts Bay facility is the site of a newly built battery/flywheel hybrid storage solution but, I see no indications of any investments in storage or renewable generators, just more transmission and NG (LNG). One wonders what will happen if solar on the rooftop combined with battery storage becomes less costly than the electricity the utility generates using imported LNG?

    1. We know what to do but the entitled human likes to do what it likes to do, fed by the money carrot. Locking in N gas use for decades is part of the plan.

      Here is a road map for the way forward, but most will wander off chasing dollars and transient pleasure. Even the most down and out in a society can feel superior as long as the delusion of dominion over “the lower orders” is kept in place. Shedding that would mean acknowledging we are not little gods, kings and queens. It would mean a fall into grace.

      Highlights from:
      Reimagining the Human
      he answer lies in the deeper cause of the ecological crisis: a pervasive worldview that imbues the trends of more with a cachet of inevitability and legitimacy. This worldview esteems the human as a distinguished entity that is superior to all other life forms and is entitled to use them and the places they live. The belief system of superiority and entitlement—or human supremacy—manifests in a range of anthropocentric commonplace assumptions, linguistic constructs, institutional regimes, and everyday actions of individual, group, nation-state, and corporate actors (6). For example, the human is invested with powers of life and death over all other beings and with the prerogative to control and manage all geographical space. The all-encompassing manifestation of the belief system of human supremacy is precisely what constitutes it as a worldview.

      This worldview is not necessarily an explicitly articulated narrative. Rather, it forms the tacit postulate from which people source meaning and justification to disregard virtually any limitation of action or way of life in the ecosphere and toward nonhumans. Human supremacy is the underlying big story that normalizes the trends of more, and the consequent displacements and exterminations of nonhumans—as well as of humans who oppose that worldview

      The planetwide sense of entitlement bequeathed by a supremacist worldview blinds the human collective to the wisdom of limitations in several ways, thereby hindering efforts to address the ecological crisis by downscaling the human enterprise and withdrawing it from large portions of land and sea.

      First, because the worldview demotes the nonhuman in favor of the human, it blocks the human mind from recognizing the intrinsic existence and value of nonhumans and their habitats. Nonhumans are rendered as resources and considered dispensable or killable; it is assumed that natural areas can be taken over and converted at will.

      The reigning human-nature hierarchical worldview thus hinders the recognition that scaling down and pulling back is the most farsighted path forward. Scaling down involves reducing the overall amount of food, water, energy, and materials that humanity consumes and making certain shifts in what food, energy, and materials are used. This quantitative and qualitative change can be achieved by actions that can lower the global population within a human-rights framework, shrink animal agriculture, phase out fossil fuels, and transform an extractionist, overproducing, throwaway, and polluting economy into a recycling, less busy, thrifty, more ecologically benign economy (10–12). These shifts must align with a new ethos in civil society toward shared norms of mindfulness around dietary choices, avoidance of waste, conservation of energy, and reuse and recycling of materials.

      Scaling down can be complemented with substantially pulling back our presence from the natural world. Achieving continental-scale protection of terrestrial and marine habitats will enable sharing Earth generously with all its life forms

      https://science.sciencemag.org/content/362/6420/1242

      If your next action does not include consideration for the rest of life on earth, think again.

      The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.

      Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

      The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

      Carl Sagan Pale Blue Dot:

  21. Fed Chair Powell Says Coronavirus Outbreak “is a Very Serious Issue”

    At a news conference in Washington D.C., Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell is asked about the economic implications of the coronavirus outbreak. Chairman Powell says the coronavirus “is a very serious issue” and acknowledges that “there is likely to be some disruption to activity in China and possibly globally.” He says the Federal Reserve is very carefully monitoring the coronavirus situation.

    https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4850536/fed-chair-powell-coronavirus-outbreak-is-issue

    1. Here in the US it could become a problem since it is not up to developed country standards as far as health care is concerned.
      However it would be a magnitude or more below the number of iatrogenic deaths each year in the US.
      No, we have other plagues that should be more worrisome but are being pushed under the rug and ignored. SOP for modern “civilization”.

