“Steckel and colleagues conclude that poor nations striving to achieve high levels of human development cannot at the same time achieve rapid improvements in energy efficiency. Even if consumer goods like stoves and refrigerators are made to run on less energy, they argue, the society-wide infrastructure improvements necessary for development (which involve a lot of inputs like cement and steel) are and will remain highly energy intensive. Low-income nations, even ones with a large economy and an affluent minority, cannot adequately raise their overall Human Development Index if they are operating at only half of the 1300 W threshold, as Jacobson is asking India, Haiti, Cuba, and the whole continent of Africa to do.
(Beware of some Jacobson critics who, determined to save capitalism but cynically adopting the language of social justice, look at the inadequacy of the high-energy 100-percent renewable strategy and draw a suicidal conclusion: that the only acceptable alternative is a big rollout of nuclear power, carbon capture, and geoengineering…)
for the world’s poor majority to achieve good quality of life, energy supplies in poor nations must be not only converted but also increased. This will require massive assistance from the rich nations; perhaps those funds and resources can be regarded as partial payback of what Pope Francis has called the “ecological debt … between the global north and south.”
Another complication: The wholesale conversion to wind and solar energy infrastructure, wherever it’s happening, will itself consume a lot of energy. Until the conversion is complete, the energy driving the transition will have to come largely from fossil fuels. So supporting the energy-expansion-and-conversion effort in poor nations will put even heavier pressure on rich nations, which will already be struggling to build up their own renewable infrastructure on a crash schedule while simultaneously trying to shrink their overall energy footprint (if they are really serious about reducing emissions). The rich nations will need to offset those emissions created in the process of converting the worldwide energy supply by cutting their own energy use even more deeply.”
And this, while some people, such as on this very collapse/peak energy blog perhaps, express ‘concerns’ for the loss of species/habitat and general despoilment of the environment, including of course anthropogenic climate change, while simultaneously pushing forth a bit of a business-as-usual/government-as-usual, and therefore fossil-fuel-burning and inequity, agenda in the forms, for example, of so-called renewable energy and a continuation of car culture and their inherent mass/mass-production buildouts and effects.
@ Paul (Pukite); insofar as you may think of Javier or at least some of their comments/statistical tweaks here and elsewhere as a kind of evil, and while I may agree, so it is suggested that this subtle and maybe not-so-subtle evil can also be manifest as another prong/flipside of an elite-based ‘retooling of BAU’, as expressed via its peddlers and/or indoctrinates, whether by design, accident, ignorance or irrationality, etc., or maybe a little of all of the above.
“They may be useful evil-doers, but they’re our useful evil-doers.”
Caelan,
You may think there is a simple way to get from A to B as if on a Starship or some other imaginary transport device.
Most others (including me) think that one has to take practical steps (as if walking or riding a bicycle along some path) to get from A to B.
The tweaks of BAU got society from slavery to feudalism and from feudalism to capitalism, more tweaks may get us to the promised land, though what that is for me may be different than what you envision.
Your vision seems appropriate for a World population of about 1 to 10 million, we will need a different vision for the next 500 to 1000 years while human population gradually is reduced due to a population transition to lower fertility levels (maybe 1.5 births per woman over their lives on average). Once we get to very low population levels, then small tribal democracies with little formal government may work fine for those that choose such a life style.
Generally humans behave rather badly and enforcement of some basic rules by some kind of governing body has been the common human solution to this problem.
One cannot just wish that humans behave well, it is not going to happen.
Hi Dennis,
Along with some added info, I’m simply suggesting– and have already done so before– a possible contradiction:
The ‘heat machine’ that’s supposed to wind down yesteryear to save the climate/planet continues to be ‘stoked’:
– Javier and friends are ‘stoking’ it from their side, perhaps via government paycheques for their work and/or via simple ideological indoctrination and…
– You and/or whoever are stoking it from the other side, perhaps via paycheques for your/their work and/or via simple ideological indoctrination…
…such as maybe via guerilla marketing and catch-phrases like ‘thought leader’; ‘brands’ like Elon Musk; and ‘mouthpieces’ like Tony Seba.
It appears as different sides of the same coin which goes something like this:
“Since AGW is nothing to worry about and/or is not real, then we can continue on with renewable buildout, using lots of FF’s…
So, Javier and co., you cover the climate angle, and Nick G and co., you cover the renewable angle and together we can get the job done.”
IOW, we cannot argue for climate/planet responsibility and at the same time argue for the continuation of BAU in its current form, even, to be charitable, where its current form is trying to adapt.
Many adaptations are dead ends.
The rest of your comment seems kind of moot in this context.
Hey Caelan, do you understand the numbers 1/3 and 1/8? Do you understand net energy? Do you understand inherent energy efficiency in the transistion? If you don’t know what I mean then you are not capable of clearly understanding how the transistion automatically dramatically reduces the energy needed by society to perform the same tasks. That is before other energy efficiency efforts are made.
The whole crap about the transition being fully dependent upon fossil fuel until it is completed (as stated in the article) is bogus and not important for many reasons. Maybe a bit of thought and investigation on your part would enlighten you as to why this is true.
The transistion automatically ends the heat engine problem. Many are afraid of that since they personally survive and thrive by the burn.
The whole crap about the transition being fully dependent upon fossil fuel until it is completed (as stated in the article) is bogus
For instance, manufacturing can be powered by renewable power – see the panels on the roof of the gigafactory; and
EVs can (and do) automatically seek out charging periods when renewables are at their maximum.
Also, every panel made and installed, every wind turbine, every EV eliminates a large amount of fossil fuel burn irrespective of what energy builds them.
Just putting the panels where the power is used eliminates mining energy, processing energy, transport energy, FF power burn and waste from using grid transmission.
Yeah.
Horses powered oil wells, and moved oil barrels. Until they didn’t.
Oil moves PV panels. Until it doesn’t.
We are talking about scaling down energy, not scaling up, and AFAIK, PV’s current powering of civilization is almost negligible, laughable, to say nothing of it powering its own processes.
You have not been paying attention to renewable growth nor do you know how much energy it takes to make a PV panel. You are good at Koch brothers driven talking points though. Do you listen to Savage or Gingrich type radio shows?
I think for myself and barely know those people.
Do you eat drink and breathe PV panels? Is your best friend or better half a PV panel?
Renewables (like PV panels) aren’t renewable for one thing, but I’ve been paying enough attention to its growth on a finite planet. Growth happens for certain things up to certain points. So what? Then things fuck up and die, sometimes very rapidly.
You, on the other hand, maybe your PV paying-attention is more along the lines of snorting coke and its got you all stoned.
It’s pretty clear you don’t know what growth is. It is not necessarily related to increased weight of the stuff you have, or in increased energy use.
You like to think of yourself as edgy, but none of this is new. Buckminster Fuller talked about the growing ability to do “more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing”.
For example, I have a small device that fits in my hand. It replaces a camera, most of my paper mail, a radio, a phone, an alarm clock, an answering machine, a rolodex, a magnifying glass, a dictation machine, a pager, a metronome, a dictionary, a synthesizer, a calculator, business cards, a pedometer, stereo equipment, CDs, DVDs, books, maps, electronic navigation devices, a compass, a video camera, a notepad, a calendar, a wristwatch, A TV, a fax, a walkie talkie, a police scanner, a chess board, and so on.
I seem to recall some of us discussing that kind of growth thing, as well as how many people ostensibly conflate energy with technology, ages ago on The Oil Drum.
Your comparison between consolidating ‘elite-system-derived technogadgetry’, and changing over large-scale high-energy forms for lower is laughable.
Fuller is long gone and we are still doing less with more. Meanwhile a lot of that garbage in your list, and the results of their creation, have contaminated the planet. That’s pretty edgy stuff, as we careen toward the edge at full speed.
Fuller is long gone and we are still doing less with more. Meanwhile a lot of that garbage in your list, and the results of their creation, have contaminated the planet.
Nah! He’s still here, just reached out grabbed him right off my bookshelf and took a picture of him with that small device that fits in my hand which alambiquated was talking about. That replaces a camera, most of my paper mail, a radio, a phone, an alarm clock, an answering machine, a rolodex, a magnifying glass, a dictation machine, a pager, a metronome, a dictionary, a synthesizer, a calculator, business cards, a pedometer, stereo equipment, CDs, DVDs, books, maps, electronic navigation devices, a compass, a video camera, a notepad, a calendar, a wristwatch, A TV, a fax, a walkie talkie, a police scanner, a chess board, and so on… BTW, that so on can also include scientific instruments like a high resolution microscopes which would really impress Anton van Leeuwenhoek.
But since you are on here on this site, posting with composted leaves and dirt you are obviously not using anything that might have contaminated the planet right? When are you going to get off your high horse and quit your holier than thou attitude?
Part of the point there is that if you want to make it personal, Fred, then it works both ways– comparative analyses and all that. So let’s have it.
I mean, it’s not like you’re posting to the net with sticks and leaves, or not lamenting about the trashing of the planet, either.
So do you care about the planet or what? How much? How much are you willing to sacrifice? As much as me? The internet? Your car? Less time for each? House-size? Air conditioning? Some gadgets? Less flights to Brazil? What? All of the above? We might have to.
Do you still want to ‘drive your car and have it too’ while expecting others to go all the way first?
What you call my ‘holier-than-thou attitude’ is in part simply ‘calling out’ some ‘don’t give a fuck’ lifestyles (i.e., ‘The American way-of-life is non-negotiable’?) and/or the forms they take– maybe yours.
