190 thoughts to “Open Thread Non-Petroleum, July 5, 2019”

  1. Solar cell efficiency could get a dramatic boost, MIT team finds

    Many commercially available cells achieve efficiencies in the order of 20-25 per cent, with higher efficiencies being a trade-off against the overall cost of the cell.

    But in a finding that may allow solar cells to surge beyond efficiencies that were previously thought possible, researchers at MIT have discovered a way of extracting even more energy out of the light that hits a solar cell, believing they can take silicon solar cell efficiencies to as high as 35 per cent.

    Traditionally, photons have only been able to transfer their energy to a single “excited” electron as they pass through conventional silicon solar cells.

    However, some parts of the light spectrum, notably blue and green light, has enough energy to excite multiple electrons.

    Generally this excess energy is converted into waste heat, and researchers have been searching for way to tap into this extra energy, seeing the potential to boost solar cell efficiencies.

    In new research published in the journal Nature this week, researchers at MIT and Princeton Universities have demonstrated a method of doing exactly that, using photons (the light particles) to “excite” multiple electrons.

    The researchers effectively coated silicon cells with a layer of molecules called tetracene that could absorb the energy from sunlight and splitting it in two.

    The process required the production of a layer of a material called hafnium oxynitride, that was only a few atoms thick, which allow for the extra energy stored in the molecules to be transferred into the silicon wafer to produce electricity.

    “It turns out this tiny, tiny strip of material at the interface between these two systems ended up defining everything. It’s why other researchers couldn’t get this process to work, and why we finally did.” Van Voorhis said.

    By “exciting” multiple electrons, solar cells could produce more electric current using the same amount of light, boosting the effiency of silicon solar cells by as much as 20 per cent.

    The concept had been theorised as far back as the 1970s, with MIT professor of chemistry Troy Van Voorhis having participated in the original proposal at the time, and now contributing to the research that was successful in demonstrating the effect in a functional solar cell.

    The research was lead by Australian researcher and professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT Marc Baldo. Before heading to the US to undertake research related to solar cell designs, Baldo completed a bachelor of engineering form the University of Sydney.

    Putting the theory into practise “only took 40 years,” Van Voorhis joked.

    The proof of concept could lead to dramatic increases in the efficiencies of silicon solar cells, pushing beyond the 29% theoretical efficiency limit of current cells, to as high as 35%.

    Also reported by PV Magazine:

    Sorbitol admixture to passivation layer increases HJT conversion efficiency

    The race to the theoretical maximum conversion efficiency continues and with new lab results in, it appears a big leap forward may have been achieved over at MIT and Princeton.

    Researchers from two of the world’s most prestigious colleges may have made a breakthrough.

    Researchers from the Massachutes Institute of Technology and Princeton have examined the impact of a sorbitol admixture to hole-conduction polymer PEDOT:PSS [poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene):poly(styrene sulfonate)] on polymer/crystalline silicon heterojunction (HJT) solar cells.

    In so doing, the team deposited a PEDOT:PSS layer as a hole-collecting contact to the rear of a cell while the front was treated ‘conventionally,’ through phosphorous diffusion.

    According to the researchers, the admixture of the infrared-transparent sorbitol improved the short-circuit density of the cell due to a reduction in infrared parasitic absorption. The researchers also observed the passivation quality of PEDOT:PSS was improved, together with the open-circuit voltage.

    1. The Greening of The West Leaves Other Countries a Devastated, Toxic Mess

      “As a culture, we are myopic. We only see what we want to see. We only see what the culture wants us to see and in this case, the culture wants us to see how amazing it is to buy a solar panel/hybrid car/wind turbine and do our part to curb global warming. We do it and feel great giving the culture our money, knowing, when we go to bed, we did this incredible, Earth-saving venture.

      But what if we were really informed? What if we were given all the information on the creation of this ‘green’ product? What if our ‘greening’ was really, at the core, just more destruction?

      …’Arguably, what makes it [neodymium], and cerium, scarce enough to be profitable are the hugely hazardous and toxic process needed to extract them from ore and to refine them into usable products…’

      We are stealing the Earth from others. Our logic that solar/wind/the electric car is going to save the planet, instead of the most logical action of using far less, is destroying faraway lands and lives. It’s easy for us to sweep it all under the rug since we are not the ones directly affected by this lust for more energy consumption. We are simply sold on the latest and greatest technology that will save the planet and make our insatiable energy consumption a little bit easier to digest.

      The public must be made aware of this catastrophe.

      We must be willing to change or face the fact that people and earth and animals are dying for our inability to change…

      Lithium is found in the brine of the salt flats, located in Chile… The whole process requires a lot of water. So much water in fact that the once life-supporting oasis is now a barren wasteland…

      ‘Now mining companies are taking the water‘…

      The race for lithium extraction is viewed as a noble one. Electric cars are sold as a ticket to salvation from Climate Change. Electric auto makers want to make it easier and cheaper for drivers to convert to ‘clean’, battery-powered replacements for ‘dirty’ combustion engines. Rather, they want more money and will sell us the ‘green’ theory…

      In Salar de Atacama, the heroic mission of saving the planet through electric cars is leaving another Indigenous community devastated.

      If this was really about saving the planet, there would be regulations on single drivers in cars. Public transportation would be at the forefront, not affordable priced electric cars that EVERYBODY can own…

      Which begs the question: What is ‘green technology’?

      The Earth is green technology. The blade of grass that grows towards the light is green technology. The breath of fresh air that is given to us by the plants on land and the plants in the ocean is green technology. The spring water that rises from the depths, mysteriously and miraculously, is green technology. This fragile environment that surrounds us, the unexplainable, intricately woven web of life that holds us, the environment that is degrading rapidly from our greedy lust for more and more, that is green technology. What we are being sold today from companies who are leading the rat-race of civilization is not green. This green technology that they speak of is actually dark red, almost black, stained with the radioactive, desecrated blood of people and earth.

      In closing, from Derrick Jensen:

      ‘There is no free lunch. Actions have consequences, and when you steal from others, the others no longer have what you stole from them. This is as true when this theft is from nonhumans as it is when it’s from humans.

      But, as Upton Sinclair said, ‘It’s hard to make a man understand something when his job depends on him not understanding it.’ It’s even harder to make people understand something when their whole way of life depends on them not understanding it.’ “

      1. As is usual with a lot of you posts Caelan, you completely ignore the unstated alternative to “The Greening of The West”, as the headline you linked to puts it. The 7.7 billion humans on the planet, most of which either don’t know about Peak Oil, Global Warming, the sixth mass extinction etc. or are too preoccupied with trying to survive or “keep up with the Joneses” or “striking it rich”, are continuing BAU pretty much unabated.

        Case in point, further down I linked to a story on a record breaking Volkswagen electric car at the Goodwood Festival of Speed, an event in the UK attended by about 150,000 people from all over the UK, Europe and possibly even further afield. Contrast that with the estimated “crowd” of about 10,000 that attended the Fully Charged Live event at the Silverstone Race Track also in the UK, an event hosted by the producers of the Fully Charged youtube channel. The Goodwood FOS is a celebration of all things automotive, especially the ones that can go fast, really fast and is replete with v8, v10 and v12 powered supercars that can only be afforded by a tiny sliver of the population. Fully charged live on the other hand is much more likely to be attended by “Greenies”, people concerned about reducing our carbon footprint, people far more likely to be concerned about the things we discuss here.

        So on one hand we have Fully Charged Live, held on the 7th to the 9th of June 2019 with an estimated 10,000 people in attendance, while on the other hand we have the Goodwood FOS held a month later on the 4th to the 7th of July, with estimates of 150,000 in attendance, giving a ratio of 15 “petrol heads” for each “greenie”. You’re wasting your time here, preaching to the converted. You need to try and get your message out to the throngs that attend events such as the Goodwood FOS.

        1. The Thickest Coat of Greenwash

          Alan, your comment makes limited sense from my perch, except, perhaps, out of frustration and/or anger on your part that I keep mentioning, usually with good external references for support, complex and serious problems with your crony-capitalist-plutarchy-derived greenwashed narrative.

          POB isn’t a site, at least solely, about relatively mindlessly peddling that sort of thing and/or, say, ‘keeping up with the Joneses’, as you write, such as with regard to who’s got the thicker coat of greenwash or who can lay it on the thickest.

          While you may mean well, like many in this game, it increasingly appears misplaced and reckless, hence my mention, incidentally, on the current petroleum thread, of the idea of ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time.’.

          Because we humans are indeed approaching 8 billion population, we have a far greater responsibility (than we did at ~2 billion for example) to make extra sure certain ideas are indeed good– cautionary principle and all that.

          “But let’s be honest: Some people don’t seem interested in any plan that has anything to do with anything other than some sort of greenwashed BAU, Ver. 2., and despite if they might posture to the contrary.

          If they did, they’d be talking far more about things like permaculture, rewilding and/or the like.” ~ Caelan MacIntyre

          See also here.

          1. Caelan, I keep you blocked most of the time, because you never quit harping on the problem, while seldom EVER mentioning anything that is remotely relevant to actually solving the problem.

            Permaculture, etc, is all fine and dandy, but it takes an idiot to even suppose while dog drunk that the seven billion people in this world today can drop their current way of life and switch to permaculture.

            IF you are willing to talk about solutions that MIGHT be implemented, in whole or in part, you would be helping, rather than just wasting your time and everybody else’s here in this forum.

            Everything you consider heresy, bullshit, or worse that the rest of us talk about is stuff that can or at least MIGHT help at least SOME of us survive, and eventually actually manage to put permaculture into effect.

            There’s no route from the real world here and now to your fantasy world, except by way of the things the rest of us talk about.

            It’s time to x you out again.

            1. “Caelan, I keep you blocked most of the time, because you never quit harping on the problem, while seldom EVER mentioning anything that is remotely relevant to actually solving the problem.” ~ OFM

              And OFM would know this because he keeps me blocked most of the time.

              “I enjoy making a fool of myself in public jousting with Caelan…” ~ OFM

              “As with Fred, Glen [OFM], I have more or less taken you offline with a canned response based on your own words.
              You’re free to ‘find enjoyment’ ‘jousting’ with each other, yourself or… whomever.

              Time’s short, guys. Spend it well or wisely.” ~ Caelan MacIntyre

  2. https://electrek.co/2019/07/04/egeb-germany-solar-adu-dhabi/

    If the Germans were living in the American southwest, they would be getting eighty percent of their electricity from the wind and sun.

    But we Yankees can count money about as well as anybody, and pretty soon, in historical terms, we will see Texans running their petrochemical industry with wind and solar juice……. so they can SELL the gas and oil they currently burn in house at a profit.

    It takes a while for the public to catch on and catch up, but sooner rather than later, Joe and Suzy SixPack will come to understand that wind and solar sourced electricity is a good thing, measured in bottom line dollars, at the homeowner’s level, and insist on it, rather than resisting it.

    Change at this level takes some time. It took twenty five or thirty years for most of the people I know who once believed that tobacco is harmless to either die or change their minds about smoking and lung cancer, etc.

    But I see people as being willing to change their minds about such things faster these days, than in times gone by, maybe as the result of most people having the internet as their primary source of information these days.

    With a little luck, I expect to live to see a lot of new electric cars and lots of solar panels here in by backwoods community.

  4. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-7194019/U-S-Navy-patents-theoretical-ship-bends-physics-speed-air-water-space.html

    “As reported by The Drive, when looking over a patent on the technology, an examiner for the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office responded with skepticism that such a craft exists only to receive a personal letter from the Chief Technology Officer of the U.S. Navy, who explained that Chinese researchers are ‘investing significantly’ in the craft”

    Given the US Navy currently controls the “Freedom of the Seas”…..

    1. Dung,

      How do you fake the footage? This looks credible IMO.

      Not necessarily aliens, but something is moving thru the sky.

      US Navy has got the best tech on the planet and certainly has safeguards around people tampering with the footage.

        1. Bob,

          you testified under hypnosis of what you saw.

          This guarantees u are telling the truth.

          Sorry, I don’t have a lot of time at the moment.

          I need to go back to bending spoons with my telepathy.

          1. “…only try to realize the truth…
            There is no spoon.
            Then you’ll see that it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself.”
            ~ The Matrix

  6. If we ignore little problems such as ecological collapse, global warming, over consumption, and material limits, the techno-paradise can evolve where energy is no longer a problem and everything (including you) is fully monitored to build a new society with near zero energy cost and massive available energy. At least that is the dream.