      1. “US it could become a problem since it is not up to developed country standards as far as health care is concerned.”
        The fatality rate from a coronavirus infection has little to do with health care.
        Its a lot more to do with host response.
        There is no treatment.

        1. Hmmm, so sure you are that the virus is the killer. Yet you miss the real killers in the cases of viral influenza. Hopefully you are not a medical doctor.
          From “Let them eat cake” to ” Let them die of other causes because they can’t get medical help”.

          The Complication of Coinfection
          . Yet this virus rarely kills on its own. In most cases, death by influenza virus actually occurs due to the onset of bacterial pneumonia.

          lthough we have annual vaccinations, influenza virus is one of the main infectious disease killers worldwide [1]. Of the 25 percent of deaths caused by infectious diseases, acute respiratory infections (for the majority, influenza and pneumonia) constitute 30 percent. Even in the years of mild seasonal flu, this infection remains a threat to the elderly [3]. Yet this virus rarely kills on its own. In most cases, death by influenza virus actually occurs due to the onset of bacterial pneumonia. Often, these are bacterial species that have colonized the nasal and upper respiratory systems, known as “commensal flora,” and considered un-harmful and asymptomatic in these locations. These bacteria, upon weakening of host defenses by influenza, can migrate down the respiratory tract and expand in new bacterially naïve niches, where they can become harmful to the host. The most common complicating bacterial agents include Staphylococcus aureus, Streptococcus pneumonia, and haemophilus influenzae, among others [7-10]. In fact, due to high rates of bacterial complications, haemophilus influenzae was given its name upon discovery because researchers originally thought it was the cause of flu-like symptoms (viruses had yet to be discovered) [11].
          https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3313527/

          To all those promoting the lack of available medical care in the US:
          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOgUBwo3JDs

          1. Data- (sorry)
            Fatality rate Influenza and Pneumonia 2019 (per 100,000)
            S, Korea/Norway 19-20
            Denmark 17
            Ireland/Sweden 15-16
            USA/China/ Netherlands 14-15

            1. You are right Hickory, best to not get medical help, since it doesn’t seem to help. I mean the medical industry harms and kills a lot more people than the flu each year. Nasty business but lots of money in it.

              Even still, high early-season vaccination rates and a relatively effective annual vaccine appeared to help suppress illnesses. In total, the CDC estimates that up to 42.9 million people got sick during the 2018-2019 flu season, 647,000 people were hospitalized and 61,200 died. That’s fairly on par with a typical season, and well below the CDC’s 2017-2018 estimates of 48.8 million illnesses, 959,000 hospitalizations and 79,400 deaths.

              Iatrogenic deaths over the last 20 years amount to 2666 per hundred thousand. Best to stay away from doctors, hospitals and medicines.
              I assume most people live at least 20 years.

              The flu never killed me but the threat of human disease has killed off the birds, amphibians, reptiles and bugs. Spray on.
              Human food is the biggest killer on the planet.
              So let a little flu have it’s way.

            2. Yeah Hickory, those damn uninsured or underinsured people keep filling the emergency rooms and then claiming indigence. Some of them get really cut rates with Medicaid or even free so they can access emergency rooms easily.
              Probably keeps those numbers down for the really poor. But not to worry, those benefits are getting trimmed each year.

            4. ROFL
              Feel sorry for the trillions of living creatures dying each day or the many more that will never be born because of human activity.

              Disclaimer, I just went to a doctor yesterday. He did not indicate a cure for Hickory disease. 🙂

            5. Fish, the most important thing you have in life is time. You can live or survive. It’s a new year. Plan a vacation or pack up the old Saturn and hit the road with the dog like a twenty year old. Tomorrow maybe your last. You need it.