And, unfortunately, it would seem that many more of us are going to have to follow suit until the tough don’t-give-a-fuck nuts finally crack– before the planet does. Or die trying. It’s possible.
Here’s a question:
Is there a way to relatively-accurately gauge/evaluate our own personal current energy/ecological footprints? If so, how/where; if not, why?
BTW, far too many, if not most, scientists have sold themselves out to the crony-capitalist plutocracy.
Full Moon “In the land of haven’t got a clue
I’m not to blame for anything I do
In the land of couldn’t give a fuck
You pay your money and leave the rest to luck…”
Is there a way to relatively-accurately gauge/evaluate our own personal current energy/ecological footprints? If so, how/where; if not, why?
Yes there is but you obviously haven’t put a lot of effort into understanding your own question. You might start by acknowledging that unless you are living alone in a cave you are benefiting from the very things you so like to disparage.
Ecological Footprint accounting measures the demand on and supply of nature.
On the demand side, the Ecological Footprint measures the ecological assets that a given population requires to produce the natural resources it consumes (including plant-based food and fiber products, livestock and fish products, timber and other forest products, space for urban infrastructure) and to absorb its waste, especially carbon emissions.
The Ecological Footprint tracks the use of six categories of productive surface areas: cropland, grazing land, fishing grounds, built-up land, forest area, and carbon demand on land.
On the supply side, a city, state or nation’s biocapacity represents the productivity of its ecological assets (including cropland, grazing land, forest land, fishing grounds, and built-up land). These areas, especially if left unharvested, can also absorb much of the waste we generate, especially our carbon emissions.
No Jevon’s Paradox in there anywhere? So we can’t drive our ICE cars for longer holiday drives because we installed some solar panels that are supposedly reducing our electric bills? Or other countries can’t get some of that extra that was not burned?
See, you don’t understand. It doesn’t matter much if we drive a little more or less, the energy comes direct from the sun in abundance and no pollution from panels or cars. Then the TAAS takes over and the number of cars drop around the world. Energy use drops, pollution drops, noise levels fall, health increases. Next buildings become more and more energy efficient and self sustaining. Soon energy use falls even further, down to less than 20 percent of what was earlier required. With it goes lots of problems.
Extra fuel to other countries that was not burned would mean that it was drilled, produced, refined, transported, delivered and consumed. How could that happen when a large amount of energy displaced it? The price would drop and no one would drill much or do discovery. Oh maybe for a very short time, but the transistion will happen fast once it gets rolling, just a few years to a decade, all the while eating away demand from FF on all fronts. Then those final users of FF will be using the most expensive energy around and be isolated since they are the polluters and people stop making trade agreements with them if they continue. It’s tough to go against 80 to 90 percent of the world.
It all works out. The poorer nations often become suppliers of energy since they are mostly near the equator with lots of sunlight.
It’s all a matter of using what is directly available every day instead of going through all the conniptions we do to get at what is dead and buried, then change it into something partially useful but ultimately destructive. In that way, we are mimicking a natural process rather than trying to avoid one.
Amusing trivia: a large portion of ocean freight, and a large fraction of rail freight, are taken up transporting oil and coal.
Eliminate oil* & coal, and you eliminate a large fraction of ocean transport and rail freight fuel consumption.
*yes, ocean transport is currently powered by oil. So, you start with passenger transport related oil, and you greatly reduce oil exports. Gotta start somewhere, and start virtuous circles…
US refineries use about 18GW. That’s enough to power about 50M EVs…
Unsure what you mean, if you care to elaborate.
When energy diminishes, so will other things, such as, perhaps, as you suggest, ‘energy use drops’ (circular point)… ‘pollution drops, noise levels fall, health increases’…
As I have suggested recently, which may apply here equally or close, “Renewables in this equation would be a correlation, not a causation.”.
I’m in part suggesting that your particular ‘transition’ appears much too late, irrespective of hypothetical and maybe relatively-miniscule efficiencies down the road that may not touch/electrify everything.
I’m also in part suggesting that some people may not actually need, want or be able to afford some things that BAU Green™ may be forcing upon them. It is not a democratic process, not even close.
“Hey Caelan, do you understand the numbers 1/3 and 1/8? Do you understand net energy? Do you understand inherent energy efficiency in the transistion?” ~ GoneFishing
Where, when and how soon, etc., do those fractions pop up, Gonzo, and for what aspects, elements and processes, etc., and in the face of what other, such as unforeseen, obstacles, etc., such as when/where/how/etc. the social/political/etc. structures change as energy diminishes? Do you think that by reducing energy, everything else that depends on it and is configured to it ‘just so’ just happily reduces along with it?
All these things and more also charitably assumes that pseudorenewables work as advertised, and as we should all know, for many crony-capitalist plutarchy often-useless trinkets and services, this is far from the case. Caveat emptor.
“Where, when and how soon, etc., do those fractions pop up, Gonzo”
Yep, typical name calling is your resort when comprehension fails.
I can tell from your questions that you have no clue and have not taken the time or energy to understand much of anything about that which you so vigorously attack. Take some time to educate yourself on these matters so at least you can respond with a viable debating point instead of just mimicking the propaganda you read.
Gonzo’s a fun mod of GoneFishing and I always call you that, but if it bothers you so and you’d rather not have me call you that, then just let me know. (Besides, you’ve called me ‘Caylee’ or some other funny name-mod like that.)
That said, you still have yet to answer my concerns, and as usual focus on the trivial.
To paraphrase Ron to you recently, don’t be so fucking defensive.
I can offer you a nappy for your tears.
“Gonzo’s a fun mod of GoneFishing and I always call you that”
Gonzo means bizarre or crazy. Look it up. See education helps you to not sound so lame and offensive. Now you know what you are doing. Although I suspect you already did.
So how is it that you are not cracking the books and educating yourself on the topics you talk about?
But more to the point, since I doubt you will pursue my admonishments and advice, what do you think should happen to reduce climate change and get us off the hamster wheel of fossil fuel addiction? If not renewable energy, what and how?
I have a reasonable idea of what gonzo means enough not to need to look it up, but I think there’s a subtle distinction to be made between modding your nickname to Gonzo and outright claiming you as actually being gonzo. Language is dynamic and can change. Besides, GoneFishing isn’t your real name, is it? And, are you always gone fishing? Do you post your comments from a boat or a shoreline? If not, then GoneFishing doesn’t necessarily mean gone fishing, does it? Well then maybe Gonzo doesn’t necessarily have to mean gonzo.
Nevertheless, in a recent previous thread, I think you went with me well beyond the level of my playful tease with your nickname.
Anyway, I have to head out, but will try to take a look at your other comments and points later. I’ll leave you with this however, which may be sufficient, such if I can’t find the time or motivation, and it’s something I’ve writ before hereon: I am not necessarily averse to some forms of technology such as PV panels. What I can be averse to, however, is the context within which those and other forms of technology are derived and implemented, etc..
As Nick G has recently suggested– and I’m inclined to agree to some points– to paraphrase, ‘The problem is political.’.
Gonzo means bizarre or crazy.
GoneFishing means I no longer am a hired corporate scientist but retired and “Gone Fishing” in the literal and abstract sense of life and the world. Now I can do as I please (sometimes). Which is the real point of “going fishing”, to be out in nature or just studying the world and trying to understand, then disseminating it. So be flattered I spend any time on you. 🙂
Instead of baffling yourself with bullshit and hemming and hawing you can either stop using it or continue to, your choice. It reflects on you not me.
You’re no longer a hired corporate scientist and are retired? Did we get that right? This despite your ‘tantrum’ lobbed at me over my pulling a previous comment of yours for ‘external peer review’, being bothered by a nickname mod, while suggesting that I be flattered that you spend any time on me?
I wonder if you’re deliberately trying to assume the definition of ‘gonzo’ to make some kind of point. Like maybe, ‘This is what happens when you call me, Gonzo.’.
How about using your real name by the way? It may have a constructive effect on your rapport and behavior (that I wouldn’t normally ascribe to a retired scientist, though maybe corporates are different). Good luck.
Caelan,
There is no BAU, the only thing that remains constant is change.
Agreed, and we can create the conditions of and for change, for the better.
Dennis – We went from slavery to feudalism and from feudalism to capitalism on the back of ever increasing, portable energy density……period.
Civilization is faltering due to ever decreasing portable energy density and “renewables” do not solve that.
The global economy requires massive surplus energy in order to thrive. TPTB have spent the last 10 to 20 years trying to disprove that fact…hows that going?
“The global economy requires massive surplus energy in order to thrive.”
Should read ” the global economy wastes massive amounts of energy in just about every process it pursues” . The global economy actually needs less than 20 percent of the energy it uses. Most of it is wasted in heat, other inefficiencies and unnecessary pursuits.
I think where we ended up is not where we intended, although more people have better lives now than ever before but the price is too high. So we need to change, adjust our ways and values and stop making the whole world pay the price for our indulgences.
Yes and the current dystem is not going to help that, such as via taxation or technology.
Maybe we should shove the nukes down the holes in the ground we make instead of trying to shove the CO2 back into mother earth. That would solve our major dilemma.
The global economy actually needs less than 20 percent of the energy it uses. Most of it is wasted in heat, other inefficiencies and unnecessary pursuits.
Gee, what next? Will you be telling people they need to study math, physics and chemistry to understand economics… 😉
Economics? Is that like a Disney film where we leave reality for a while then at the end realize we are back in a worse reality with less money and less time and a mind warped by fictions?