    <The Rise of the Internet of Things and the Race to a Zero Marginal Cost Society
    The bulk of the energy we use to heat our homes and run our appliances, power our businesses, drive our vehicles and operate every part of the global economy will be generated at near zero marginal cost and be nearly free in the coming decades. That’s already the case for several million early adopters in the European Union who have transformed their homes and businesses into micro power plants to harvest renewable energy onsite. Currently, around 25 percent of the electricity powering Germany comes from renewable energies. By 2020, the country aims to increase that to 35 percent.

    https://www.huffpost.com/entry/internet-of-things_b_8306112

    1. If we ignore little problems such as ecological collapse, global warming, over consumption, and material limits, the techno-paradise can evolve where energy is no longer a problem and everything (including you) is fully monitored to build a new society with near zero energy cost and massive available energy. At least that is the dream.

      Yep! President Trump has ordered Attorney General William Barr to abolish the laws of thermodynamics… 😉

      http://nephologue.blogspot.com/2018/08/the-global-economy-heat-engines-and.html

      Nephologue
      Exploring the interplay of thermodynamics, economics, and climate

      …In order to understand this growth better, I think it’s important to ask why we need energy in the first place. This may seem like a pretty bone-headed question — of course we need energy. But energy is not an essential ingredient in traditional macro-economic models. In the best case energy is treated as a quantity that can be “substituted” for other ingredients of the global economy as capital and labor.

      As a physicist, this seems totally nuts as our individual ability to work rests on the availability of energy. We’re not somehow divorced from the laws of the universe. I’ve never heard of someone being an effective element of the labor force who had completely ceased to eat. And food sure doesn’t materialize without work being done.

      Instead, I think it’s appropriate to treat civilization as a what can be termed a thermodynamic heat engine.
      Tim Garrett

      Cheers!

      1. Yeo, civilization moved the heat engine source from the real time source of distant hydrogen fusion to a very diffuse (in time, geological, chemical process and area) stored energy system (that takes energy to obtain) of dead plants buried long ago.

        However, we have managed to overcome that minimally diffuse energy system that we developed through combustion and are now collecting much more energy per square meter than we expend.
        Right now global energy is about 0.04 watts/m2 from all of human energy sources. Compare that to the more than 2 watts/m2 that are being collected by the GHG these energy sources have added to the atmosphere.
        Now that is leverage. What a remarkable achievement. Gathering energy with no further effort or expenditure. No other species can match that.

      1. Slaves would fall under ‘material limits’; as instructed, ignore that. If we ignore enough things then the future looks marvelous.

    1. This one was quite close to my home. BTW, as far as I know the Tesla chargers were not damaged.
      But the investigation is only in the early stages, It is a miracle that more people were not injured or killed. So far no fatalities have been recorded.

  10. ‘BIGGEST COMPLIMENT YET’: GRETA THUNBERG WELCOMES OIL CHIEF’S ‘GREATEST THREAT’ LABEL

    “Greta Thunberg and other climate activists have said it is a badge of honor that the head of the world’s most powerful oil cartel believes their campaign may be the “greatest threat” to the fossil fuel industry. The criticism of striking students by the trillion-dollar Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) highlights the growing reputational concerns of oil companies as public protests intensify along with extreme weather.”

    https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jul/05/biggest-compliment-yet-greta-thunberg-welcomes-oil-chiefs-greatest-threat-label

    1. Another young voice:

      “Venezuela,” Daniela Rodríguez explained, “is building socialism in the midst of a war.” According to Rodríguez, “the U.S. is using new tools of warfare trying to subjugate, dominate, and push back socialism not only in Venezuela but in any part of the world.” Nevertheless, she added, “we are learning new ways to defend humanity.”

      1. Bloody kids. They should be in the kitchen helping their mothers prepare meals and discussing crochet patterns with their sisters, not dabbling in men’s business. 🙂

  11. ENTIRELY NEW REASON FOR METHANE VENTING FROM THE ARCTIC SHELF

    Scientists have discovered a previously unknown mechanism of influence of salts migration on the degradation of gigantic intra permafrost gas (methane) hydrate reserves in the Arctic Shelf. Clusters of gas hydrate crystals resemble an ice mass that can just barely be considered a gas in solid state, with a unit volume of gas hydrate containing up to 160-180 volumes of pure gas. Gas hydrates that formed thousands of years ago under favorable natural conditions may start dissociating into gas and water (or in other words, “thawing”) if the natural environment is no longer conducive to their sustainable existence.

    Scientists from Skoltech, Tomsk Polytechnic University, and the Pacific Oceanological Institute of the Far Eastern Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) found that one of the reasons for extensive methane release from the bottom sediments of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf is the destabilization of underwater permafrost gas hydrates that interact with the salt solutions (sea water) migrating into the thawing submarine permafrost: “We found that salt migration to the frozen hydrate-containing rocks intensifies the pore gas hydrates dissociation and accelerates their thawing.”

    https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-05/sios-sda052119.php

  12. very ot:
    1907 — Robert A. Heinlein lives (1907-1988).
    “There is Lovecraft, the misogynic racist; there is Heinlein, the authoritarian militarist; there is Ayn Rand, the rabid opponent of trade unionism & the left, who, like many a reactionary before her, sees the problems of the world as a failure by capitalists to assume the responsibilities of ‘good leadership’; there is Tolkien & that group of middle-class Christian fantasists who constantly sing the praises of bourgeois virtues & whose villains are thinly disguised working class agitators — fear of the Mob permeates their rural romances.

    To all these & more the working class is a mindless beast which must be controlled or it will savage the world (i.e. bourgeois security)…”

    — Michael Moorcock, Starship Stormtroopers, an essay on SciFi Fascists,

    1. Micheal Moorcock has his head up his ass, judging from this quote, but I do realize it’s out of context.

      1. Hey, I liked Ayn Rand when I was 16– being a hero for being a total asshole is very cool when you’re 16!
        But then you mature, and the simple delusion passes into the past, and being an asshole for most people wanes (not all).

        1. People with good reading skills don’t read Hitler or Marx or Rand or Heinlein, or anybody else, as being the architects of a desirable new society.

          They read them for what they can learn from them, for the insights to be gained from reading them.

          If you go back and read Rand without your preconceived idea that she is supposed to be, or is to be taken , as a leader, rather than just a novelist, you will see that she possessed enormous insights into the way governments can go bad, right or left.

          Of course being that she in REALITY was JUST A FUCKING NOVELIST, one who had personal and family experience with communism, it’s to be EXPECTED that in order to paint communism in the worst possible light, tshe painted capitalism is the best possible light. That’s what they call artistic license in freshman lit at community colleges.

          Unfortunately, I seem to be the ONLY person in this forum who understands the difference between a novel and a blue print…. or a novel that as in the case of Rand’s, that has been co opted as a blue print by one or another political faction.

          The large majority of all the regulars here can gain a good bit of understanding about the ways of naked apes by reading Rand, if they will put aside their prejudices and just READ her, without assuming her arguments are to be taken as blueprints or guidelines.

          Venezuela today is pretty much the dead on picture she painted of a ” people’s republic”. Of course she will never be accepted as a legitimate writer by anybody on the left, any more than I have ever been able to get anybody here in this left leaning forum to admit that HRC ran a scam called Cattle Gate, or that she ran a bimbo squad to cover up Bill’s serial abuses of women, etc.

          Hypocrisy rules on both sides of the aisle, politically.

          It’s amusing to note today that millions of the same women and men who refused to acknowledge HRC’s sins are absolutely determined to shoot down every man in the D party for past sins, real or maybe just imagined, at some risk of weakening the the D’s to the point that Trump wins a second term, appoints more judges, etc.

          So while they won’t admit their hypocritical failure to speak up back when, out of political solidarity, they are now going to the opposite extreme…… while still refusing to admit that they failed to act upon their convictions earlier.

          Most of us have heard of a speech by DP Moyhinan , not sure of spelling, referred to as the defining deviancy down speech.

          It says it all. All my redneck neighbors and family who voted for Trump and will vote for him again, are not idiots who believe his bullshit.

          Quite a lot of them are reasonably well informed people, and are quite frank with me in saying that it’s ok for Trump to be a rapist, because it was ok for Bill C to be a rapist, etc. They call it fighting fire with fire.

          Hopefully these justifiably pissed off women who are now publicly committed to justice for women will calm down enough to realize that if they don’t back off somewhat, they may get something they don’t want…. Trump in the WH for a second term.

          1. Hi OFM-
            “It says it all. All my redneck neighbors and family who voted for Trump and will vote for him again,”

            I still don’t get the thinking on this.
            I do understand the analogy with B Clinton, in that both have crappy personal ethics.
            But they don’t seem to care that trump is pretty inept, has committed jail-worthy tax fraud, can’t read much or pay attention (to briefings from the national security agency) well, attacks free speech and muddles the distinction between actual news and fabrication of events? As you know I could go on for 20 pages with this. Lets remember , he will not be running against the Clintons.
            I don’t get the rationale of those who are not idiots, other than to invoke successful brainwashing by the right wing media.

            As an example, I talked to someone who watches Fox for their news. They were convinced that Ocasio-Cortez was the per-ordained Democratic party nominee for the 2020 election.

            https://www.adfontesmedia.com/

          2. OFM —

            “Unfortunately, I seem to be the ONLY person in this forum who understands the difference between a novel and a blue print…. or a novel that as in the case of Rand’s, that has been co opted as a blue print by one or another political faction.”

            Well, perhaps not the only person, but close. Mostly you’re right, of course. Blogs, in general, seem to be filled with condescending comments (as in offensive superiority by armchair experts). I’m guilty myself, on occasion, for which I apologize. In any case, you’re right to point this out, not that anything will change. People seem to be hard wired to assume the moral (and intellectual) high ground. 😉

            BTW, I had a partner with multiple PhDs: Eng. Physics, math and physics, and a Geophysics Prof, who was head of the Dept. of geophysics at a major university who had studied with Paul Dirac at Princeton. Both dead. These were two of the humblest people I’ve met. Doubt either would comment on Blogs. Too busy doing original research, I’d guess.

            1. If one focuses on the bad, I suppose the internet should be closed to the general public and only superior highly trained and qualified elitists allowed to publish on it after being monitored by official agencies.
              However, I keep finding large amounts of good to wonderful information and ideas on the internet buried among the garbage, debris, propaganda and marketing hokum.
              It is sad that so much time and effort has to be spent filtering out the waste on the internet, but who is actually qualified to filter it before the public sees it? Given the chance to filter, most ideas would be canned or put aside for a long time.
              The radical and discarded ideas of yesterdays often turn out to be the accepted truths and realities of today. Those at the frontiers of any area will be outcasts or fringe until all the dust settles and the incumbent “experts” protecting their territory either die or are overwhelmed by the evidence.

              Of course we no longer have time left to allow decades for new thoughts, ideas and results to be accepted. We now need the courage and smarts to grab them and do our best as fast as possible. Or face the consequences.

              But of course, the elite experts and Omniscient business/political leaders have made such a great success of this nation and the human world. Bringing us to such a wonderful level of success and grandeur as the world has never seen before.
              So who am I, a mere mortal, to pontificate in the face of such success? Maybe I should just shut up, and leave the internet to it’s inevitable fate of superior controlled intercourse.

          3. Oh come on OFM! I don’t see how you can characterize Ayn Rand (rhymes with “I’m Grand”) as merely a novelist. She surrounded herself with libertarian sycophants, Alan Greenspan among them, and created the Nathaniel Branden Institute(??!!) as a quasi think tank. She was clearly aiming at being a philosophical heavy weight of the libertarian right wing. Just a novelist? I don’t think so.

  13. Interesting developments in the field of motorsports over the weekend:

    Volkswagen I.D. R Improves Goodwood Hill Record To 39.9 Seconds

    On July 6, Romain Dumas made use of another run in the Volkswagen I.D. R at the 2019 Goodwood Festival of Speed and further improved its all-time record to 39.9 seconds (compared to 41.18 seconds in the practice run).

    Both times beat the 41.60-second time set in 1999 by Nick Heidfeld driving a McLaren MP4/13. We’re more than certain that 20 years ago no one would have imagined that an electric car could be be quicker than an F1.

    The Volkswagen I.D. R driven at Goodwood is a special sprint version of the I.D. R, with a smaller battery pack, since the track length is just 1.16-mile.