              RIP Kobe

            6. Hey GF
              “He did not indicate a cure for Hickory disease. ”

              I’ve got one for you. Since you find most of what I say irrelevant or bullshit, and to some degree its certainly mutual, just ignore me, or perhaps better-
              refrain from commenting on any thread of discussion that I am involved in, and I will do the same in return.
              It would then be a nice day/week/year…

            7. Hickory, you like to troll and suppress speech. No, not me buddy.
              Just hit the ignore button if you don’t like what I write or can’t refrain from arguing with me.
              I find some of your comments are interesting but am sorry you don’t see much reality. The human condition is generally to live in a delusion of small chosen frames when possible.
              Or expand your frame. Everyone is welcome.

            8. Hi HB, thanks for the concern, but you are guessing at what I need. Mostly I need to do some dishes and make dinner for me and a friend.
              Eat your veggies.

            9. Dishes, like I said you can live or survive. There’s more to life today. Don’t miss out.

              Fish, I was projecting a little of myself on to you. But your posts tend to read like your not realistic about todays society and what can get done. Hickory on the other hand seems more in tune about today’s modern world. You seem to want to go back and put the cat back in the box. But that’s not going to happen. We’re evolving(good or bad) and I would think you should understand that.

              An apple a day keeps the doctor away and OFM in business. Seldom do I run across someone my age that I would trade my health for. It’s priority one right after posting smart ass comments here at POB.

              You have more in common with Hickory than with most others walking on two legs around you.

            10. Hi HB, you confuse me with Trump et. al. that are bringing the US back to late 1800’s industrial/societal philosophy. Have fun watching the rivers burn and run colors, while seeing the air.
              What I am aiming for is very forward looking but might actually work compared to the “modern world” view.
              Have fun building out those 12 billion PV panels a year over the next 25 years. Current global production is about 330 million per year, so by the time it catches up (if ever) it will be well behind.

              “Man is evolving” are you one of those singularity man/machine people?

        2. Hickory exclaimed: “The fatality rate from a coronavirus infection has little to do with health care.
          Its a lot more to do with host response.
          There is no treatment.”

          How to treat ARDS
          How Coronavirus Kills: Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS) & Treatment
          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okg7uq_HrhQ

          So with three major breakthroughs in treatment, best to not go to the hospital because Hickory says there is no treatment. Pneumonia aside of course, that is treatable.

        3. Hickory wrote:

          There is no treatment

          “Thailand has reportedly seen promising results after treating a coronavirus patient with a mix of two antiviral drugs which are usually used to treat HIV.

          Medics tested the drug mix on a patient who was in a ‘serious condition’ with the disease and within 48 hours they were declared disease-free, reports Bloomberg.

          The drugs, originally used for HIV and influenza treatment, were a success according to a medical briefing given by Dr Kriangsak Attipornwanich. “

          https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7957889/Thai-medics-claim-coronavirus-break-Patient-declared-disease-free-48-hours.html

  22. Good time to invest in aircons?

    RECORD HEAT FORECAST FOR COMING YEARS

    “The coming five years are anticipated to be warmest period on record, Britain’s Met Office said Thursday, warning of an outside chance of Earth breaching the Paris deal 1.5C temperature rise cap before 2024… With just over 1C of warming so far, Earth has already been battered by a string of deadly wildfires, droughts, and storm surges exacerbated by rising seas –phenomena all made more likely by climate change.”

    Of course, perhaps the theories of climate change, evolution and the Earth being spherical are all wrong, we are currently hurling toward the next ice age, and God will look after the faithful so we can forget about peak anything and happily multiply to earn ourselves enough points to assure ourselves a nice spot in Heaven.

    https://phys.org/news/2020-01-years.html

    1. Looks like the 4 large volcanic eruptions in 2019 and 2020 so far are not doing much other than adding CO2.

    2. Points to get in Heaven? I remember my parents collecting Green Stamps, does that count?

    3. Heaven with it’s corresponding universe obviously exists in a totally different dimension than earth’s universe and the reason that’s important is because God is indeed testing (judgement) all of us every day to see if we have pleased Him well enough to pass by joining Him in His dimension and His universe, heaven.

      1. God is indeed testing (judgement) all of us every day to see if we have pleased Him…

        You mean he has to test us to find out if we please him? You mean he doesn’t already know? Damn, I thought he knew everything.