Plus we drank soda and ate heavily salted popcorn or candy and lost some health?
No, no amount of studying could correct that. Avoidance is the best thing. 🙂
a big problem with many of the arguments countering the points made in the Stan Cox “cornucopian” article is precisely a lack of an economic model to get from where we were in 2005 to where we need to be by [insert date of choice here]. The past ten years have seen an upheaval and dismantling of the economic practices that existed prior (see any of Watcher’s posts) to such a degree its hard to tell under what economic “system” we are actually operating under. Giving it credit, it has “worked” thus far. But it’s clearly strained, and it’s very very unclear 1) if it can persist much longer; 2) what will take its place should it slump.
All the renewable cheerleaders are saying “we’ve had such and such growth of renewables” in the past 15 years and that growth will continue indefinitely. Just substitute “renewables growth” for “stock market growth” and you sound just like your average wall street journal reader that is completley reliant on the easy-money policies unleashed upon the globe. Once that strains and falters that easy money growth could quickly dry up. And there are so many other problems that the very notion and idea of Peak Oil barely registers any more, to the point that in an economic meltdown of any significant order, it’s again very very unclear if “build out to 100% renewables” will even be part of the discussion of priorities.
I’ve maintained since at least 2010 that our civilization could literally crumble into dust via peak oil without peak oil ever really being recognized as the cause. Reality might never present the bill. Delusion and confusion could persist until the end.
Agreed Twocats. Things could grind down/crumble in so many ways regardless of peak oil, or indirectly from peak oil. And this could happen during the ‘bumpy plateau’ period since the whole system is geared towards growth and has no idea how to live in steady state or decline (from massive overshoot).
I see renewables as fossil fuel extenders at this point, and for the next 3 decades. Without some dramatic thermodynamic engineering breakthrough all this ‘belief’ in the possibilities of a renewable future for 8 B people and the ‘civil’ society is just wishful thinking/denial.
But when your prospects are poor, sometimes fantasy is a an appropriate response.
I did see a bicycle with the entire frame made with great craftsmanship from bamboo- https://calfeedesign.com/products/bamboo/
“People have more faith in technology that hasn’t been invented than they ever did in God?”
-Art Berman
wow – three decades! You are a glorious light of optimism hickory – i appreciate that.
i’m having trouble spotting this system 4 years (though I have been too pessimistic in the past and try to temper that urge.
don’t get me wrong though – I am in complete favor of ramping up renewables as much as possible and have been impressed with the gains made thus far and pleasantly encouraged by broad swathes of humanity to “gear themselves up” mentally for that transition. That combined with reduced energy lifestyles and population controls, it could be accomplished with only “significant upheavals”.
I just doubt such a transition could occur without one or several “new world orders” appearing to manage and ration the process (and violently put down those that would oppose such a move).
Someone at some point needs to decide who is going to get scarce resources and if the crew that is calling the shots is left to make those decisions then, Hickory my friend, you and I are f-zillicated.
my comment about 3 decades wasn’t very clear- meant to say- ‘for the foreseeable future’ – we are not about to have some glorious implementation global renewables on a scale that will keep up with fossil depletion. Perhaps if we had been serious about it when the first Saudi embargo happened. 1973.
Hickory,
It will not be “glorious”. It will simply be market based economics. As some energy resources become scarce they will increase in price and be utilized more efficiently. In addition alternative sources of energy will become more competitive and output of those sources will increase. The increase in output of alternative sources of energy (wind and solar) and transportation (plugin vehicles) are likely to lead to economies of scale in their manufacture as well as research and development and innovation which will reduce the cost of these alternatives and an acceleration of their rate of adoption.
This is a pretty familiar story in economics, typically told in introductory university economics courses.
The story is pretty well agreed in mainstream economics.
Coffee Signals With Dennis
Dennis, I’m unsure ‘we’ have anything, if we ever did, like a market-based economy, except in artifice and the machinations of relatively-useless so-called-economics courses/books.
What we appear to have instead is an engineered economy, perhaps in some regards similar to the old Soviet Union, ironically.
‘We’ appear to have NASA-as-SpaceX and ‘Government Motors’-as-Tesla; we have Exxon’s T., Rex in government, with the Koch brothers appearing as a convenient ‘distractive device/ruse’ (as if Big Oil has nothing to do with renewables); we have Big Oil/Big ‘Government’ ostensibly in, or getting into, so-called renewables and the chained-up tax-slaves paying for it, among many other misadventures; we have AGW denialism, whose ‘denialists’ may be funded out of the same Big Government offices as the renewables teams; we have Bitcoin as a possible government invention; we have the ‘desperation’ of shale oil as apparently fundamentally unprofitable; we have the apparent urgency of AGW that is not being addressed (and why should it be, cuz renewable buildout); we have a mess of proxy wars in MENA; and so forth.
You want to call that a ‘market economy’? If so, maybe you would do well to take a trip up here and have me have you smell the coffee in person at one of our local coffee shops. ?
Digital Man “He picks up scraps of conversation
Radio and radiation
From the dancers and romancers
With the answers, but no clue…
I agree with gist of your statement Dennis , but I think there is a strong probability that timing of the ramp up will be too late. Bad planning, poor foresight.
A disorderly and chaotic transition, with rapid downsizing bringing out the worst in ‘humanity’.
Hickory,
I agree the ride is unlikely to be smooth. There is likely to be quite a bit of economic disruption which will lead to changes both positive and negative.
Hi Caelan,
We do not live in a utopian universe.
You may believe the market based economy of Canada is not different from the planned economy of the Soviet Union.
I would disagree strongly.
The world is not perfect, never has been, and is unlikely to be so in the future.
Well regulated capitalist economies with representative democratic socialist political systems are a terrible thing, just better than anything else humans have devised so far, in my opinion.
Jef,
Mostly that was the transition to capitalism, very little change from slavery to feudalism.
I disagree that dependence on fossil fuels cannot be overcome. Much of that dense energy is wasted, only about 25% of it is utilized in the case of internal combustion powered transportation. In the case of electrically powered transportation about 80-90% of energy is utilized cutting energy needs by at least 69%.
Likewise there is at least 60% of thermal energy waste in coal and natural gas power plants, for home heating where some modern boilers can achieve 95% efficiency, but air sourced heat pumps produce 2.5 units of heat for every unit of energy consumed and ground source heat pumps as much as 5 units of heat per unit of energy consumed.
As we transition away from fossil fuel and move to wind solar and electric transport there will be plenty of surplus energy.
The faltering economy has been growing at similar growth rate of real GDP per capita since about 1970.
A free market (which properly accounts for externalities) will price fossil fuels appropriately as they become scarce, they will be used more efficiently and other forms of energy will take their place.
Yeah.
And…why would anyone say electricity isn’t dense and portable??
Caelan, being one of those you regularly accuse of kowtowing to some capitalist plutocracy or what ever, I will gladly chime in here. In response to Peter’s incessant knocking of renewables, I decided to read “The Energy Imperative: 100 Percent Renewable Now” by Hermann Scheer since I’ve had it lying around since I bought it and never read it. Interestingly, while reading it, you have come to mind, a lot. You wanna know why? I’ve reached page 44 of 172 pages and had to take a break to prepare my report on the EIA’s Electric Power Monthly, which was released on Tuesday evening but, from what I’ve read so far, Scheer was very concerned about the political, legal and financial systems that have developed around our current energy systems. One of the things he keeps harping on is that renewables by their very nature are incompatible with large centralised systems. He seemed to favor somewhat anarchic systems of every country, region, town, village, family or individual for themselves and was very critical of the currently entrenched power systems.
He struck me as a little bit of a bull in a china shop type of guy, advocating for laws that would result in the dissolution of the current power structure. The German Renewable Energy Act, appears to have been an attempt to do exactly that. One of Scheers arguments was that it could not be expected that the beneficiaries of the current status quo would co-operate with the dismantling of the system they benefit from. Peter’s constant protestations fit the resistance the established power structure would have to these changes to a “t”. Rather thank try and come up with solutions to the challenges of trying to go 100% renewable, people like Peter would rather point to the challenges and suggest that they are intractable. People like Elon Musk on the other hand, look at the challenges and spend most of their time trying to figure out how to overcome them.
I would be really interested in hearing what you think about Scheers ideas should you ever get a chance to read any of his books. I even see some of the ideas Tony Seba talks about in his presentations in the book I am reading. The failure of “experts” to anticipate in disruptive change is discussed and at least one of the same examples that Seba uses is mentioned. Scheer died four years before Seba’s “Clean Disruption” was published so one has to wonder if any of them got ideas from each other. So, before you go prattling on about the continuation of BAU etc. please be reminded that Hermann Scheer, one of renewable energy’s staunchest champions, was certainly not advocating anything close to the continuation of BAU. As far as “the establishment” goes, he must have made some bitter enemies with his outspoken advocacy of change and stinging criticism of the status quo. I can imagine that there were fair number of people who were extremely relieved when he died, supposedly of natural causes. Hans Josef Fell, who was his colleague in advocating for renewables and has taken up the mantle of advocacy since Scheer’s death is not in the same league, not by a long shot.
“Scheer was very concerned about the political, legal and financial systems that have developed around our current energy systems. One of the things he keeps harping on is that renewables by their very nature are incompatible with large centralised systems. He seemed to favor somewhat anarchic systems of every country, region, town, village, family or individual for themselves and was very critical of the currently entrenched power systems.” ~ islandboy
Alan, the diminishing of large-scale energy appears incompatible with large-scale centralization. Power simply cannot be projected out as far.