    This is a huge success for Volkswagen, which also presented its other I.D. cars, including a pre-production Volkswagen ID.3 at the event.

    This is particularly interesting from the point of view that the Goodwood Festival of Speed is a four day event chocked full of petrol-head porn. Lots of extreme racing machines competing, some of them over a hundred years old. In this arena Volkswagen has presented a car that is unbeatable by just about anything with an ICE. This little machine now has three records to it’s credit:

    1)Fastest car up Pikes Peak, of any kind.
    2)Fastest electric car around the Nürburgring Nordschleife, 2nd fastest overall behind the Porsche 919 Hybrid Evo.
    3)Fastest time up the Goodwood Hill Climb.

    I repeat, at an event filled with petrol-heads this little electric machine showed that nothing with an internal combustion engine can beat it. It’s acceleration is unmatched and that is something EV haters just have to admit!

  14. To Those Who Think We Can Reform Our Way Out of the Climate Crisis
    Our only hope is to stop exploiting the earth—and its people.

    “We do know, at least, how we got here. It was all that oil and coal that we burned, that we’re still burning. But that ‘we’ is misleading. It isn’t all of us, and never was. As the Swedish scholar Andreas Malm recounts in Fossil Capital, his exhaustive account of the rise of the coal-powered steam engine, coal was initially embraced by a tiny subclass of wealthy Englishmen, the ones who owned the mills. They came to favor steam over hydropower in large part because it allowed them to erect factories in cities and towns—rather than submitting to the dictates of distant rivers and streams—giving them access to what we would now call a flexible workforce: masses of hungry urbanites accustomed to the indignities of factory labor, willing to toil for less, easily replaceable if they refused.

    In the process these early industrialists created the illusion fundamental to the functioning of our entire economic system: the possibility of self-sustaining growth…

    From its inception… the carbon economy has been tied to the basic capitalist mandate to disempower workers, to squeeze the most sweat out of people for the least amount of money. For the last 200-odd years, the exploitation of the planet has been inseparable from the exploitation of living human beings…

    We already know well that the 1 percent do not let go of power willingly.

    Nor will our political system likely be much help, even with our survival as a species at stake…

    The techno-optimist dream holds together only if you hide the fact that much of the progress made by the United States and Europe came at the expense of poorer countries: As corporations off-shored manufacturing jobs over the last few decades, they sent the carbon-intensive industries with them, allowing Western consumers, at the clean end of a very dirty process, to import massive quantities of goods…

    But there are other futures, other worlds as yet unmade. We have only to choose ours, and to fight like hell for it—fiercely, with forms of solidarity that we have not yet been able to imagine. Solidarity not only with one another but with this planet and the many forms of life it hosts. There is no way out of this but to cease to view the Earth, and its populations, as an endless sink of resources from which wealth can be extracted.

    This is not hippie idealism but purest practicality: There is no way to preserve anything approximating the status quo without turning into monsters, or cadavers, and no way to survive that is not radical. ”

  15. By Tad Patzek: On the Green Queen’s Race

    “Tad Patzek today wrote about the Green Queen’s race for electricity…

    Tad begins by pointing out that

    a recently update[d] climate model is predicting more than 1 degree of additional warming than the previous model for our current CO2 levels. That’s bad news but seems consistent with what we observe every day in the news.

    Then Tad gets to his main point:

    ‘…since 2004, the annual increases of total electricity consumption in the world have outpaced all electricity production by all PV arrays in the world…’

    This means that the Green Queen is not only not keeping up, she’s not even in the race…

    And we haven’t even begun to replace the other 84% of fossil energy that we use for non-electricity applications like heating, fertilizer, tractors, trucks, trains, ships, planes, mining, steel, cement, glass, etc..

    ‘Thus, there are no other paths but to shrink, shrink more and transit away from fossil fuels.‘

    Once again I observe that facts don’t matter and denial defines our species.”

  16. Best way to fight climate change? Plant a trillion trees

    “The most effective way to fight global warming is to plant lots of trees, a study says. A trillion of them, maybe more.

    And there’s enough room, Swiss scientists say. Even with existing cities and farmland, there’s enough space for new trees to cover 3.5 million square miles (9 million square kilometers), they reported in Thursday’s journal Science . That area is roughly the size of the United States.

    The study calculated that over the decades, those new trees could suck up nearly 830 billion tons (750 billion metric tons) of heat-trapping carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. That’s about as much carbon pollution as humans have spewed in the past 25 years.

    Much of that benefit will come quickly because trees remove more carbon from the air when they are younger, the study authors said. The potential for removing the most carbon is in the tropics.

    ‘This is by far—by thousands of times—the cheapest climate change solution’ and the most effective, said study co-author Thomas Crowther, a climate change ecologist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.

    Six nations with the most room for new trees are Russia, the United States, Canada, Australia, Brazil and China.”

    1. as long as they don’t die due to beetles, infestations, heat, drought, rain, fires, etc. etc.

      1. Good point. I suppose that’s another sort of ‘red queen’… Better make it 2 trillion.

  17. CLIMATE CHANGE AND DEFORESTATION TOGETHER PUSH TROPICAL SPECIES TOWARDS EXTINCTION

    “Tropical deforestation between 2000—2012 led to a vast amount of forest area, bigger than India, losing its ability to link tropical wildlife with a habitat that would protect them from rising temperatures. Today, only 38 per cent of tropical forest allows resident wildlife to avoid climate warming by moving uphill or towards the poles.”

    https://phys.org/news/2019-07-climate-deforestation-tropical-species-extinction.html

  18. Inhale, Exhale, you know the refrain…

    Unfortunately it is a very tiny minority of humans that are causing deforestation around the world.
    There should be a way to hold them accountable!

    1. Increasingly, its a very tiny minority of humans who hold almost all the wealth (and power); will they be ever held accountable (for anything)?

    2. “very tiny minority of humans that are causing deforestation”
      Not sure what you mean by this Fred.
      After all, it is the 7.7 B who use
      toilet paper, cardboard packaging, printed paper, lumber and ply, fire wood, etc
      And all the agricultural production on previously forested lands, on every continent.
      The palm oil, and sugar cane ethanol, and corn ethanol, and cotton, coffee, cocoa, and heck- people even cut down forests to grow marijuana.
      Oh, and the lands cleared of forest for cattle grazing- who eats that meat?
      Not to mention all the direct food crops- who eats that tortilla?
      Whose house has no wood?

      Almost all us are living and or working, at this very moment, where once stood a tree.

      1. “very tiny minority of humans that are causing deforestation”
        Not sure what you mean by this Fred.

        Ok point taken. Though the system that convinces most people they want, not need all those things is controlled by a small minority.

        Case in point we don’t need to eat beef raised on what used to be Amazonian rain forest.
        There is a very small group of cattle ranchers in Brazil that benefit from that and they funnel money to the Bolsonaro regime.

        I’m all for everyone being held accountable and for reducing the human population and our individual footprints but it is still a tiny group that wields the levers of power.

        I really notice the massive brainwashing because I do no own a TV set, on occasion I stop in with some friends at a local sports bar to have a beer and it never ceases to shock me! We have now found a beer place that serves local craft beers and does not have mainstream TV of any kind. They play black and white videos of the Munsters.

        1. People are now being trained for full tracking and control.
          I notice that Google search engine has gotten stupid lately, does well for marketing and advertisement but fails on many other queries. Gives many inappropriate results or only gives sites pertaining to one of two possibilities now.
          Been tossed from Google scholar twice so far, don’t even use it much and it thinks I am a bot. Anyone else experience this.

          1. Yeah, they have changed their Captcha algorithm. Been snagged several times on searches, getting pissed off with spotting bikes and traffic lights. Why can’t they make it more interesting, a human can get pissed of with a repetitive task but a bot can’t.

            NAOM

      2. Historically, homo sapiens have had a population of 1-10 million (over the last 200,000 years), with a near extinction about 70,000 years ago.
        Of course they had robust and intact ecosystems.
        7.7 billion on an ecologically collapsing planet?

  19. Seems like a battle lost and almost no one mentions population overshoot.

    “In Sweden, 76% of people think climate change is the single most serious problem the world is facing. Still, Greta Thunberg continues to spend her Fridays sitting in front of the Swedish parliament. She says she won’t stop until Sweden is in line with the Paris Agreement which aims to limit a global temperature rise this century to 1.5 degrees Celsius by dramatically cutting carbon emissions. [But] according to Climate Action Network Europe, a coalition of NGOs, no European country, not even Sweden, is on track to fully meet its targets. We will probably sit there for years to come, Thunberg told CNN.”

    https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/06/europe/climate-student-strikes-eastern-europe-intl/index.html

    1. Seems like a battle lost and almost no one mentions population overshoot.

      Population overshoot, ecological footprint, climate change, collapse of industrial civilization and the 6th mass biological extinction event are all intricately linked! They are for all practical purposes just different facets of our highly interconnected systems. It makes no sense whatsoever to talk about any of them as problems to be solved in isolation. Either we tackle all of the above as a multi level systems reset or it is game over for all of us and time is already very short!

      Cheers!

    2. Totally agree Doug. It is the central trunk of the problem.
      So many of the people I know, and commentary I read, is all about making a bargain- ‘if we just lower our carbon footprint with tree planting equivalents, and use hemp toothbrushes, and raise the babies diaperless, and crap like that, everything will be ok’.
      What ever happened to people talking about the population bomb?
      I guess its just not popular to refrain from procreating.

      1. I don’t know about procreating in general, but birthrates are already below replacement level for whites and some types of Asian.

        1. Abortion banned in Dominican Republic, El Salvador, and Nicaragua; countries currently involved in the US immigration controversy.

          1. Also they are countries where rape is common, especially of young girls who end up being forced to have children that just keep the poverty and despair circulating.

            NAOM

            1. Funny how that happens. Countries with high levels of religious pretense, having high levels of sexual abuse. In my neck of the woods when women have children for different men, the female children are often at risk of abuse from the mother’s current mate. In the mean time religious leaders preach from their pulpits about the evils of abortion. I wish they would spend more time talking about the reasons so many unwed young women are getting pregnant in the first place!

              Here is an example of the pro life views in in op ed written by the Archbishop of Kingston:

              Abort that thought

        2. …birthrates are already below replacement level for whites and some types of Asian.

          ROFLMAO!!! some types of Asian.

          You are a pathetically ignorant racist xenophobe! Why don’t you go crack a few books and go study some history, anthropology, biology, evolution and genetics…

          On second thought, don’t bother you are not just ignorant you are dumber than a pile of rocks!

          1. Yea I realized that looked funny after I read it again. What I meant is that the Japanese, for example, sadly aren’t having enough babies to replace the population they already have. Same with the Koreans and now the Chinese also thanks to the one child policy disaster. I think Thailand is falling into a negative natural population increase as well, or will be soon.

            1. Why is it sad Cameron B, when a country like Japan begins to drop in population? The whole world needs to learn how to do that, and fast.
              We need to shed 5 billion quickly. The most humane way is to stop adding new ones.

            2. It’s difficult to explain, but it just is. Take note of how there’s always a buzz and excitement in the air of a place that is rapidly growing because young people are moving in and starting families. I guess because population growth means opportunity. Whereas a dropping population means the exact opposite, as it represents an undesirable place to be. Typically places experiencing population decline have all sorts of social and economic problems like few jobs, low incomes, high crime, dilapidated housing, abandoned buildings, etc.

            3. ROFL!

              So, I guess there must be lots of opportunity and little in the way of of social and economic problems in the Middle East, Sub Saharan Africa and Latin America. At the same time Western Europe, Japan, China, Korea must be really undesirable places to be and must be experiencing high unemployment, “low incomes, high crime, dilapidated housing, abandoned buildings, etc.”

              I guess that’s why people are fleeing all those areas experiencing population declines for the few remaining areas with high population growth rates. Hold on, wait a minute………..

              /sarc

            4. Last I knew, western European countries aren’t experiencing negative population growth, yet. It’s the eastern European countries that are failing in that regard, like Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Moldova, Latvia, etc. People don’t see those as desirable countries to move to, healthy amounts of children aren’t being born there, and they are experiencing severe brain drain among the youth they do have precisely because of the problems I mentioned that come when a place suffers from population decline.

            5. I can’t improve on Hickory’s and Islandboy’s comments! But we are at almost 8 billion humans on a rapidly degrading planet and you think that continued growth is an opportunity?!