        1. He really loves us without asking for much in return besides obedience.

          1. …obedience or else BURN in hell FOREVER.

            No, not asking much.

            Some “love”.

      2. God creates creatures that sin –> creatures sin –> god tortures them for eternity.

        It’s hard to imagine a bigger piece of sh$t than the Christian god.

      3. Isaiah 45:7 King James Version (KJV)
        7 I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things.

        Your god created evil. It states it in your own holy book.
        Your god is a piece of shit.

        1. I agree. The way I see it, in the Christian mythology, God is guilty of conspiracy to commit murder — at the very least. Because, if He created everything, and He had a plan, and man’s sin’s in that plan, then, at the bottom of it, it’s God’s fault. That’s why I worship Thor; you know the rules, no hypocrisy involved. ?

          1. Cabbages For Christ are just mentally ill.
            I avoid them. If they did not do such dangerous and insane things, they would be less visible.

    4. “Good time to invest in aircons?” ~ Doug Leighton

      For a fraction of a second, I thought that read, ‘Good time to invest in unicorns?’.

      …Well, it wouldn’t surprise me.

    1. That’s what happens when lots of money is thrown at a ‘kid just out of the sandbox’ (with mental vestigials of Tonka, Hotwheels, Lego, Fisher-Price, etc.).

      I’m half-serious of course, but only half.

  24. The great human population rise, still rising. Maybe it will fall, but a long way from zero.

    1. I just watched a couple of days ago the sci-fi film, Interstellar, on someone’s TV. Remember TV?

      1. Never owned one.
        Had a few working class girlfriends in the 1970’s who had one.
        But that was a long time ago.

      2. My kids literally don’t, and think having a phone in your house connected to a land line is quaint and sort of cute. I still have a land line, but neither one of them do.

        The whole idea of “push” media seems weird to them. My daughter commonly uses a laptop, a phone and a tablet at the same time all three mixing different kinds of content, and all three interactive as opposed to simply ways to passively consume stuff.

  26. In a world where 40 percent of bird species are claimed to be diminishing, there is one winner that stands out and has exponentially increased it’s population. You wouldn’t want to win that status though.

    Earth’s dominant bird: a look at 100 years of chicken production
    There are approximately 23 billion chickens on the planet right now. But because the life of a meat chicken is short—less than 50 days—annual production far exceeds the number of chickens alive at any one time. In 2016, worldwide, chicken production topped 66 billion birds. Humans are slaughtering, processing, and consuming about 2,100 chickens per second.

    We’re producing a lot of chicken meat: about 110 million tonnes per year. And we’re producing more and more. In 1966, global production was 10 million tonnes. In just twelve years, by 1978, we’d managed to double production. Fourteen years after that, 1992, we managed to double it again, to 40 million tonnes. We doubled it again to 80 million tonnes by 2008. And we’re on track for another doubling—a projected 160 million tonnes per year before 2040.

    https://www.darrinqualman.com/100-years-chicken-production/

  27. A total of 182 bird species are believed to have become extinct since 1500. Avian extinctions are continuing, with 19 species lost in the last quarter of the twentieth century and four more known or suspected to have gone extinct since 2000. The rate of extinctions on continents appears to be increasing, principally as a result of extensive and expanding habitat destruction.

    http://datazone.birdlife.org/sowb/casestudy/we-have-lost-over-150-bird-species-since-1500

  28. Interesting to see the media tuning against fossil fuels.

    https://youtu.be/fBAPJg_FAfI

    Cramer’s daughter bought a Tesla.

    I have long held the theory that a lot of American opinion making is driven by journalists and their specific needs. For example, influential journalists earn well but don’t have anything to invest in, so they put their money in the stock market. As a result, Americans are nutty about the stock market, even though it isn’t a great place to invest for 80% or more of the populace.

    Tesla targeted people with lots of money and nothing much to spend it on, and that may pay unexpected dividends. If enough high profile journalists buy a Tesla, Americans might suddenly start thinking that EVs are the cat’s pajamas.

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