Renewables in this equation would be a correlation, not a causation.
Part of my concerns, however, are that they may offer sufficient power to maintain at least some dangerous levels of centralization/centralized pseudoauthority, and torturously drag this whole thing out, at the ongoing expense of people and planet.
The implications are that some of you might be willing participants– blissfully ignorant or otherwise– in the planet’s continued demise by the renewable/BAU/GAU narrative(s) and agendas.
“1 March 2018 (AFP) – Puerto Rico’s power grid broke down again on Thursday, leaving some 800,000 customers without power, as the US Caribbean possession struggles to recover five months after Hurricane Maria slammed the island.”
If this happened in Jamaica, and our islandboy was doing permaculture on his land, say, and maybe with a little microecovillage community he helped create on it, he might be far less affected.
Solar panels are green plants. You can eat them, other species can eat them, they fertilize the soils, they self-propagate and grow, they help retain water and soil, they help increase biodiversity, they manage the climate/microclimates, they can be fermented to provide ethanol, bees use them to in part make beeswax that can be used for candles and maybe some forms of waterproofing, and they sequester carbon, etc..
Try that with PVs.
Try commenting on this blog with leaves and dirt. 🙂
One-trick pony there…
I’ll take plants over PVs and in-person interaction over the internet any day.
Caelan,
Then I suggest you take the conversation to your local coffee shop.
I already do.
You could forgo the use of electricity, as it supports so much evil in the World (or so you seem to believe).
If we cannot manage our, to paraphrase you upthread, ‘terrible systems’, then forgoing electricity is what we will likely be doing.
In any case, it appears that so-called developed countries will have to forgo much of their current lifestyle demands on the planet. Presumably, this includes some automotive, and electrical. Presumably, again, this may include your car, Dennis.
Caelan,
It is possible cars will not be used in the future, perhaps you have never used a car. That’s great, if true.
From memory you travelled to China in the past.
Did you swim?
Hmmm, I wonder if very many have come to the conclusion that it is human nature to build complex mechanical systems and reorganize nature into new forms. To think we can do otherwise may be highly irrational, akin to asking the leopard to change it’s spots or a duck to avoid water.
We can of course see where our actions are dangerous and harmful, modifying them. But to think we can deny our basic characteristics might be the most foolhardy of our many delusions.
Also, to assume we know where the human conglomerate set of actions are actually headed, in the long run, might be merely another case of grand self-delusion.
It’s a Whitefish repair that failed.
Reality check: (The Guardian) – The dwindling North Atlantic right whale population is on track to finish its breeding season without any new births, prompting experts to warn again that without human intervention, the species will face extinction.
Scientists observing the whale community off the US east coast have not recorded a single mother-calf pair this winter. Last year saw a record number of deaths in the population. Threats to the whales include entanglement in lobster fishing ropes and an increasing struggle to find food in abnormally warm waters.
The combination of rising mortality and declining fertility is now seen as potentially catastrophic.
Ironically I just read this piece in Fortune:
Germans Just Love Paying Sky-High Prices for Green Energy
The cost of the Energiewende is largely borne by German consumers, who pay a surcharge of around €20 ($23.61) on their energy bills. German households pay more for their electricity than in any other European country except for Denmark, where power costs €0.308 per kilowatt hour to Germany’s €0.298.
However, as the latest survey – conducted by Kantar Emnid on the AEE’s behalf – shows, enthusiasm for renewables is increasing if anything. “The survey results show the breadth of the societal consensus supporting the Energiewende in Germany,” said AEE deputy managing director Nils Boenigk.
The main reasons for that support? Future energy security and the fight against climate change. “People in Germany know the deployment must continue so we can fulfil our obligations regarding climate protection and future generations,” said Boenigk.
BTW, a little side note here regarding calling Tony Seba a mouth piece. I equate that statement as assuming that Tony Seba is personally invested either ideologically, politically or financially in a particular outcome with regards to renewables, EVs etc… Having read him and watched his lectures my take on him, is that he has invested a considerable amount of time and effort into studying the various manifestations and consequences of disruptive technologies. Now he may be right, he may be wrong, perhaps somewhere in between, regardless, I have never gotten the impression that he is selling an ideology. As far as I can tell he is just reporting what he has learned.
Anyways, I’m really no longer all that interested in wasting my time trying to convince reactionaries, who insist that the world is a stark contrast between black and white, that reality is both complex and nuanced with millions of shades of grey!
Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System
By Donella Meadows~
You could say paradigms are harder to change than anything else about a system, and therefore this item should be lowest on the list, not second-to-highest. But there’s nothing physical or expensive or even slow in the process of paradigm change. In a single individual it can happen in a millisecond. All it takes is a click in the mind, a falling of scales from eyes, a new way of seeing. Whole societies are another matter — they resist challenges to their paradigm harder than they resist anything else.
So how do you change paradigms? Thomas Kuhn, who wrote the seminal book about the great paradigm shifts of science,7 has a lot to say about that. In a nutshell, you keep pointing at the anomalies and failures in the old paradigm, you keep coming yourself, and loudly and with assurance from the new one, you insert people with the new paradigm in places of public visibility and power. You don’t waste time with reactionaries; rather you work with active change agents and with the vast middle ground of people who are open-minded.
^^ Lip-service bullshit above ^^
So much so, that it’s nauseating. That must be what it’s for. ‘Let’s nauseate Cae.’
If we truly believed those kinds of things, we’d variously challenge the current paradigm, but so much of your commentary here over the years has consisted of the intellectual analingus of the current paradigm, creativeless rips and plugs of assorted cutting-edge trendoids. What makes it worse are those who backpeddle, such as from claiming to be proponents of anarchism and to being proud to ass-lick leadership and contradictory. WTF?
Some people would make The Donald look stable.
BTW, don’t forget color and other things beyond human perception, besides your shades of grey.
Fred hit a nerve there!
Well given that I had a computer graphics art studio in NY at one time, I probably have forgotten more about color palettes than most will ever learn.
Tetrachromats can see colors that most people cannot — up to 100 million, estimates suggest, which is 100 times that of the average human. Most people have three cells, or receptors, in their retinas, but tetrachomats have a fourth receptor, which may be what allows for their heightened color perception. They are usually female, and it’s estimated that about 12 percent of women carry the gene for this fourth receptor. Carrying the gene doesn’t guarantee that you’ll wind up with heightened color vision, but those who both have the gene and who are immersed in a wide range of colors from a very young age appear to be more likely to develop the ability. Researchers are still in the very early stages in their understanding of this condition, so there aren’t any hard numbers on how often it manifests itself.
But some people see the world in plain black and white.
Spectrum (C.~1992)
Neurochemical tones of a very narrow spectrum
An infinitely variable palette of frequencies they called ‘color’
Red green blue were enough for those who could not see all there was…
‘Infrared’… ‘What lovely hues’…
‘What were humans really like?’, it wondered…
Not a human could respond…
Red green blue were enough for those who could not see all there was…
LOL! As usual, you pick something out of the blue (pun intended), that seems to demonstrate a profound lack of knowledge and curiosity about the physical world around you and how humans perceive it due to inherent biological and cultural limitations.
Ironically most humans could not even recognize as a distinct color, the part of the electromagnetic spectrum that corresponds to wavelengths of 450–495 nm until modern times. There isn’t even a word for blue in most ancient and even some modern human cultures…
Not a human could respond…
Bull! Speak for yourself, Kemosabe!
A poet once said, “The whole universe is in a glass of wine.” We will probably never know in what sense he said that, for poets do not write to be understood.
Richard Feynman
Links to actual scientific papers in article if anyone is interested.
Fred – I seem to remember some theory that we all had the receptors to see into the UV but it got blocked out at the cornea. Also that turtles or some, similar animal, could see well into the UV.
Interestingly there wasn’t a word for orange the colour in English until the first such fruit were imported to the UK
ps – my memory is not to be trusted much these days.
I’m not sure about UV, will have to research that but infrared more likely.
Human eyes can detect light at wavelengths in the visual spectrum; other wavelengths, such as infrared and ultraviolet, are supposed to be invisible, but an international group of scientists from Poland, Switzerland, Norway and the United States, has found that under certain conditions, it’s possible for humans to see infrared light. Using cells from the retinas of mice and people, and infrared lasers, the group found that when laser light pulses rapidly, light-sensing cells in the retina sometimes get a double hit of infrared energy. When that happens, the eye is able to detect light that falls outside the visible spectrum.
Re: The colour and the fruit ‘orange’ in the Anglo Saxon vernacular and other languages… BTW, the spell checker on POB doesn’t like the British spelling of the word ‘color’ 😉
Interesting comments from many cultures and back grounds here’s a sampling:
English uses the same word -“orange” for both the color and the fruit. I have subsequently found out that the same is true in French, German and Hungarian. Are there any languages where the two words are different?
Tony May, London, England
In Catalan ‘taronja’ is the fruit, while ‘carbassa’- which incidentally means pumpkin – is often used to refer to the colour. Nevertheless, people do use ‘taronja’ for the colour, although I have been told that this is somewhat incorrect and a bad habit picked up from Spanish.
M. Lockwood, Besal¿ Spain
In Romanian the fruit is called “portocala” while the colour is “porticaliu/ portocalie” (masc/fem) There is not much of a difference between the two words, I admit, but maybe someone knows the etymology of “portocala”?