            6. Well Cameron-
              “Whereas a dropping population means the exact opposite, as it represents an undesirable place to be. ”
              Get used to it.
              Its inevitable.
              When the population gets into a condition of severe overshoot (to the tune of over 5 billion people), its going to contract.
              Might be gradual, might be fast.
              Part of that depends on our policy and family decisions. One child one family is the most gentle way to slow down. And genocide the worst.
              Failure to recognize and acknowledge the problem points you towards the much more severe paths.

            7. Cause
              Effect
              Don”t confuse the two. Population decline can be caused by economic downturn or population decline can become an economic boost as the cheese is divided between less people. A glass half empty or a glass half full or room to top up.

              NAOM

            8. In India too the fertility rate is dropping rapidly. It is now 2.3 kids per woman and will soon drop below 2.1. In many South Indian states fertility rates are already at West European levels of around 1.6.

    3. Doug, how’s your German?

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Y1lZQsyuSQ
      Die Zerstörung der CDU.

      This kid’s rant is awesome! his channel has almost a million subscribers and this video has gone viral with over 15.5 million views. This is no longer our planet it belongs to them and I’m really glad to see they are appropriately pissed off at the system that has robbed them of their future.

      I’m afraid some of us old timers will be hung out to dry… C’est la Vie!

      1. I see it as more proof our public schools have become centers for pushing liberal ideology. Sad it’s not like back in our days when children were taught to respect elders or else face the consequences.

        1. Also hast du das Video gesehen? Ich bin beeindruckt von Ihren Sprachkenntnissen! Obwohl ich glaube, dass junge Menschen zu denken, für sich selbst fähig ist, und ist ein Produkt des deutschen Bildungssystems …

        2. Yeah, a liberal ideology like science. They are trying to teach our kids that the earth is billions of years old when we know, as the Bible tells us that it is only six thousand years old. They are trying to tell kids to believe in evolution and other such nonsense. They took prayer out of schools.

          They need to Make America Great Again like the good old days when kids were all dumb as a rock.

        3. Hey Charles, I didn’t know you were German! It is only through the miracle of Google’s language translation that I was able to view an English translation of the closed captioned text!

        4. C. Van Fleet- “when children were taught to respect elders”

          Why respect elders when they vote for a president who scores 0/100 on dignity and respectful behavior?
          Why respect elders when they take you into idiotic wars (Viet and Iraq for examples)?
          Why respect elders when they run a country into a 22$ Trillion debt hole?
          Why respect elders when they tolerate a system that results in less than 50 people gathering unto themselves more wealth than the poorer 1/2 of humanity combined?
          Why respect elders when they have a system of indoctrination of children, teaching them to adhere to a system of medieval fabricated events of world history and spiritual enslavement? [Religion]

          Respect must be earned.

        6. Charles,

          Many elders deserve little respect as we are responsible for the state of the planet.
          It is appropriate that youth should be pissed off, maybe it will lead to more of them voting and electing representatives that can bring on needed changes to the system.

        7. “Sad it’s not like back in our days when children were taught to respect elders or else face the consequences.”

          Satire? Stupidity? I am really confused!

  20. BREACHING A ‘CARBON THRESHOLD’ COULD LEAD TO MASS EXTINCTION

    “Daniel Rothman, professor of geophysics and co-director of the Lorenz Center in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, has found that when the rate at which carbon dioxide enters the oceans pushes past a certain threshold—whether as the result of a sudden burst or a slow, steady influx—the Earth may respond with a runaway cascade of chemical feedbacks, leading to extreme ocean acidification that dramatically amplifies the effects of the original trigger.”

    https://phys.org/news/2019-07-breaching-carbon-threshold-mass-extinction.html

    1. You mean like a 9,000 Km long trans Atlantic Sargassum weed bloom that decimates coral reefs when it washes up on the beaches and reefs in my neck of the woods. Yeah, the tourists are complaining about the stench and the fact they can’t sunbathe and swim in front on the Margaritaville Beach Resort in Hollywood Florida.

      You know that thing about Inhaling and Exhaling? Forget it, just Fuck it!

      Though I have become curious as to how I could get some data to figure out how much CO2 is being sequestered in the seaweed. Also how quickly it is released when it starts to rot on the beach…

      1. You need to get that cleaned up. It’s a very serious business matter for beach resorts like Margaritaville and the economic prosperity of communities like Hollywood.

        1. You need to get that cleaned up.

          ROFL!
          Sure! Be my guest and let the appropriate departments know you have a plan!
          https://www.hollywoodfl.org/Directory.aspx

          While you are at it remind them they just wasted a couple million on their beach replenishment plan and all that imported sand got washed back out on to the reefs!

          And hurricane season is just starting! Maybe the next Cat 5 will take care of the Margaritaville Resort and then we won’t have to worry about the rest…

          1. Yeh, clean it all up, would ya Fred?
            And when your done, could you mop some of those superfund sites.
            Its bad for the countries image. Its hard to project blind optimism when you have superfund sites,
            unless perhaps you’re an orange fat guy.

          2. It gets a little annoying when you see the same folks that have been brushing aside the warnings from scientists about global warming and claiming it is all a hoax to waste taxpayer money and stifle the economy, suddenly start getting agitated about unanticipated, unpleasant consequences. Now the consequences are “a very serious business matter for beach resorts like Margaritaville and the economic prosperity of communities like Hollywood.”

            Well! Darn it! Whaddaya know?

          3. The economic impact (i.e. revenue) generated by an entity like Margaritaville offsets the potential costs of withstanding a direct hit by a Category 5 hurricane, which is statistically unlikely to happen in any given year anyway.

            1. Seriously?! You gotta be joking! Have you ever seen the aftermath of a direct hit by a Cat 5 hurricane? It can take years for a community to recover from the secondary impacts. A direct hit by even a lower category huricane on any coastal town is a devastating event. But don’t take my word for it, ask the insurance companies.

            2. I understand that a direct hit by a Category 5 hurricane, or even one of lesser strength, is going to be devastating. However, when you look at risk assessment, the probability of a Category 5 storm striking any one particular location where a Category 5 landfall is possible in any given year is quite low. As such, using this risk as a rationale for why a property like Margaritaville should not be constructed is pointless, because the risk is outweighed by the economic impact such a property brings to a community. These are the types of factors your elected officials and economic development experts have to take into account when deciding the best use of land and how make local economies the best they can be.

      2. Fred, you might find the following article from one of the local papers in my neck of the woods of interest:

        Region agrees to establish action plan to tackle sargassum seaweed

        BRIDGETOWN, Barbados (CMC) — A 26-point agreement to establish an action plan to address the influx of the sargassum seaweed in the region, was agreed to by representatives from 13 countries from the Caribbean and Latin America during a recent meeting in Cancun, Mexico.

        It is hoped that the action plan will be in place before the next regional sargassum forum this October in Guadeloupe.

        Signatories to the agreement include Belize, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Guadeloupe, Guatemala, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Jamaica, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, and Trinidad and Tobago.

        The agreement, established last week, outlines the need for cross-border information sharing on sargassum monitoring, science, education and entrepreneurship, among other topics.

        The agreement also calls on participants to begin identifying financial mechanisms to mobilise resources, to map out control efforts to identify sargassum-related initiatives, and to involve cruise lines in the issue.

        So, we are getting all these signals but, I sense no urgency to de-carbonize our electricity and transportation systems. The owner of this particular newspaper also owns a several hotels across the Caribbean as well as the VW, Audi, Porsche, BMW/Mini, Honda and Kia car dealerships. While they have installed solar PV at a couple of the showrooms and a hotel they are almost finished building in the business district, I don’t really see them agitating for more solar and EVs. They seem content to continue BAU as long as it doesn’t inconvenience them in any way. The sargassum problem is definitely a problem for their guests at the various properties they own, stretching from the Bahamas to the Windward Islands.

        I submitted a comment under a psuedonym that you might find interesting, along the lines of a discussion we had about this problem last year.

        1. Yeah, finding uses for the seaweed is a good idea. I’m pretty sure it can be collected before it hits the beaches and it is very rich in nutrients!

          Not too hard to figure out which one was your comment 😉

      3. I can only wish I was wasted away again in Margaritaville. A place like that brings jobs, people, and economic development to your community. I’ll drink to that! ?

    2. The curse of the internet is the ease with which one can create a text with embedded hyperlinks…
      Then the required force to resist the temptation not to click on them is in my case sorely lacking!

      So I went and clicked on this link on the page.
      https://phys.org/news/2017-09-mathematics-sixth-mass-extinction.html

      By 2100, oceans may hold enough carbon to launch sixth mass extermination of species, mathematics predicts (Update)

      1. Yeah, just when we think we have enough feedbacks and tipping points, another one rides the bus. Should we declare the patient has a terminal case of human?

        Meanwhile Guadalajara is recovering from 1.5 meters of hail, but that is small news I guess.

  21. So to counter all the doom a little bit of sunshine with an EV and Solar news update. Too bad we couldn’t have started down this road 50 years ago.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6HIJwN12Ks
    Tesla Time News – Tesla Crushes Delivery Record!

    No, this video is not exclusively about Tesla!

  22. Megawatts of installed PV, through q1 2019-

    Calif 25,000 MW
    NC 5,500
    AZ 3,800
    NV 3,400
    FL 3,200
    TX 3,000
    NJ 2,800
    MA 2,500
    GA,CO,NY,UT all between 1-2,000

    shout out to NC, NJ and MA, who are making places like AZ,FL and TX look like weaklings.

    And the biggest no-shows to the game, when considering its big solar potential-
    OK 35 MW [not 3,500]

    1. California with a WAY better solar resource and about four times as many people is has less than five times the installed capacity of North Carolina.

      Considering that NC is a red state, this is an indication that politics do not NECESSARILY control people’s attitudes and opinions about solar power, and that a conservatively oriented state government is NECESSARILY an impediment to going renewable.

      There’s food for thought in these statistics.

      1. Yes, strong work NCarolina.
        Duke Energy has been proactive there recently in regard to solar.
        S.Carolina, on the other hand, has poor policy-
        ‘South Carolina is nearing a 2-percent limit set on solar power in the state.’

      1. Yes, I declined to mention NM, with poor showing despite a great resource potential.
        I figured that per capita, they were doing pretty well, and they are not a wealthy state either.
        Per capita solar, NM ranks much higher than TX, and CO, but less than AZ and UT.

    1. You could still get car batteries repaired in garages specializing in radiators and batteries into the sixties, and some people I know were still doing it in their backyard up into the eighties, to save a few bucks. They got replacement cells by robbing them from another battery, so you could take two that were bad and make one good one.

      Car batteries consist of either three or six cells in series, providing either six or twelve volts nominal, and when cell goes bad, the battery is done for….. unless you are willing and able to disassemble it and replace the bad cell. It’s nasty and somewhat dangerous work, and I haven’t heard of anybody doing it within the last thirty or forty years or so, except for large batteries such as the ones used in forklifts, which run well into four figures. You can still get a reconditioned fork lift battery, so far as I know, but the work is now done in a factory someplace rather than in a local shop.

  25. Climate Catastrophe and Stanley Milgram’s Electric Shock ‘Obedience’ Experiments: An Uncanny Analogy

    “Humankind’s increasing awareness of impending climate catastrophe is positively correlated with increasing GHG emissions. In an attempt to better understand this counterintuitive relationship, we have drawn attention to what we believe are strong connections between the casual forces behind Milgram’s Obedience Studies and climate catastrophe. In our view, perhaps the most important similarity is their common dependence on the inherently strain-resolving and binding bureaucratic process—particularly how the presence of ‘others’ across an individually rewarding bureaucratic process can push and pull all functionaries into denying awareness/existence of, or diffusing or displacing responsibility for their individual contributions towards a harmful organisational goal. Thus, bureaucracy can not only dispense personal benefits to functionaries for fulfilling their eventually harmful roles, but can also promote feelings of responsibility ambiguity for the infliction of that harm, thereby promoting the broad view that all can engage in wrongdoing with probable impunity. For all functionary cogs in an organisational machine, this dangerous cocktail enables the making of unethical choices easy and ethical choices both difficult and personally burdensome.
    It would seem to us that the most effective way to reverse this potentially destructive behaviour is that all functionaries be reminded of the harmful consequences of their contributions—somehow ensuring that cause perceptually overlaps with effect, thereby rendering feelings of personal responsibility unavoidable. Another strategy is to encourage individuals, at every possible opportunity, to accept, instead of relying on strain-resolving and binding-based excuses to deny, displace and diffuse, full responsibility for their harmful contributions to an eventually harmful process. On this note: Do you know the size of your carbon footprint and what, from the bottom-up of the power structure, have you done to significantly reduce it?”

    1. Caelan, I could have responded to your comment further up but since this comment sort of speaks to the causes of my “frustration and/or anger” at a philosophical layer I will respond here.

      This thread is littered with comments that outline the reasons for my frustration such as the fact that a very wealthy dynasty in my neck of the woods is now getting concerned about the sargassum seaweed problem in the Caribbean and the gulf of Mexico as evidenced by a publication of a story on a regional response to “the threat” in the family owned newspaper. This family owned group of companies has made some token investments in solar (greenwashing?) but, I wouldn’t exactly call them leaders in the quest for reduced carbon emissions. Like most people they will address CO2 emissions if it can be done conveniently but heaven forbid if a reduction in carbon emissions were to cost too much. Can’t have that! Now that the high nutrient content, warm water temperatures and high CO2 availability are combining to cause inconvenient blooms of sargassum in the region, something must be done urgently. See my comment (pretty obvious which one of the two is mine) for what I think of that situation. Had to throw a bone to the crony-capitalist-plutarchy at the end of the comment to enhance the chances of the first part being approved by the moderators.

      Then there is the Goodwood Festival of Speed, testimony to the fact that a wide swath of the public is quite happy to continue pumping tons of CO2 into the air and “burning rubber” all in the name of entertainment. Sure there were EVs at the event and the timed shootout winner was an EV but, by and large the event was an orgy of internal combustion with many manufacturers showing off their latest upcoming internal combustion powered supercars. Notable exceptions were the Honda E, Aston Martin Rapide E, Jaguar I Pace and the Porsche Taycan. Note that of those four only the Honda is targeted at people outside of the wealthy or extremely wealthy. I posted a comment in the livestream of the event after watching the record smashing run of the VW IDR and the downright hatred of EVs displayed in some of the other comments, highlights the fact that there are tons of people out there who don’t see Peak Oil or Global Warming as issues worthy of any attention.

      Which brings me to my next point. Generally speaking, I get the feeling from pronouncements made by politicians, academics and business leaders, both locally and worldwide that, while they might be aware of Global Warming there is no sense of urgency. It is only when sargassum starts pilling up on South Florida beaches that some people begin to take notice and even then, many people are going to want to deny that human actions have anything to do with the sargassum problem. Then there’s the issue of continuing build out of CO2 emitting infrastructure, in my neck of the woods, exemplified by the completion of a brand new LNG fueled 190 MW combined cycle gas turbine generator, representing more than a quarter of the islands peak electricity demand requirement. At the same time others point to the massive ongoing development of coal fueled generating capacity in the developing world, largely driven by the Chinese Belt and Road initiative. Again no sense of urgency in reducing CO2 emissions especially when economic growth can be promoted easily by just increasing emissions (burning more FF). As a result, as many here have taken pains to point out, global CO2 emissions are still increasing rather than declining.

      Over the past couple of weeks I did some digging around the net looking for correlation between atmospheric CO2 levels and mean global temperatures. I ended up at the web site https://skepticalscience.com/ where IIRC I found an article suggesting that the best correlation is temperature with a ten year delay. The implication of this is that the temperatures being experienced now are related to CO2 levels ten years ago and it will take another ten years for current atmospheric CO2 levels to be reflected in global mean temperatures. So, if CO2 emissions were to remain at current levels for the next ten years, global mean temperatures will continue to rise. James Hansen gave his original warnings in congressional testimony just over 31 years ago and after a couple of years of bi-partisan agreement on the need for action on CO2 emissions, FF industry owners engaged in a campaign to discredit the science with outcomes like the following:

      Climate Scientist Schools Climate Change Denying Senator (video from 2014 senate hearing)

      It is as if those behind the denial of the science think that, if emissions are curtailed at some convenient time, like when formerly habitable and heavily populated parts of the world start to get too hot for human habitation, or start to be inundated by sea level rise, the warming will stop and start reversing. They do not seem to understand that if CO2 emissions went to zero tomorrow, temperatures would continue to rise for at least another ten years. For temperatures to start declining, CO2 levels will have to decline and even then, it is unlikely that temperature declines would be experienced in less than a decade, a hysteresis effect if you will. So it seems we are destined to continue pumping greenhouse gases into the air until some unpleasant milestone is reached, all so a small group of people can continue to be obscenely wealthy. When that milestone is reached there will be panic but, it will be too late since there will be ten years of warming “baked into the cake”.

      Against this background I often feel that my efforts to “change the world” are immensely futile and feel that your views, being more radical than mine, are even more so. Despite that, my conscience will not allow me to join the party. Knowing what I know now, I would not in all honestly be able to live with myself while knowingly exacerbating the problem, when I can make other choices. Kids like Greta Thundberg and the German kid ranting in the video posted above by Fred give me hope but, they need to exert their political and economic muscle like yesterday. Will they be able to stop this train before it goes over the cliff? I have my doubts.

      1. It is generally accepted that if ALL carbon emissions stopped today, as the oceans catch up with the atmosphere, the Earth’s temperature would rise roughly 0.6 C, in other words — this is COMMITTED WARMING. What are the odds of stopping all carbon emissions today?

        NEW GLOBAL CO2 EMISSIONS NUMBERS ARE IN. THEY’RE NOT GOOD.

        “Natural gas use is seeing the greatest acceleration, growing two percent annually in the last five years. While it has a lower carbon footprint than other fossil fuels, such as coal, it is a major source of the increase in carbon dioxide emissions. This is because natural gas is not only being used to replace coal, but also meet new energy consumption needs. In China, natural gas rose 8.4 percent per year since 2013 to respond to new energy needs, such as for heavy manufacturing, in addition to replacing coal. Oil is also on the rise, with oil consumption up 1.4 percent per year since 2012.”

        https://www.wri.org/blog/2018/12/new-global-co2-emissions-numbers-are-they-re-not-good

        1. What are the odds of stopping all carbon emissions today?

          Um, I just walked down my street to the corner of Federal Highway just a couple of blocks south of Young Circle and it is still jammed with ICE cars and trucks and just to the north of me Ft. Lauderdale International is undergoing airport expansion. Rinse and repeat for every rural village, town, city and metropolitan area everywhere on the planet!

          So IMHO the odds of stopping all carbon emissions today is ZERO!

          BTW, a side note to all those people who keep saying that CO2 emissions keep rising and solar, wind and EVs are such a minuscule part of the overall energy and transportation mix. Stop insulting our intelligence we know that, we know how to do a Google search. Instead of stating the obvious and saying renewables can’t save the world, another fact which all of us also know, how about telling us how you plan on dealing with the consequences of Peak Oil or maybe another war in the Middle East with a complete shut down of the Strait of Hormuz! What?! you think that couldn’t happen?

          So while you may not believe in Climate Change or the sixth mass extinction think what a few strategically placed nuclear missile strikes in the Middle East would do to your fantasy world of infinite fossil fuel based economic growth?
          Sargassum weed blooms in front of The Margaritaville Resort would stop being on your list of things to worry about!

          Cheers!

          1. Who knows maybe a few of us can learn something from this Danish project.

            https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/05/the-copenhagen-effect-how-europe-can-become-heat-efficient

            This is how Copenhagen plans to go carbon-neutral by 2025

            http://www.energylabnordhavn.com/

            EnergyLab Nordhavn – New Urban Energy Infrastructures
            From April 2015 until October 2019 the project EnergyLab Nordhavn – New Urban Energy Infrastructures will develop and demonstrate future energy solutions. The project utilizes Copenhagen’s Nordhavn as a full-scale smart city energy lab and demonstrates how electricity and heating, energy-efficient buildings and electric transport can be integrated into an intelligent, flexible and optimized energy system.

            The project participants are: DTU, City of Copenhagen, CPH City & Port Development, HOFOR, Radius, ABB, Danfoss, Balslev, Nerve Smart Systems, Glen Dimplex, METRO THERM and the PowerLabDK facilities. The project is supported by EUDP (Energy Technology Development and Demonstration Programme).

            1. Too bad those articles/links didn’t give any solid info on how the city is planning to go neutral, other than pumping around some cold seawater in the summer for cooling.
              Am I missing something? So many words, so little actually said.

  26. Every once in a while I find myself more or less compelled to point out that in the real world, if we want political change, we have to win over some middle of the road and some opposition voters.

    Anybody here in this forum who posts comments to the effect that stupid ignorant xenophobic religious southern white men, etc etc etc are the problem is doing the hard core right wing a damned big favor.

    I USED to think well educated and sophisticated people with excellent university educations would understand the science of winning friends and influencing people , having absorbed this knowledge and developed this skill in their homes, and in university classrooms.

    We all have our blind spots. THIS used to be one of my own personal worst ones, but I’ve been over it now for years.

    There are literally millions of people in this country who are VERY interested in the price of gasoline and diesel fuel, etc, due to their own day to day business affairs. They buy gasoline and diesel in substantial quantities. A friend of mine who is a one horse operator with one front loader, a bulldozer with a bucket instead of a blade, and a truck to haul it, typically spends twenty percent or more of his gross income for diesel fuel.

    He has internet, and he’s a reasonably well informed man, considering that he ‘s a high school dropout.

    But the devil will be providing complimentary ice water in hell before he reads this forum a third time. I got him to try it a couple of times, but he kinda sorta believes in Jesus you see… and he does NOT want to hear about how he’s a racist xenophobe. He’s not exactly sure what a xenophobe IS , but he sure as hell understands that being called one is NOT a compliment.

    He only gets to church once in a long while, but his parents and grandparents are buried out on the hill beside my farm, where my own grandparents, and my mother and dead sister and brother are buried, and the more you go around badmouthing religion in general and Christianity in particular, the more determined he is to vote for Trump and company.

    So go ahead and get your jollies preening your holier than thou feathers, displaying your supposedly superior intellects, while you shoot your own toes off with your own mouth.

    And don’t fucking forget that when you defended HRC right thru Cattle Gate, and her email stupidity, and her bimbo cover up operations for Bill, that the hard core right wing was paying CLOSE ATTENTION, not only to what Bill and Hillary were up to, and developing an ever deeper contempt for your hypocrisy.

    NOW when I confront one of my ignorant older relatives ( I can say this knowing none of them will see it! ) about their own hypocrisy in overlooking Trump’s shortcomings in respect to women and crooked business, well…….. can you guess what their retort is ?

    Paraphrased, it generally runs something to the effect that we’re fight fire WITH fire. If it was ok for you Democrats who are out to force us to live according to YOUR preferred values, it’s ok for us to support somebody who at least PRETENDS to support ours.

    There’s no important book that has ever gotten more WRONG about the natural sciences, but there’s no important book that’s ever gotten more RIGHT about the human experience than that old KJB…….. some of you may have heard the story about the mote in the other guy’s eye when you have a piece of lumber in your own.

    I don’t expect more than one person out of a hundred who reads this comment to take it seriously, unless he already understands it and lives by it.

    But if I convince just ONE reader of this forum to soften up his rhetoric a little,here and elsewhere, if he’s prone to going around saying such things as “religion is poison” the end result is that maybe one more middle of the road voter, or even a right wing voter, will either vote D or at least stay home next election, as the result of finding and reading this forum.

    My long departed old Momma never had an opportunity to learn more than how to read and write and do some basic arithmetic, but she understood even as a child, without having it explained to her more than a couple of times, that you catch flies with honey, rather than vinegar. She repeated this basic lesson to me, when I was a child.

    Somehow, millions of well educated people seem to have overlooked teaching their kids this elementary but fundamental lesson.

    1. .,, A friend of mine who is a one horse operator with one front loader, a bulldozer with a bucket instead of a blade, and a truck to haul it, typically spends twenty percent or more of his gross income for diesel fuel.

      He has internet, and he’s a reasonably well informed man, considering that he ‘s a high school dropout.

      But the devil will be providing complimentary ice water in hell before he reads this forum a third time.

      No problem! Send him here instead!

      https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Persian-Gulf-Conflict-Could-Send-Oil-Beyond-325.html

      Persian Gulf Conflict Could Send Oil Beyond $325

      The possibility of Iran attempting to close the Strait of Hormuz to tanker traffic has increased significantly in recent weeks, as has the possibility of a Persian Gulf War, especially with the Islamic Republics’ intentional destruction of a U.S. surveillance drone on June 20.