Christina, Bucharest, Romania
In Greek, the word for both the colour and the fruit is ‘portokali’ which I presume comes from the name of the country ‘Portugal’, the same as in Romanian. There is a small difference in pronunciation: 3rd syllable for the fruit and final syllable for the colour.
Nic Sinclair, Pannonhalma Hungary
>>Persian/Farsi: Orange(fruit)= >>purteghal Orange(colour)=narenji Actually, the Persian for an orange was also narange, so they were the same. The Persian narange was rather bitter, but it was still exported to Europe. But the Portugese created a new sweeter variety, and when this was reimported back into Persia they called it the purtegale.
ralph ellis, Northwich uk
@Fred, people who have had their cornea removed are able to see into the UV. Colour ranges vary from person to person and even eye to eye. I see things redder with my left eye and bluer with my right – errr, exactly what shade is that that I am looking at.
NAOM
Oh, in Spanish Naranja is an orange and Toronja a Grapefruit.
(J pronounced as H).
TKS, NAOM and George for opening my eyes to UV vision in humans 😉
I was aware of various insects being able to see UV. Especially certain butterflies that display wing patterns that can only be seen with UV sensitive vision.
Ironically color in butterfly wings is usually due to structure and not pigment.
BTW the word for both the color orange and the fruit in Portuguese is, ‘Laranja’. the ‘J’ is pronounced hard not soft like in Spanish.
Wings of Morpho butterflies create color by causing light waves to diffract and interfere.
Look Ma! No blue pigment here.
.
Salmon is kinda orange.
Colors are pretty arbitrary. Newton chose seven colors of the rainbow because he figured there must be a connection to the seven planets – Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. If he’d had some mystic reason for choosing six, orange would be a much more obscure color.
Of course it’s a poem, Fred.
Glad to see it inspired some interesting discourse.
Island
You are misrepresenting me totally in order not to face real problems that exist.
I keep on putting up the actual facts of electricity delivered in Germany today.
Yet unfortunately the reality of it does not sink in because glib statements about cold storage and heat storage are much easier than trying to figure out where 50GW of electricity comes from at 5pm on a November, December, January, February or even March windless evening.
The childish absurdity to criticize everyone who points out basic and obvious problems is a sad inevitable outcome of spoilt children who have grown up to be adults who have never learnt that they cannot have something because they want it.
Anyway you really don’t understand the calamities heading towards us.
Billions of tonnes of topsoil are lost every year, only soil can grown the main crops such as wheat, barley, potatoes.
On top of that every year another 80 million consuming being will want their share of a shrinking pie.
So don’t worry to much about solar panels it is the last thing that will matter.
You keep on presenting these facts as if they are not well known and as if no one has ever addressed them. I have not been able to read any more of Scheer’s book since last week since I have been focusing on other matters, so I can’t tell you what his ideas were yet. Remember, Scheer was one of the biggest protagonists of the Energiewende and spent a good deal of his time during interviews and presentations explaining why it could not be left up to the incumbents to drive the transition. Have you ever watched anything featuring talks by Scheer or interviews with him? It’s pretty obvious you haven’t read any of his books.
“The childish absurdity to criticize everyone who points out basic and obvious problems is a sad inevitable outcome of spoilt children who have grown up to be adults who have never learnt that they cannot have something because they want it. “
I don’t know where you are going with that and who you are referring to (me or Musk) but if that was directed at me, try imagine what it was like to grow up in the seventies in Jamaica with both parents being teachers. My dad was a high school principal for the first four years of that decade after which he tried to get out of that profession while my mum, a British expatriate, rose up through the ranks at a new school, eventually becoming vice principal herself after I had left high school (the same one she taught at). I guess that makes me really spoiled, what with being lavished with the largess of the income of Jamaican high school teachers, LOL!
Here’s a hint. My interest in and ability to work on cars was partially as a result of trying to keep the family cars running, a 1961 Rover 100 and a 1972 Austin Maxi 1750, the first British hatchback. By the time we moved to the town where I finished high school both cars had started to show signs of living very close to the sea, rust and both were exhibiting the legendary (un) reliability of British cars of their era. Let’s just say those cars provided a lot of opportunities to learn how to fix stuff. In addition cars from that era required a “tune up” every three months or so, a skill I had mastered by the time I finished high school. One of the standing jokes at my high school was how my mum was always parking the car at the beginning of the downward slope of the school driveway, just in case it wouldn’t start and we had to push start it, a technique only people who can drive manual transmissions know anything about. Let’s just say, my upbring has made me very careful about deciding what it is that “I want” bearing in mind that everything has a cost.
“Anyway you really don’t understand the calamities heading towards us.”
As for that statement, I discovered theoildrum.com back in late 2007, early 2008 and was an active participant in several discussions there. When TOD went dormant, I eventually settled here and would have to be very dense not to uderstand what we are facing. Having said that, when you add declining oil production to that mix, if something is not found to make up for declining FF production, the whole world will eventually end up looking like Haiti. You obviously think that nuclear is the best option for filling the void. I live in the tropics and beg to differ. Almost anywhere in the tropics could probably survive largely on solar energy. In terms of scaling, over 100 GW of PV capacity was added worldwide in 2017 with the figures for the five previous years being 76.8, 50.9, 40.1, 38.4 and 30.0 GW(source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics). Notice a trend? From the same source, adding more than 100 GW to their cumulative capacity at the end of 2016 leads to over 400 GW of capacity worldwide, over 99% of which has been installed since the end of 2004. In contrast according to this article from http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/ , Nuclear capacity could more than double by 2050, says IAEA
If nuclear power’s potential as a low-carbon energy source grows in recognition and advanced reactor designs further improve both safety and radioactive waste management, the use of nuclear power could grow significantly, the report says.
In its high case projection, global nuclear generating capacity increases from 392 GWe at the end of 2016 to 554 GWe by 2030, 717 GWe by 2040 and 874 GWe by 2050. Nuclear’s share of global electricity generation would increase from the current level of about 11% to 13.7% by 2050. This projection – which assumes that current rates of economic and electricity demand growth, particularly in Asia, will continue – reflects that 30-35 new reactors are expected to be grid connected annually starting around 2025. This rate of connections was last seen in 1984, when 33 new reactors were connected to the grid, the IAEA noted. However, it says 33 grid connections by 2025 “would require immediate action today”.
So, the optimistic scenario from your team has nuclear capacity taking more than 25 years to double? And you think nuclear can save the world? Talk about “childish absurdity”!
Nuclear power is both a biological death trap and non-scalable due to both lack of viable fuel and very high costs. Anyone promoting nuclear energy as a means of global energy supply has no concern for the living world as well as a very unrealistic view of the technology, it’s economics and ability to scale.
Island
I am not surprised you failed again to even try to answer the vital question.
Where does the electricity come from at 5pm during winter when it is pitch black and will remain so for 15 Hours and Europe is in the middle of a calm of three day.
I will help you, by telling you where it will not come from.
Hydro power at the moment can deliver about 5% of Europe’s needs, even building hydro and pumped storage in every place suitable would only produce about 12%. Remember pumped storage lasts for only 3 to 6 hours and in winter solar is very limited.
Obviously not from nuclear because people without any knowledge are allowed to make decisions out of fear rather than the best engineers in the world. More people are killed on roads in a day than all the nuclear power accidents combined, but don’t let facts interfere with mindless bias.
Virginia has a large tidewater region with recurrent flooding. Here is a very comprehensive study of the state’s tidewater region with problems analyzed and actions to be taken. There is a series of repetitive loss region maps to survey. A graph shows the Hague has increased flooding events over 5 times that compared to the 1930-1950’s period.
The Arctic heat blob anomaly has shifted slightly south and now connects across Greenland and eastern Canada all the way to Mexico. Further east the Euro-Siberian cold sandwich is wrapped in warm anomaly.
That cold weather in Europe is wiping out all the fancy rhododendrons and azaleas and palms in European gardens. They were already starting to bud thanks to the warm winter.
And they got snow in Naples.
I certainly hope your thoughts and prayers are going out to that Greenland ice, because if it slides off the island there’ll be hell to pay.
Between the ponds/lakes forming, the black carbon, dirty ice and algae the surface of the melt region on the Greenland ice cap is getting darker. Now it looks like the cloud cover in summer has been reducing allowing more input of light energy into the system. Decreasing cloud cover drives the recent mass loss on the Greenland Ice Sheet
The Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS) has been losing mass at an accelerating rate since the mid-1990s. This has been due to both increased ice discharge into the ocean and melting at the surface, with the latter being the dominant contribution. This change in state has been attributed to rising temperatures and a decrease in surface albedo. We show, using satellite data and climate model output, that the abrupt reduction in surface mass balance since about 1995 can be attributed largely to a coincident trend of decreasing summer cloud cover enhancing the melt-albedo feedback. Satellite observations show that, from 1995 to 2009, summer cloud cover decreased by 0.9 ± 0.3% per year. Model output indicates that the GrIS summer melt increases by 27 ± 13 gigatons (Gt) per percent reduction in summer cloud cover, principally because of the impact of increased shortwave radiation over the low albedo ablation zone. The observed reduction in cloud cover is strongly correlated with a state shift in the North Atlantic Oscillation promoting anticyclonic conditions in summer and suggests that the enhanced surface mass loss from the GrIS is driven by synoptic-scale changes in Arctic-wide atmospheric circulation. http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/6/e1700584
GOES-S just launched a few seconds ago. So far so good.
More than 40 people in Europe have died so far due to the extreme cold, so respectfully now is not an appropriate time to make jokes about garden plants and Greenland ice.