      This act provides weight to Tehran’s threat that it will inflict a heavy toll on U.S. allies in the region if attacked by American forces and will not allow these same countries to export their oil if it can’t export its own.

      The memory remains remarkably fresh in Iran of the 1951-53 oil embargo that toppled the democratically-elected government of Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh – and the CIA installing the despot Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the so-called Shah of Iran, in his place.

      The impact on oil markets of an Iranian closure of the Strait of Hormuz would be enormous.

      For the record, I have nothing personal against your neighbors, friends and relatives and would have no problem having a couple of beers with them. Now that is very different from how I respond to the trolls that occasionally come to this site even if I occasionally misidentify a legitimate comment. Oh, and I’m not in the business of catching flies either.

      Cheers!

      Edit: your friends an neighbors have no chance against the newest level of AI bots! Watch this video. And no, it’s not just a game, this technology is already out in the wild and is being used against humans!
      https://openai.com/blog/openai-five/

      1. Oh oil corporation fantasy dreams, $325 sounds like the end of oil to me. When the car starts looking like another divorced wife that you have to pay alimony, the car will go or just rust on the spot. 🙂

        The US will get like Europe and Europe will go all electric. China will be a big leader in hybrids and electric vehicles. Electric trucks will become the norm.

        1. But I still find it interesting that the war drums are being beaten ever more loudly…

      2. Lmao $325 hahaha.

        How the hell do they come up with that figure?! Why not $300 or $315 or …well you get my drift.

        Nevertheless it’s an oil companies wet dream (initially) cometh the hangover of the global economy collapsing it will be a nightmare.

        1. How the hell do they come up with that figure?! Why not $300 or $315 or …well you get my drift.

          They rounded up from $324.87 😉

      3. “Oh, and I’m not in the business of catching flies either.”

        Votes.

        In a lot of localities, and in some states, convincing one or two middle of the roaders out of each hundred to vote D will be enough to put a D in office.

        Maybe the anti religious commentary, taken as a whole, will convince more people to register and vote D than otherwise. Here in this forum, this may well hold true.

        But taken right across the electorate, I believe otherwise.

        The better educated people are mostly already voting D if they vote at all, they are already on board, and don’t need their fur rubbed the wrong way to keep them in the fight.

        Rubbing the fur of a social conservative the wrong way, by badmouthing his religion and his parent’s and grandparent’s religion, motivates him to vote R.

        Hopefully the D’s will have practical sense enough to run on platforms and issues that mean something to damned near everybody, this time around, rather than on issues that leave forty or fifty million working class and socially conservative people with the impression that the D party is taking them for granted, that they no longer really matter to the party. Most of the ones who have traditionally voted D did so again, last time around, but ENOUGH of them either switched and voted R, or else just stayed home on election day, to hand the election to Trump.

        It doesn’t take a whole lot one way or the other when it’s close. Sometimes I believe the D’s are going to roll over the R’s like a tsunami in 2020, and at other times, I think Trump may win, and that the R’s will continue to hold the Senate.

        My opinion at the moment is that the election will be close in a hell of a lot of states and localities.

    2. Mac, you should give it up. No one will ever convince a Trumpite to believe in science, or that gays are not the work of the Devil, or that religion should not be taught in public schools or that every household does not need assault weapons manufactured only to kill human beings.

      As for HRC, she got three million more votes than did Trump. Trump will get his 35 to 40 percent. But the independents that supported him now know him a bit better. He is his own worst enemy.

      As for feeding honey to the Trumpites, that would be a total waste of good honey. Nothing will ever give them any good common sense. A far-right wing idealogue will always be a far-right wing idealogue, totally immune to the thrust of common sense. Independents and reasonable Republicans know what’s happening and will vote accordingly. There is no need to start spreading honey around.

      1. BTW, slightly OT!
        Any one who thinks AI bots have not been unleashed in the comments section of this and other blogs/social media sites should think again.

        https://openai.com/blog/unsupervised-sentiment-neuron/

        Unsupervised Sentiment Neuron

        We’ve developed an unsupervised system which learns an excellent representation of sentiment, despite being trained only to predict the next character in the text of Amazon reviews.

        We were very surprised that our model learned an interpretable feature, and that simply predicting the next character in Amazon reviews resulted in discovering the concept of sentiment. We believe the phenomenon is not specific to our model, but is instead a general property of certain large neural networks that are trained to predict the next step or dimension in their inputs.

        Methodology
        We first trained a multiplicative LSTM with 4,096 units on a corpus of 82 million Amazon reviews to predict the next character in a chunk of text. Training took one month across four NVIDIA Pascal GPUs, with our model processing 12,500 characters per second.

        That paper is from 2017. This year Tesla announced the specs on its new AI chip and that it would no longer be using NVIDIA.

        Tesla Autonomy Day
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=3&v=Ucp0TTmvqOE

        Elon Musk on the dangers of AI
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-Osn1gMNtw
        Elon Musk’s Last Warning About Artificial Intelligence

      2. Hi Ron,

        I agree that most of the people who are dumb enough to vote for Trump are too dumb to ever change.

        And as you have pointed out, some of them have learned better than to vote for him again.

        But elections are often close, locally, state level, and nationally.

        There’s no NEED to gratuitously go around poking sticks in the eyes of people who otherwise might just stay home, or even switch from Red to Blue, in the privacy of the voting booth.

        I’ve personally persuaded at least half a dozen rednecks they should be voting D, based on their personal health issues alone, or the issues of some of their family members.

        Of course there are others who think I’m an idiot because the D’s were so incredibly fucking stupid as to write the ACA in such a way that it was a fucking disaster for millions of small business owners and their employees…… who by and large tend to be Republicans, where as the employees of governments and large companies with health care plans tend to be Democrats, on average.

        One of my second cousins has told me in public in no uncertain terms that he will never in hell ever vote for a D again, because he lost his insurance policy, and getting one back equal to what he had, for his family, was going to cost him pretty close to an extra fifteen thousand bucks.

        I try do deal in day to day realities when I’m talking politics.
        If rhetoric does no good, then it should at least do no harm.

        Let’s hope the D’s have sense enough to run on platforms that reassure working class people and small business owners, etc, that the party hasn’t forgotten them. The various special interests voting blocks that got most of the attention from the party last time around aren’t necessarily enough to win without MORE of the voters from the classes of people you and others here routinely paint as second class citizens.

        Not many of them will ever read this forum, so it doesn’t really matter much here.

        But when you and others make such comments as are often to be found here in OTHER forums, it adds up to a lot of votes for R types, because they return the favor of your middle finger by getting off their ass and voting R, rather than staying home or going bowling on election night.

    3. OFM. I’m trying to hear what you are saying.
      And part of it I have strong affinity for. That is the idea of discussing issues with people in a way that doesn’t demean them, and that offers an alternative way or facts to look at things. So much of our culture and voting population is severely influenced by twisted facts, extreme opinions, on both sides. Sometimes people just have to hear a sane and respectful person present a different viewpoint.

      On the other hand, anyone who voted for trump can not claim to be a religious person and cannot claim to be respectful to the country, unless they are willing to proclaim extreme ignorance as their excuse.
      Religion/’religious’ people, religious leaders have been given a pass on criticism a million times when it comes to being on the wrong side of humanitarian issues. Like war, genocide, the expropriation of whole continents, racism, slavery, etc.
      Respect must be earned, not granted to some franchise with a horrendous history.
      To just accept it is to keep playing along with that enabling behavior.
      Won’t do it.

    4. OFM,

      So the people you refer to do not understand that there are alternative points of view? Their instinct is not to defend there personal point of view rather than to run and hide.

      Strange that, tell your friends to read the Oil thread as the views are a bit less pointed there and there tends to be less focus on religion.

      Generally I do agree that insulting folks accomplishes little and is bad manners.

      My guess is that one finds a bit of that on right wing blogs, though admit I rarely spend time at those except oilprice.com which has a decidedly right wing point of view for the average comment.

  28. I got a very hypothetical question to anyone interested.

    If Yellowstone was to erupt for say 6 months continuously. GHG among other non-GHG would be released into the atmosphere. Lets assume the current equivalent CO2 = ~500ppm. How much would be the equivalent CO2 be, after the 6 months of eruption is up?
    Again it is a very hypothetical question and a lot of assumptions are to be made, but i think there should be a way to give a rough calculation based on the assumptions and known data such as the size and geology of yellowstone etc.

    1. Well, for perspective, according to the U.S.G.S., volcanoes, both on land and under the sea, generate about 200 million tons of CO2 annually, while our automotive and industrial activities cause some 24 billion tons of CO2 emissions every year (worldwide). Therefore, greenhouse gas emissions from volcanoes comprise less than one percent of those generated by humans.

      1. Yea definitely correct. Human emissions are enormous relatively speaking. But check this out.

        A Massive Lake Of Molten Carbon The Size Of Mexico Was Just Discovered Under The US

        A recent scientific discovery has drastically changed our view of the global carbon cycle and identified a new significant risk. Researchers have discovered a giant lake or reservoir made up of molten carbon sitting below the western US.

        The molten carbonate sits beneath Yellowstone National Park, which in and of itself is a super volcano with the power of a massive eruption. The last major eruption was 640,000 years ago at Yellowstone, however if the super volcano did erupt it could cause the US to go into a volcanic winter. The eruption, when it does occur, would be on the order of 1,000 times more powerful than the 1980’s Mount St. Helens eruption.

        https://www.forbes.com/sites/trevornace/2017/04/30/a-massive-lake-of-molten-carbon-the-size-of-mexico-was-just-discovered-under-the-us/#5a6a688e420b

        It has a potential to be quite impactful. Though the chance of an eruption is very small.

    2. I can’t answer your question in regard to CO2, or equivalent.
      But worth considering with volcanic eruptions is the possibility of large volume of atmospheric haze made of sulfur aerosols and ash, worse with certain eruptions than others.
      This can have a big cooling effect.
      Probably the only natural scenario that could reverse what humans are doing is a massive volcanic event. These events are extremely rare, so don’t change your investment theory based on the possibility. Might have to wait 8 million years.

      https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-do-volcanoes-affect-w/
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanic_winter

      1. 100% correct. But after the ash settles after say a year or a few years. Warming will start.

        I believe the Permian extinction exhibited this effect, on a huge scale with the Siberian traps which if memory serves me right, was a flood basalt. Oh and i think oddly enough the flood basalt event occurred near a coal deposit, consequently burning a ridiculous amount of coal. (kind of what we are doing right now)

    3. If Yellowstone erupted we won’t be around to worry about CO2. 1/ A large chunk of the USA will be buried 2/ There will be a global winter that will see off the rest of us.

      NAOM

    1. Indeed.
      Pan Arctic Albedo-Warming Potential at record level for date.

  30. Hey Iron Mike.
    Last week there was a discussion about transmission of solar energy from the Med/Sahara zone to up north of the alps, with HVDC lines. You had concern about transmission losses.

    Here is a good example of what that kind of transmission can do, in China.

    “The new ultra-high voltage transmission line, stretching 3,324 kilometers (2,065-miles)…is also reporting that the transmission line is expected to reduce Chinese coal usage by about 30 million megatonnes per year.”
    “These ultra-high voltage transmission lines are also expected to be able to transfer high levels of renewable energy generated in the west of the country to provinces in the east and central region of China. The country’s National Energy Administration approved 12 of these new transmission lines last September, which are aimed at specifically transferring renewable electricity.”

    https://cleantechnica.com/2019/07/09/chinese-thermal-coal-demand-set-to-fall-with-launch-of-new-power-transmission-line/

    Once again, the same kind of infrastructure would be very useful from places like Texas to the Great Lakes and NE, and Med/Sahara to N.Europe.
    Perhaps big ocean wind zones might also be connected in such a manner.

    When it comes to big infrastructure projects, central planning can be great. We have amateur level planning in the USA.

    1. Very interesting thanks for the link. I need to read up more on it.

  31. How about a 4500kW Plug for your Prius? Yep 4.5 MegaWatts
    “The High Power Commercial Vehicle charging standard would allow users to recharge their large, commercial vehicles (Classes 6, 7 & 8) in 20-30 minutes. Up to 80% of Class 8 truck, carrying 500kWh, in 20 minutes. Up to 4.5 MW power delivery, 3000amps.”
    Hopefully Variable Voltage ( up to 1500Vdc) and Bi-directional.

    https://www.evnewsdaily.com/2019/07/08/08-july-2019-new-standard-for-charging-trucks-bmw-ceo-to-leave-amid-ev-challenge-and-ford-vw-alliance-for-electric-cars/

  32. Esteemed FredM,

    There is an abstract on the Earth Science page at EurekAlert on corals shifting poleward. Numbers of new polyps on tropical reefs are down but way up on subtropical reefs.

    It’s from the Bigelow lab, in the Marine Ecology Progress Series.

    1. Thanks, I’ll check it out!
      Regardless it still leaves massive dead zones in the tropics and the ocean nearer the poles are still affected by ocean acidification so I have a hunch we are going to have major ecosystem resets in marine environments around the globe. I suspect giant jellyfish, gorgonians and soft corals might do well for a while. That 9000 km long sargassum weed bloom out in the Atlantic is a clear sign that things are already starting to happen. I think about this a lot. There are coral reef systems that are thousands of years old and in the short 40 years that I have spent diving I’ve seen more than my fair share of their destruction.

      1. Corral Reefs have thrived during periods of earths history when the climate was significantly warmer or significantly colder than today. If you seriously care about the current cause of their demise I suggest you broaden your focus to include Chemicals and other toxic wastes used or produced in Agriculture, Industry and by the average consumer.

        The causes of the hundred and counting, dead zones at the mouth of our rivers are quite the same as the causes of the dying of the corral reefs. The Nile ran brown for thousands of years but only in the last century has it produced a permanent and growing dead zone.

  33. Who Wants to Kill the Electric Car This Time?

    Several years ago, oil companies began to see EVs as a real threat to their businesses. Electric-car sales, virtually nonexistent when President Barack Obama took office, were rising consistently (though more than 1 million Americans have bought or leased an electric vehicle, EVs still represent only about 2 percent of new car sales). By the beginning of 2016, a new generation of plug-in cars targeting the mass market had been announced—including the Chevy Bolt, the updated Nissan Leaf, and Tesla’s Model 3—all of which were promising 100-plus miles of range and a price tag around $30,000 after the federal tax credit.

    About the same time, the Koch network began preparing a calculated campaign to keep gas-guzzlers on the road. In late 2015, a couple of key Koch agents started meeting with oil-refining and marketing companies to pitch a new “multimillion-dollar assault on electric vehicles,” according to a HuffPost investigation. James Mahoney, a Koch Industries board member, and Charles Drevna, a former president of the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, were raising funds to defend the oil and gas industry from stronger fuel-efficiency standards and transportation electrification.

    The article goes on to detail how these anti-EV, anti-efficiency measures are put into effect. People should bear this in mind whenever they see something critical of EVs. While some studies/opinions may be genuine, a considerable amount of “dark money” has been spent to disparage EVs. I might add that the same sources are also very anxious about renewable energy.

    1. Jevons paradox is alive, well and in my local DIY store

      “The problem – common to all ‘solutions’ at this stage – is that the planet’s resources have been severely depleted as a result of the economic growth that we have engaged in since the Industrial Revolution and especially in the decades after World War Two. Because we have consumed our way through the resources beginning with the cheapest and easiest, the remaining resources are expensive and increasingly difficult to obtain. Not that we are about to ‘run out’ of (in the short-term) anything at today’s rate of consumption. But at today’s rate of consumption electric cars are less than five percent of the global car fleet; so we would need a 200 percent increase in the production of these cars to meet our zero-carbon fuels aim. This is a problem because, for example, even at half that – the increase agreed by the European Union between now and 2030 – we would only have enough cobalt – an essential component of lithium ion batteries – for eight months! Lithium itself would last a bit longer (just short of five years) but by then we would be out of several key metals that would make further car production impossible anyway…

      No doubt as resources become increasingly difficult to extract, a degree of recycling will become viable. But – and it’s a big but – most recycling involves large volumes of cheap materials rather than the relatively small quantities of expensive materials that we are going to be running short of. The energy and costs involved in recycling these mean that recycling will never become a viable way of overcoming the shortages once the earth’s crust has depleted…

      All of which brings me back to William Stanley Jevons and the battery-powered lawn mower in my local DIY store. As fast as the energy density of batteries has increased, so firms have found new applications for them. Predictably, greater efficiency has created even greater demand; causing us to use up the remaining resources even faster. The increased demand, furthermore, requires that we do not just have to replace the energy we get from fossil fuels with wind turbines and solar panels, but that we must set even more ambitious (and wholly unrealistic) targets to produce even more energy with these non-renewable renewable energy-harvesting technologies than we currently get from fossil fuels. And that is yet another headache for anyone who thinks that wind, sunlight and batteries are going to sustain business as usual [Greenwash Ver. 2.0] in the face of our deepening global human impact crisis.”

      1. Just because the source is UK based doesn’t mean that there is not a healthy dose of Koch Industries derived money influencing those opinions with dubious facts and bogus “research papers”. Did you read the Sierra Club article? Good read on how crony-capitalist-plutarchy-derived money is put to work to further their crony-capitalist-plutarchy ends.

        1. The Dilemma of The Crony-Capitalist Plutarchy As Superset Racket

          Alan, I’m unsure how much it matters if what I’ve been commenting about, and not just from my quoted article, is true.

          If we look around us in the real world, with our own eyes and endeavor to do our own thinking for ourselves, we just might see a world in trouble, and a world that doesn’t at all look amenable to being fixed by conflicts-of-interest to having it get fixed– IOW, as in the idea that it pays to treat a disease rather than cure it (and, in the process, to create more symptoms and diseases to treat).

          The crony-capitalist plutarchy is just such a system, a ‘disease’ in its own right that wants to treat/make money on whatever symptoms/diseases in can find, create and/or perpetuate.

          Solar panels and electric vehicles very much appear as treatments, rather than cures, from the disease, for other diseases/symptoms it has, itself, created and/or perpetuated.

          I realize that our systems are an extension of us, but we’ll leave it at that for now.

          Racket

          “…originally and often still specifically, a ‘racket’ referred to a criminal act in which the perpetrator or perpetrators fraudulently offer a service to solve a nonexistent problem, a service that will not be put into effect, or a service that would not exist without the racket. Conducting a racket is racketeering. Particularly, the potential problem may be caused by the same party that offers to solve it, but that fact may be concealed, with the specific intent to engender continual patronage for this party.

          The most common example of a racket is the ‘protection racket’, which promises to protect the target business or person from dangerous individuals in the neighborhood and then either collects the money or causes damage to the business until the owner pays. The racket exists as both the problem and its solution, and it is used as a method of extortion.”

          Sierra Club

          “In February 2012, it was reported that the Sierra Club had secretly accepted over $26 million in gifts from the natural gas industry, mostly from Aubrey McClendon, CEO of Chesapeake Energy…

          In 2014, the Energy and Environment Legal Institute filed a referral with the Internal Revenue Service pointing out that Sierra Club and Sierra Club Foundation were not paying income taxes from sales of solar panels for their partners across the US.

          The Sierra Club has an affiliated super PAC. It spent $1,000,575 on the 2014 elections, all of it opposing Republican candidates for office. The Sierra Club is a partner of America Votes, an organization that coordinates and promotes progressive issues.

          In 2015, a PR front group, known as the Environmental Policy Alliance, claimed that the Sierra Club and other U.S. environmental groups received funding from groups with ties to Russia’s state-owned oil company.“

          1. Caelan, One of the things I find eerily suspicious about your comments here is that, I cannot recall you ever calling out The Koch Brothers, Charles Koch or Koch Industries by name. Neither can I recall any disparaging comment from you regarding any of the shadow organizations that the Kochs have founded/funded including American Legislative Exchange Council, David Koch’s Americans for Prosperity Foundation, FreedomWorks, Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform, the Cato Institute, The Heritage Foundation and The Institute for Energy Research, to name a few.

            For a more complete list of known recipients of Koch money see:

            Report: Think tanks tied to Kochs (from Politico)
            Koch Family Foundations – Sourcewatch
            OpenSecrets.org page on Koch Industries

            From the OpenSecrets.org page, Koch industries spent over $30 million between lobbying and contributions between 2017 and 2018. From the report highlighted in the Politico article:

            According to the report’s analysis of IRS filings, the State Policy Network and its think tanks’ combined revenue in 2011 topped $83 million, in large part with funding from conservative money groups like the Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund, which receive large donations from groups tied to the Koch brothers and other prominent conservatives.

            The Sourcewatch page lists hundreds of donations by the Koch Family to various organizations over the years.

            The above lists suggest that the Koch Brothers (Charles more so than David) are keenly interested in creating a plutarchy, defined as plutocracy and oligarchy occurring at the same time (government by a “few” wealthy people). Yet I cannot recall you ever calling any of these people or organizations out by name. Neither can I recall you being specifically critical of the rent seeking industries from which these oligarchs derive their wealth, namely oil, coal and gas. Yet you get your “knickers in a knot” over advances in technololgy and so called green industries that threaten the very foundations of the wealthcurrent set of wannabe oligarchs.

            Since you seem so fond of and adept at dredging up quotes from the past, how about finding a quote from yourself where you name and criticize any one, at least just one of the offending parties? I would love to have my suspicions put to rest but don’t have the skills or resources at my disposal that you appear to have.

            1. Bullseye!

              I’m mostly a lurker here but I just had to say thanks for this post. Thanks also for your other informative posts.

            2. Yes Caelan! Anybody who expresses doubt or criticism regarding the impending “free green energy future” must surely be a Russian Fossil Fuel Troll in League with the Koch brothers.
              Perhaps more anti-Koch virtue signalling on your part will put your arguments in better stead with the techno-cornucopians?

              What the Ad Hominem Fallacy Isn’t
              https://youtu.be/eyBBMLPnNcQ

  34. How long before emissions from coal stop rising?

    Japan walks away from new coal, denting prospects for NSW coal exports

    The demand for new coal-fired power stations in Japan has collapsed dramatically over the last four years, as Japan prioritises new renewables projects over fossil fuels.

    A new report authored by IEEFA analysts Tim Buckley and Simon Nicholas suggests the trend will have significant ramifications for Australia, particularly the NSW coal industry, which is amongst the largest suppliers of thermal coal to Japan.

    Japan is the largest customer of coal exported from NSW, receiving 45% of NSW coal exports in 2018, but a greater focus on embracing renewables has seen plans for an expansion of Japan’s coal generator fleet largely shelved.

    Since 2015, the development pipeline for new coal-fired power plants in Japan has fallen from around 12,600MW to just over 4,580MW, representing a 64% decline as Japan backs away from coal.

    Numerous planned new coal developments have been cancelled because they have not stacked up financially. The emergence of more cost-effective renewable energy projects has accelerated this trend, along with decisions from major Japanese financiers and insurance firms to reduce their exposure to fossil fuel investments.

    and

    Natural gas beat coal in US. Will renewables and storage soon beat gas?

    Coal, the long-reigning king of the U.S. power sector, was officially dethroned by cheap, abundant natural gas in 2016. In 2018, natural gas fueled more than 60 percent of newly installed electric-generating capacity and accounted for 35 percentof total U.S. electricity generation.

    But that may be about to change. Natural gas faces intensifying pressure from wind and solar power combined with storage technologies. Renewable energy resources such as solar and wind are expected to be the fastest growing source of electricity generation, outpacing gas for at least the next two years.

    Electricity generation from utility-scale solar is expected to grow by 17 percent in 2020 and that from wind by 14 percent during the next two years

    >
    and

    US renewable energy transition to move faster than anticipated by 2022: FERC report

    Dive Insight:

    Looking between FERC’s April and May infrastructure updates, renewables appear to be displacing fossil fuel and nuclear capacity at a faster pace. The May Energy Infrastructure Update included an additional 3 GW of coal capacity expected for retirement.

    “The revisions in FERC’s latest three-year projections underscore the dramatic changes taking place in the nation’s electrical generating mix,” Ken Bossong, executive director of the SUN DAY Campaign, said in a statement.

    “The FERC 3-year forecast of U.S. electrical generating mix is an affirmation that the clean energy transition is underway,” World Resources Institute (WRI) Senior Associate Devashree Saha told Utility Dive via email.

  35. Another one for the Worse-Than-Expected file!

    INSTABILITY IN ANTARCTIC ICE PROJECTED TO MAKE SEA LEVEL RISE RAPIDLY

    “In the last six years, five closely observed Antarctic glaciers have doubled their rate of ice loss, according to the National Science Foundation. At least one, Thwaites Glacier, modeled for the new study, may be in danger of succumbing to this instability, a volatile process that pushes ice into the ocean fast.”

    https://phys.org/news/2019-07-instability-antarctic-ice-sea-rapidly.html

    1. Yep, been a long time fan of Nate since back in the early Oil Drum days.
      He gets more things right, than not. Though he still has a couple of blind spots when it comes to rates of change and unknown unkowns, He claims he has a six hour talk posted on these topics, perhaps he covers them there in more detail.