And how many other people died in Europe in that same time period? Let’s get some perspective. In terms of lives, what happens to Greenland ice is a bit more important. It’s not a joke.
I guess the silver lining to that cloud is less Europeans.
Climate change related heat has killed thousands of Europeans every summer over the last couple of years.
The Netherlands Central Bureau of Statistics reckons that on average 200 more Dutch people will die every week during a heat wave, a 10 percent rise in deaths.
Last summer 64 people died in Portugal due to fires related to climate change
Heat is a much greater problem than cold! I think you are the real joke!
If the Greenland ice sheet melts, the sea level will rise by 25 feet. It’s not a joke.
3 feet is all it’ll take to flood the Mekong delta every year.
Also, The radiation was detected from the test flight…
Looks like the cold war never ended and it is now working it’s way up to hot. No place to hide folks. Putin better watch out, Trump might tweet at him and then fire several more people.
LOL! he is targeting South Florida… Ironic since it has a large population of Russian mafia types. And of course, Mar-a-Lago !
New efficient, low-temperature catalyst for hydrogen production
Scientists have developed a new low-temperature catalyst for producing high-purity hydrogen gas while simultaneously using up carbon monoxide (CO). The discovery-described in a paper set to publish online in the journal Science on Thursday, June 22, 2017-could improve the performance of fuel cells that run on hydrogen fuel but can be poisoned by CO.
In addition to the unique energetic properties of single atoms, the CO2 conversation reaction was facilitated by the interaction of the nickel atoms with a surrounding sheet of graphene. Anchoring the atoms to graphene enabled the scientists to tune the catalyst and suppress HER.
To get a closer look at the individual nickel atoms within the atomically thin graphene sheet, the scientists used scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) at Brookhaven’s Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN), a DOE Office of Science User Facility. By scanning an electron probe over the sample, the scientists were able to visualize discrete nickel atoms on the graphene.
Our state-of-art transmission electron microscope is a unique tool to see extremely tiny features, such as single atoms,” said Sooyeon Hwang, a scientist at CFN and a co-author on the paper.
“Single atoms are usually unstable and tend to aggregate on the support,” added Dong Su, also a CFN scientist and a co-author on the paper. “However, we found the individual nickel atoms were distributed uniformly, which accounted for the excellent performance of the conversion reaction.”
To analyze the chemical complexity of the material, the scientists used beamline 8-ID at the National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II)—also a DOE Office of Science User Facility at Brookhaven Lab. The ultra-bright x-ray light at NSLS-II enabled the scientists to “see” a detailed view of the material’s inner structure.
The February 2018 temperature map is out. An enormous area of the country had temperatures 15 °F or more below normal for the entire month. Some areas were even 20 °F below normal.
Eastern Montana experienced a top 5 coldest February of all time. In Miles City, the record for the coldest February on record was broken by 1.4 °F, incredible considering such records are often broken by only a few tenths of a degree.
In Havre (see chart below), the average February temperature was just 1.5 °F, also an all-time record low. The whole month ended up 20.7 °F below normal. Six days had an average daytime temperature more than 30 °F below normal, including one date (February 12th) with an average temperature that was an astounding 45 °F below normal!
{DELETED – too long use a link}
An enormous area of the country had temperatures 15 °F or more below normal for the entire month.
Really?! Compared to the areas on that map with above normal temps, it looks pretty damn small to me…
I guess you had to be there without a car. 🙂
Better stated, a large area experienced monthly temperatures 15 °F or more below normal, while no areas experienced temperatures 15 °F or more above normal. The highest above normal temperatures were in the 10-15 °F range. Keep in mind too Montana is not small. It is the fourth largest state by area and about the same size as the whole of Japan.
Meanwhile the northern hemisphere (pretty big place) is 1.2 C above average and the Arctic 5.3C above average. Montana being 1/250 of the northern hemisphere has to get a lot colder to make any difference at all.
Below are temperature deviation data (in Fahrenheit degrees), relative to 1971-2000 averages, for 9 locations in northern North America.
Location ……..February 2018 January-February 2018
Prudhoe Bay, AK …….20.93…………….. 14.46
Moosonee, Ontario 1.57 ………………….1.90
Nome, AK …………..12.66 ……………7.07
Churchill, Manitoba -1.64 ……………1.16
Iqaluit, Nunnuvut -1.88 …………..-3.35
Goose Bay, NFL… -4.88 …………..-1.54
Yellowknife, NWT….. 1.79 ………………….3.88
Sault Ste. Marie, MI 3.30 ……………3.64
Hibbing, MN …..-8.98 …………………-3.74
Average …………………2.58 ………………….2.61
In much of northern North America it was below average for most of February with a big warm up in the last 10 days. On Feb. 18, Iqaluit was 7.61 F below average but ended up only 1.88 F below average. Churchill, Manitoba was 6.55 F below average on February 19 but ended the month only 1.64 F below average.
The most obvious deviation was that for Prudhoe Bay at +20.93 F. That continues a string of major positive deviations for the last 4 months:
November +15.50 F
December +19.04 F
January +8.61 F
February +20.93 F
Cold in Montana in February. Imagine that.
I’m glad some things still seem regular,
even if all the idiots did vote for a charlatan.
Bob- did you get your Trump Univ diploma up on the wall yet?
It is always interesting to read your posts Bob.
The main thing I notice, North America hasn’t enjoyed as much of the warming the rest of the world has enjoyed. Seems, because of our position on the planet, we bear the weight of of glaciers, ie first to form, last to leave.
It is curious tho that this late in a post-ice-age event Greenland has not melted a lot more. Also that Antarctica remains intact. This clearly shows how cold the modern period since the last ice age has been.
It is curious tho that this late in a post-ice-age event Greenland has not melted a lot more. Also that Antarctica remains intact. This clearly shows how cold the modern period since the last ice age has been.
Climate-change–driven accelerated sea-level rise detected in the altimeter era
R. S. Nerem, B. D. Beckley, J. T. Fasullo, B. D. Hamlington, D. Masters and G. T. Mitchum
PNAS 2018; published ahead of print February 12, 2018, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1717312115
Significance
Satellite altimetry has shown that global mean sea level has been rising at a rate of ∼3 ± 0.4 mm/y since 1993. Using the altimeter record coupled with careful consideration of interannual and decadal variability as well as potential instrument errors, we show that this rate is accelerating at 0.084 ± 0.025 mm/y2, which agrees well with climate model projections. If sea level continues to change at this rate and acceleration, sea-level rise by 2100 (∼65 cm) will be more than double the amount if the rate was constant at 3 mm/y.
Abstract
Using a 25-y time series of precision satellite altimeter data from TOPEX/Poseidon, Jason-1, Jason-2, and Jason-3, we estimate the climate-change–driven acceleration of global mean sea level over the last 25 y to be 0.084 ± 0.025 mm/y2. Coupled with the average climate-change–driven rate of sea level rise over these same 25 y of 2.9 mm/y, simple extrapolation of the quadratic implies global mean sea level could rise 65 ± 12 cm by 2100 compared with 2005, roughly in agreement with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 5th Assessment Report (AR5) model projections.
All scientific gobbledygook. What’s the altimeter era? Satellite altimetry? Altimetry isn’t even in the dictionary, have to force auto correct to accept it. Interannual and decadal? More words not in the dictionary. TOPEX/Poseidon, Jason-1, Jason-2, and Jason-3? “Simple extrapolation of the quadratic”? You need to keep things simple for the working man, or better yet just be up front and truthful about how much your looking to raise my taxes to fund your job.
You need to keep things simple for the working man, or better yet just be up front and truthful about how much your looking to raise my taxes to fund your job.
Trump’s tax breaks for the rich won’t trickle down to help working Americans
The Joint Committee on Taxation found that, on average, households earning between $20,000 and $40,000 would end up paying more, not less, under the House GOP plan. Several analyses have found that between 25% and 45% of middle-class Americans would ultimately pay more, not less, under the tax plan.
“The point is, you can never be too greedy.”
Donald Trump during campaign
“Only stupid people pay taxes!” President Trump
“My IQ is one of the highest — and you all know it! Please don’t feel so stupid or insecure; it’s not your fault.”
Donald Trump
If you think education is expensive — try ignorance. — Derek Bok
If you can’t be bothered to find these things out for yourself, then you are really not entitled to contribute to the debate.
I think that between now and the elections in November the Repub/Trump tax law will be very popular with voters. Most will see a reduction in their witholding and celebrate by spending and borrowing more. It will help more Republicans get elected.
I suspect that most of the additional costs to the voter will happen in more subtle ways and be obvious after the election. You can bet that the Republican devotion to balanced budgets will return with a vengence regarding expenditures on such “wasteful” items as Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP, WIC and the evil-0f-evils Social Security.
Bosses at world’s most ambitious clean coal plant kept problems secret for years
Kemper’s failure could be a serious setback for global climate policy and plans to reach the Paris climate targets. International climate agreements rely heavily on developing practical carbon capture technologies that have so far largely proved elusive. Kemper was slated to be the largest coal carbon capture plant ever built, touted as potentially the first of many similar projects worldwide.
Right now, it’s Bitcoin. But in the past we’ve had dotcom stocks, the 1929 crash, 19th-century railways and the South Sea Bubble of 1720. All these were compared by contemporaries to “tulip mania”, the Dutch financial craze for tulip bulbs in the 1630s. Bitcoin, according some sceptics, is “tulip mania 2.0”.