      1. And he is a mushroom hunter!
        There are several types of people, with mushroom hunters at the very top.

  37. Yet another one for the (overflowing) more-than-expected file.

    RESEARCHERS DISCOVER ICE IS SLIDING TOWARD EDGES OFF GREENLAND ICE SHEET

    “Ice on the Greenland Ice Sheet doesn’t just melt. The ice actually slides rapidly across its bed toward the ice sheet’s edges. As a result, because ice motion is from sliding as opposed to ice deformation, ice is being moved to the high-melt marginal zones more rapidly than previously thought… you do not need beds with till or mud, which acts as a lubricant, to have high rates of sliding. Rather, they discovered that it is over hard bedrock where ice slides more rapidly. Additionally, the ice slides over the bedrock much more than previous theories predicted of how ice on the Greenland Ice Sheet moves… What’s important is that, because of this, you get a lot of ice to the oceans or low altitudes where it can melt really fast.”

    https://phys.org/news/2019-07-ice-edges-greenland-sheet.html

    2. Have the researchers considered basal temperature in the ablation region of the ice sheet? Seems they like to use linear calculations into the future even though the ice loss is accelerating.
      Just wondering.

      If the enhanced meltwater effect is the key, then since meltwater is a seasonal input, velocity would have a seasonal signal and all glaciers would experience this effect. If the force imbalance effect is the key, then the velocity will propagate up-glacier, there will be no seasonal cycle, and the acceleration will be focused on calving glaciers. Helheim Glacier, East Greenland had a stable terminus from the 1970s–2000. In 2001–2005 the glacier retreated 7 km (4.3 mi) and accelerated from 20 to 33 m or 70 to 110 ft/day, while thinning up to 130 meters (430 ft) in the terminus region. Kangerdlugssuaq Glacier, East Greenland had a stable terminus history from 1960 to 2002. The glacier velocity was 13 m or 43 ft/day in the 1990s. In 2004–2005 it accelerated to 36 m or 120 ft/day and thinned by up to 100 m (300 ft) in the lower reach of the glacier. On Sermeq Kujalleq the acceleration began at the calving front and spread up-glacier 20 km (12 mi) in 1997 and up to 55 km (34 mi) inland by 2003.[38] On Helheim the thinning and velocity propagated up-glacier from the calving front. In each case the major outlet glaciers accelerated by at least 50%, much larger than the impact noted due to summer meltwater increase. On each glacier the acceleration was not restricted to the summer, persisting through the winter when surface meltwater is absent.

      An examination of 32 outlet glaciers in southeast Greenland indicates that the acceleration is significant only for marine-terminating outlet glaciers—glaciers that calve into the ocean.[39] A 2008 study noted that the thinning of the ice sheet is most pronounced for marine-terminating outlet glaciers.[40] As a result of the above, all concluded that the only plausible sequence of events is that increased thinning of the terminus regions, of marine-terminating outlet glaciers, ungrounded the glacier tongues and subsequently allowed acceleration, retreat and further thinning.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland_ice_sheet

      Great map here showing basal melt regions of the Greenland Ice sheet.
      Melt at the Base of the Greenland Ice Sheet
      https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/88505/melt-at-the-base-of-the-greenland-ice-sheet

      For those wanting a deeper view into the physics of glaciers and ice sheets.

      Temperatures in glaciers and ice sheets
      http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~luethim/pdf/script/pdg/chapter6.pdf

      1. “Seems they like to use linear calculations into the future”
        Seems to be quite common across many projections. Makes you wonder how much worse things will be.

        NAOM

  38. Global warming is definitely a hoax!

    https://www.iceagenow.info/record-cold-in-brazil/

    The thermometer reached -9.2°C at the station Epagri-Ciram in Urupema, the lowest temperature ever recorded. The previous record of -8.8°C was set on June 28, 2011.

    If I’m reading this correctly, this is the coldest temperature ever recorded in Urepema. Not just for the day, not just for the month, but EVER.

    Urupema is a municipality in the state of Santa Catarina in the South region of Brazil.

    https://saojoaquimonline.com.br/climaterra/2019/07/07/com-9-2c-urupema-bate-recorde-de-frio-ja-registrado/

    Oh, In case anyone is wondering, it is winter in Brazil! 😉

    Cheers!

    1. ASTROMET GENERAL FORECAST: CLIMATE & WEATHER – 2019-2022

      “For thousands of farmers west of Ohio and all through the corn belt of the United States the planting and growing season of 2019 is nothing more than recovery and catch-up the very best that one can.

      We are now in a full weather/climate Agricultural market for the duration of the next three decades – the 2020s, 2030s and 2040s – due to the climate of global cooling and the Sun’s Grand Minimum.

      There’s a very good reason for the common saying:

      ‘Do not mess with Mother Nature.’

      That’s the laws of physics and thermodynamics to me as an astromet and Mother Nature is back in a big way under the Sun’s Grand quiescent phase over the next three straight decades.

      Be not misled.

      Anyone who thinks they can ignore or deny the power of the Sun’s Grand Minimum and weather of global cooling because of the lying propaganda of ‘man-made global warming’ is going to pay very dearly in life, limb and property in this new mini-ice age.

      I’m providing my general Astromet climate/weather forecast here to help farmers and those in agriculture adjust to the roller coaster ride that will continue from now to the year 2022.”

      http://solarcycle24com.proboards.com/thread/5804/astromets-forecast-climate-weather-2019

      1. Anyone who thinks they can ignore or deny the power of the Sun’s Grand Minimum and weather of global cooling because of the lying propaganda of ‘man-made global warming’ is going to pay very dearly in life, limb and property in this new mini-ice age.

        Alex, I’m looking for funding or possible partners in a new snow removal company I’m starting in Miami based on your forecast which I find overly conservative. I now have come to believe that we are headed towards much colder temperatures globally!See my recent post on Brazil’s coldest temperature ever recorded!

        If you would like to help fund my snow removal business I can promise a high return on investment. Let me know and I can provide further information, a business and financial plan and my contact and bank account information. This is a genuine ground floor opportunity!

        Cheers!

      2. Alex- the self-annointed AstroMet Avatar.
        Cherry Picker 1st class.
        Ostrich-Man.

        He believes himself.
        Still doesn’t accept that living beings are made up of individual cells.
        Thinks the earth is filled with marshmallows.

        Some would call it funny, other tragic.

        btw- check out the link, its an interesting example of what the internet can provide to those with an agenda

  40. Solar was biggest source of electricity in Germany in June

    Germany achieved a remarkable milestone in the month of June, with solar – for the first time – becoming the largest single contributor to its electricity output for the month.

    The graph above shows that solar contributed 19 per cent in the month of June, taking the total renewables share to 52 per cent. Nuclear provided 12 per cent while brown coal, gas and black coal made up the rest.

    Another interesting aspect is the record low output of lignite (brown coal generation), which fell to just over 7TWh for the month of June, about 40 per cent below recent levels, thanks to the relatively low wholesale electricity prices and a high carbon cost.

      1. Very interesting graph! For the first six months of the year it seems to show a steady drop in electricity generation overall. Are Germans becoming more efficient and conserving more? Or is their economy showing signs of contracting. However the graph also seems to show a steady increase in the relative ratio of renewables compared to non renewables.

        1. The drop in electricity generation is due to seasonal variation in power load.

          Select “monthly”, year: all
          then select only “load”

          Most of the data on the site goes back a couple years, some almost 20 years.

          Share of renewables is higher due to a decline in coal power production which might be because of higher prices for carbon certificates.
          This corresponds with a huge reduction in electricity exports and Germany seems to be headed back to a more balanced electricity exchange with neighboring countries.

          1. “This corresponds with a huge reduction in electricity exports ”

            Have you hard data for the claim?

      2. Great data source. Wish we had that for the USA.
        Regarding the seasonal drop in electricity use, perhaps much of the winter heating is via electricity?
        Also, wind has been increasing significantly. Almost all of it from offshore source.

        1. Don’t forget lighting, winters are long and very dark. Domestic, workplace, streets – it all adds up.

          NAOM

    2. LOL! Found this little gem at the bottom of the page, don’t know if it is true but it is pretty funny nonetheless!

      Putin mocks wind turbines, says they shake worms out of the ground
      https://reneweconomy.com.au/putin-mocks-wind-turbines-says-they-shake-worms-out-of-the-ground-58121/

      I vote for Greta Thunberg, AOC’s New Green Deal, The German Kid who did that Youtube rant, The kids (young adults) who came up with all those Biomimicry projects I posted, a rapid end to Koch and GOP style capitalism, Including fossil Nancy Pelosi who is just the other side of the same old coin. We need a completely new economic and political system which includes much more socialism and support of democratic principles. And if you don’t agree, get ready to face the wrath of the younger generation because they are coming after you!

      Cheers! 😉

  41. Alaska feeling the heat,

    ALASKA CHOKES ON WILDFIRES AS HEAT WAVES DRY OUT THE ARCTIC

    “A European climate-monitoring satellite this week confirmed that the recent levels of smoke emissions and fire intensity in Alaska and throughout the Arctic were unprecedented for June. Meanwhile, amid all of this, scientists in Alaska are worried about the future of scientific research at the region’s universities — the state legislature is struggling to get enough votes by Friday to override a veto by the Republican governor that would effectively slash state funding for the university system by 41 percent.

    https://insideclimatenews.org/news/11072019/arctic-wildfires-alaska-climate-change-heat-wave-2019-university-funding

    1. I imagine that charred NWT land is happily absorbing sunlight these days.

      “In 2014 the summer fires in the Northwest Territories, Canada, claimed 7 million acres of boreal forest—an area larger than Massachusetts—making it one of the most severe fire seasons in the country’s history. Those fires emitted approximately 94 tera-grams of carbon, offsetting half of all the carbon removed from the atmosphere through annual tree growth across all of Canada’s vast forests.”

      https://phys.org/news/2019-07-nasa.html

        1. If we had turned from our wicked ways, we would not need any intervention from the supernatural. The land would recover on it’s own and the world will heal itself. So the fix is already in, no need for a god to intervene if we turn from our wicked ways. So that god is useless.

            1. The system destroys lives now instead of beating slaves as in the past.

        2. I would suggest you revise Genesis and see how your god deals with problems, you might not like the cure.

          NAOM

        3. Do they allow you to vote, Danny Brave?

          [apparently not Brave enough to think on his own]

        4. In the hour when the Holy one, blessed be He, created the first person, God showed him the trees in the Garden of Eden, and said to him:

          “See My works, how fine they are; Now all that I have created, I created for your benefit. Think upon this and do not corrupt and destroy My world, For if you destroy it, there is no one to restore it after you.”
          Ecclesiastes Rabbah 7:28

          1. Amen! I try to do what’s possible for me to protect His splendor but we are living in a sick world.

          2. There was never a “first person”. Humans and Chimps evolved from a common ancestor.

            The Bible is nothing but bullshit from cover to cover.

  42. xxxx

    share

    In DepthENERGY
    Solar plus batteries is now cheaper than fossil power

    Robert F. Service

    See all authors and affiliations
    Science 12 Jul 2019:
    Vol. 365, Issue 6449, pp. 108
    DOI: 10.1126/science.365.6449.108

    Article
    Info & Metrics
    eLetters
    PDF

    Summary

    This month, officials in Los Angeles, California, are expected to approve a deal that would make solar power cheaper than ever while also addressing its chief flaw—its dependence on sunshine. The deal calls for a huge solar farm backed up by one of the world’s largest batteries. It would provide 7% of the city’s electricity beginning in 2023 at a cost of 1.997 cents per kilowatt hour (kWh) for the solar power and 1.3 cents per kWh for the battery. That’s cheaper than any power generated with fossil fuel. The deal is being driven by steady price declines in solar power and utility-scale batteries, the latter of which have dropped in cost by 76% since 2012, according to one recent analysis.

    xxxx

    It’s hard to guess how much lower the costs of solar power equipment can go.

    The super battery industry is still new, and it’s reasonable to expect that the price of the giant batteries used to store solar power at industrial scale will continue to fall for some years to come.

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