Why this lasting fixation on tulip mania? It certainly makes an exciting story, one that has become a byword for insanity in the markets. The same aspects of it are constantly repeated, whether by casual tweeters or in widely read economics textbooks by luminaries such as John Kenneth Galbraith.
Tulip mania was irrational, the story goes. Tulip mania was a frenzy. Everyone in the Netherlands was involved, from chimney-sweeps to aristocrats. The same tulip bulb, or rather tulip future, was traded sometimes 10 times a day. No one wanted the bulbs, only the profits – it was a phenomenon of pure greed. Tulips were sold for crazy prices – the price of houses – and fortunes were won and lost. It was the foolishness of newcomers to the market that set off the crash in February 1637. Desperate bankrupts threw themselves in canals. The government finally stepped in and ceased the trade, but not before the economy of Holland was ruined.
Yes, it makes an exciting story. The trouble is, most of it is untrue.
Yes, it makes an exciting story. The trouble is, most of it is untrue.
As are most of the stories about Bitcoin.
It helps to actually understand that Bitcoin is just one of about a thousand currently existing cryptocurrencies. Comparing it to stocks or companies totally misses the point. Anyone who has ever exchanged US dollars in a foreign country knows that people speculate on the future value of the US dollar on both the official and the black markets. I have personally witnessed US dollar currency bubbles. Same with many other global currencies. But I digress!
Bitcoin Might Be A ‘Bubble’ But Digital Currencies Are Not
You have likely seen some articles discussing the sudden rise in value of Bitcoin over the past year. Bitcoin has experienced a surge in value. However, the surge in attention and value has also attracted a number of critics, including Vanguard founder Jack Bogle and Nobel Prize winner Professor Joseph E. Stiglitz from Columbia University. They have both attacked Bitcoin saying that it’s a “bubble,” comparing it to many Dotcom companies that were really shell companies offering little value and not “backed by anything.” Stiglitz actually went so far to say Bitcoin should be outlawed and said it doesn’t serve any useful social function. While I have tremendous respect for the intellect and vision of many of the critics of Bitcoin, I also feel that they are missing the point. And I will just say it, Professor Stiglitz is wrong. First, digital currencies have already been adopted and outlawing them would set the U.S. down a very dangerous path. The future will be paved with disruptive technological advances, as the past hundred years have been, and we should embrace and drive these developments, not cling to bygone notions of currencies. Cryptocurrencies and digital currencies, like Bitcoin, have a role and are gaining traction because they do offer value that existing currencies fail to provide.
Bold mine
It’s hard for me to imagine that anybody fool enough to believe in a flat earth will have money enough to get there.
The thought of flat Earthers flying is funny in it’s own right.
close your mind and there will be no surprises
close your eyes about sunrises
if you think anything that might conflict
If you see a sight that contradicts
look inside to find your truth
look inside to find your proof
and remember the four corners
you’ve been to the four corners
of the Earth
Running a standard eyeball over the last but one graph there appears to be a 30 year cycle. Ok, 2 cycles and using a ‘looks like’ is not very scientific and begs more data with further analysis, so, can anyone suggest a natural cycle that matches that?
NAOM
so, can anyone suggest a natural cycle that matches that?
Yeah, the natural cycle of the seasonal uptake of CO2 by land plants in the northern hemisphere, which he clarifies here:
This looks like it’s mostly yearly fluctuation. Let’s plot this same data, but instead of plotting residual by time, let’s plot it by month. That way, all the Januarys will be plotted in one place, all the Februarys, etc. up to all the Decembers. When we do that, these CO2 residuals paint this picture of a seasonal pattern:
But at the end of the day once you subtract the residuals it is the quadratic fit to the data, that really tells the story of accelerating rise of anthropogenic CO2
Probably the most important result is encompassed in that long-term quadratic model — it’s certainly the bulk of the change over the last 60 years. It fits the data well enough that it gives a good estimate, not only of the value of the long term trend, but of the rate of increase as well.
.
Seasonal makes sense for the fine signal but it is the 30 year cycle when you subtract that that has me wondering.
NAOM
I think it’s just a good quadratic fit with a kink in the middle, which shows higher emissions than the curve just before 1990 and then reverted back to trend just after. I don’t know the reason (China? Big fires in the tropics?).
It’s just about impossible for me , or anybody else, to keep up with all the news relevant to understanding what will be happening over the next couple of generations.
One thing that I haven’t seen discussed to my satisfaction , in depth, HONESTLY, anywhere, is the real overall impact of the welfare state we have constructed for old people in western societies.
I’m currently making out like a bandit myself, considering the combined value of my very modest social security check and the large value of Medicare, even though I’m not sick- not yet anyway. I paid in a LOT at times, but more years than not, I didn’t pay in much at all, sometimes nothing, because I lived some years without generating any taxable income. I have significant non taxable income right now, in terms of my net worth, because I own real estate that is appreciating nicely.
And there are countless millions of younger people collecting various benefits from various safety net programs as well.
I AM NOT ARGUING FOR OR AGAINST SUCH PROGRAMS within the context of this comment. I do generally support them, although I also realize there’s a great deal of waste and fraud to be considered in any HONEST discussion of them.
What I’m saying is that anything I read about them is generally slanted, sometimes subtly but more often blatantly, either in favor of or against them.
So what is the real overall LONG TERM EFFECT of such programs on the economy, local, national, world wide?
How much more discretionary income would a typical working person have if we weren’t paying the taxes that support old farts like me, and my even older Dad? What would we be spending it on?
If we were to quit paying huge sums from the public purse to keep millions of old terminally ill people alive for another few weeks, how big a bang would those same dollars make if we spent them on programs to keep children healthy? How much would a statistical measure such as life expectancy fall if we were to eliminate this spending on people who are going to die anyway within a few days?
The last couple of hundred grand we spent on my mother to keep her with us for the last two or three years- in and out of intensive care but at home, not even in a nursing home- would have added hundreds of years, maybe thousands of years, to the lives of younger people, had it been spent on preemptive measures to PREVENT younger people falling ill in the first place.
But I don’t want a discussion about the merits of the welfare state, that’s covered wall to wall and tree top tall all over the msm and the net.
I would like to hear the the thoughts of the regulars here about what the economy would look like if we DIDN’T have the welfare state.
Would we still be having four or five kids , or two or less per woman?
Would we be a decade or two further along in terms of solving the cancer problem, or a decade or two further behind?
Would we have a surplus of decent housing, relative to today, because we would be building more new houses, and dying sooner,leaving them empty?
It’s hard to find an intellectually honest discussion of the value of our built infrastructure, including housing, which will be inherited by the younger generations, as we old farts die off.
Unless I turn into a medical basket case and the state spends a LOT of money on me, I will be leaving behind permanent improvements built by my own hands worth far more than I will ever collect in welfare benefits. But most people I know at the moment haven’t really contributed anything at all that is permanent, to the future welfare of the people, excepting whatever public property has been built with the portion of their tax money that is spent on infrastructure or research.
Are the younger generations actually winners, or losers, in terms of the transfer of wealth from generation to generation?
Any relevant links are appreciated, and thanks in advance.
“How much more discretionary income would a typical working person have if we weren’t paying the taxes that support old farts like me”
Trumpster, the simple fact that you are asking this question shows you are drinking the conservative right wing mantra, that favors the rich 5% business owners. Half your Social Security and Medicare contributions are paid by your employer. Do your really think that if that contribution tax was eliminated. Your employer would put it all into your pay check pocket? Social Security is designed to pay a large proportion to low income contributors than high income. Another example of poor government haters shooting themselves in the foot(but we all know your poor friends enjoy hurting themselves with guns) with Conservative anti government values.
“What would we be spending it on?”
If you need to ask this question, it’s another reason why the American people need Social Security. You shouldn’t be spending the money. You should be saving the money for future old age. Social Security is an annuity insurance government program with lower overhead costs then the private sector can’t match. It’s not an investment. There are personal 401K and Roth’s vehicles for that purposes.
“The last couple of hundred grand we spent on my mother to keep her with us for the last two or three years”
Again Trumpster you are looking a gift horse in the mouth. But clearly at the time, you didn’t stand up and refuse health care for your mother for a social benefit. Why would you ask others to do something you couldn’t do yourself ?
“I would like to hear the the thoughts of the regulars here about what the economy would look like if we DIDN’T have the welfare state.”
There would be a lot of elderly like yourself living in cardboard boxes. This country is wealthy enough to support health care for all(just ask your buddy Bernie). Trumpster, you are a good example of right wing media and religion indoctrination mantra.
If it makes you feel better. Your more than welcome to reply with an HRC hate rant.
HB you seem to have really missed OFM’s point altogether. I would charge you with overdeveloped knee-jerk reaction.
HB, you’re a goddamned idiot.
But keep it up, because you constantly demonstrate that you are utterly incapable of having an original thought, or thinking outside your very small partisan box.
I asked for opinions, but I don’t want yours, because you are utterly incapable of critical thinking.
You are undoubtedly unaware of it, but plenty of rather well educated very true blue big D Democrats have serious misgivings about whether we will be able to support old people much longer, the way we do now, due to the demographics involved, due to falling birthrates, women having their kids later, due to falling incomes among working people, due to people living longer with chronic diseases that are expensive to treat.
This sort of problem requires big picture thinking, SYSTEMS thinking. Some of the countries that are farther along on the path to stable populations, or declining populations, are already wondering how in hell they will manage, and are putting serious resources into possibly having robots do a large part of the necessary work.
Some people are so concerned they are ready and willing and maybe even EAGER to have large numbers of immigrants ….. low skilled and poorly educated, as a rule, if they are going to do the sort of work involved in this case……. allowed into their countries, which in effect means simply postponing the day of reckoning.
We already have people who are double and even triple dippers, on pensions, and we have a number of cities in this country already bankrupt because local politicians who knew they would either be dead or long retired before their giveaways came home to roost in the form of life time health care and pensions for city employees.
Such recklessness has a hell of a lot to do with the Rust Belt BEING the Rust Belt.
The socalled Social Security Trust Fund doesn’t even exist, except as a chimera on paper, because it’s literally impossible for a REAL trust fund to be operated by the same people who take in and spend the money. A TRUSTEE holds money for someone else, for SAFE KEEPING.
The SS trust fund loans out the incoming money to the rest of the federal government, which promptly spends it, replacing it with IOU’s.
But the federal government is FUCKING BROKE, as has been readily acknowledged by more than a few of the other regulars here, in commenting about the lack of resources needed to solve our various problems such as air pollution, water pollution, the inevitable depletion of fossil fuels, etc.
The usual short hand for this discussion is something along the lines of “eternal growth is impossible” so we have to figure out how to live steady state with declining resources, or at least with far fewer resources.
There’s a day coming, almost for sure, for dead sure imo, that we aren’t going to be ABLE to pay for benefits that have been promised.
So it behooves us to be thinking about how people are going to deal with their economic and health care problems later on.
You don’t have anything to add, other than partisan rants.
You might want to think about getting your money out of oil, in the event you really have any. A lot of the regulars here think the oil industry is a damned poor investment choice.
Now as far as HRC is concerned, the Democratic Party is still in the hands of her old octupus like old time political machine, in terms of control of the party office and levers of power.
But the younger generation of rising Democrats washed its hands of her sometime back. She’s history now. Not too many Democrats are willing to say so in public, so far, because not many people of any stripe want to admit they have made a major mistake, but DAMNED FEW people are still actively defending her.
Monica Lewinsky wasn’t a trailer park whore, as she was painted by the liberal establishment, which was determined to protect Bill and Hill.
She was the VICTIM, a kid, in intellectual terms, and Bill was the predator, and you’re one of the idiots who refuses to recognize such an obvious truth, while hypocritically screaming about Republicans and conservative southern people voting for Roy Moore.
Well, they were doing the same exact thing, in moral terms, as you have been doing…… covering up for one of their own.
“There’s a day coming, almost for sure, for dead sure”
Actually Trumpster, I think you have a thing for HRC. You seem to enjoy writing about her. You started your post all up tight and tense with me. Then by the time you finished unloading your rant on HRC. Your all laid back and calm like a teenager boy hiding his playboy magazine. I guess it’s an applebutter “day coming” Lewinsky thing. I’m “almost for sure, for dead sure” you should wash your blue dress overalls.
“federal government is FUCKING BROKE”. “The so called Social Security Trust Fund doesn’t even exist” and yet it allows Trumpster to “currently make out like a bandit”.
I’m sure the Federal government can afford your $620 Social Security check every month.
“plenty of rather well educated very true blue big D Democrats”
Thank you Trumpster, I wish I could say the same for your Republicans.
Trumpster, you need to watch starting at 37 minutes
OFM:
I’ve wondered about the same issues. The numbers on how much of the nation’s wealth is “squandered” on those like me, 74 yo, that might be better spent elsewhere. I’m having rotator cuff surgery tomorrow. It will cost me $250. Four years ago I had a stent put in for an abdominal aneurysm. It cost me $500, the Medicare bill was about $90,000. I can say with certainty that I never paid that much into Medicare in about 40 years of high income wages.
I think we are living in the tail end of a period where we thought that economic growth would solve all of these issues. The data is telling us that it won’t.
As to your question: what would the society look like without these expenditures? I don’t see the issues being anything like you suggest. I see a return of the social upheaval of the progressive era, lots of violence in the streets, lots of political turmoil as different power centers vie angrily for their share of the pie.
But then I see that coming anyway.
“HB you seem to have really missed OFM’s point altogether. I would charge you with overdeveloped knee-jerk reaction.”
And yet Trumpster responded to my comment and ignored you. I charge you with applebutter.
Jim – totally agree. I’m not quite your age and still haven’t any major health issues (but I’d be a fool to think they aren’t coming). In the UK system our social care system is failing, and the NHS is unlikely to be far behind. The private pension system is gradually cracking, very few are fully funded even with what is recognised as share values being higher than they rightly should. We recently had the college lecturers striking for a government bail out because some of their pension expectations (which are really high) aren’t going to be met. Pretty much every single commentary on these assumes they can be solved by just getting the right political party in power and a return to growth. It just isn’t going to happen. My generation have had it pretty good, but part of the cost is that we’ve destroyed the prospects for the millenials. They aren’t going to retire or have a healthy rewarding old age, they aren’t mostly going to have interesting jobs or live in a world that is better every day. They are the most stressed generation ever and yet they aren’t complaining much yet – maybe the zombification through smart phones, social media and advertising indoctrination will work for some time, but when it doesn’t watch out.
Pretty much every single commentary on these assumes they can be solved by just getting the right political party in power and a return to growth. It just isn’t going to happen. My generation have had it pretty good, but part of the cost is that we’ve destroyed the prospects for the millenials.
I certainly agree with with the first part of that but I’m not quite as willing to completely write off the ‘millenials’ and the prospects of future generations.
Case in point this TED talk which is interesting for its content but also because of the speaker’s views about the problem solving capabilities of those so called millenials. Humanity may indeed be fucked if it continues on that growth based path but even that is not an absolute given. Who knows, those millenials might yet develop technology that makes medical procedures dirt cheap for the masses. They may create completely new political and steady state economic systems.
How we look kilometers below the Antarctic ice sheet
I’m not writing off millennials. Rather I fear the day they wake up and decide us old fogies need to be held responsible for our profligacy. But I do think their priorities are completely distorted at the moment – e.g. there really isn’t any need for any more software that allows someone to get something that they would be far better off not buying ordered a millisecond faster and delivered a couple of minutes quicker.
Fred and George,
I think it’s wrong to point fingers at any generation. The root of most of the problems arise from the rapid growth of the human population on a finite earth. Millennial’s have enjoyed their share of the advancements in standard of living from technology, my boomer generation never imagined. They are also part of the population problem as much as anyone else.
The technology and advancements to reduce costs will come from society as a whole. It’s basic economics when a cost becomes expensive for a product. The profit incentive for alternatives will drive the market place to control costs. Look what happened after years of expensive and $100 per barrel oil. Society will continue to realize the cost of pollution and environmental damage, just maybe to late.
What is your interpretation of what happened after (I think only about three or four) years of $100 plus oil. Mine is that we had huge over-investment from the oil industry which is still feeding through to the supply side, and was exacerbated by the very low interest rates, and then a price crash, which might have staved off another recession.
George, I think you have it right except the staved off recession. I would argue that the crash in oil price in late 2014, actually slowed the American economy down for about a year. After the great recession the American oil industry was a leading job and growth simulator. American oil producers cut capex and drilling so much in early 2015. That it slowed the entire economy. Consumers loaded with debt were slow to respond by spending their savings at the pump. Now I think we are seeing a more balanced economic stimulus from the oil industry and lower price at the pump.
I also think at the turn of the century and early Bush Administration the oil industry was under investing in capex. We were coming to the end of the easy big oil finds. Plus with the low prices and the massive Middle East reserves. No one wanted to invest into expensive capex oil. After the failure of the Iraq war, change in liability laws in fracking and increase in oil price. The shale boom ground work was in place.
I wasn’t really talking about only American. It has so many resources still that not much is going to harm it in the near term, on average anyway. I think the trouble there is when you look beyond the average – the wealth disparity is huge and getting worse, there is no history of that ever ending well and is often seen just before an Empire’s collapse
Here is another thought, in the early years of the shale revolution of about 4 million bpd increase over 4 years. Iran got about a million bpd removed from the world market because of sanctions. Falsely giving signals shale wasn’t effecting supply. Near the end of the 4 year ran, Iran restored that million bpd. Bam, an over supplied market. Who would have guessed?
After World War 2, America was about the only industrial nation that wasn’t in ruins. There were plenty of jobs to build a nation at home and supply the world. That advantage is long gone. The rest of the world is now hungry and ready to compete. Without trade today, America’s standard of living would plummet because it could never produce what it currently consumes. American won’t really under stand this until the value of the dollar collapses. Sometimes you have to hit rock bottom before you can rebuild.
“My generation have had it pretty good, but part of the cost is that we’ve destroyed the prospects for the millenials. They aren’t going to retire or have a healthy rewarding old age, they aren’t mostly going to have interesting jobs or live in a world that is better every day. ”
First of all the world was not getting better every day, it was steadily being destroyed. Only if one takes a very narrow view of the world in a portion of it was it actually getting better.
My response is why not? Why can’t they have a better world and interesting occupations or endeavors? Forget retirement, it is not the way to go except for those physically and mentally incapable. Sure there will be large challenges to face but that just makes it more interesting. Give them credit, the 20th century was a nightmare scenario of horrific wars. Many survived and thrived. Many did not but we kept going. The 21st century will also have it’s disasters, but we have more knowledge, tools and communication now.
As far as medical goes, many may be much healthier than we are. The cost of biosensors is falling and computing is cheap. Future generations may not go to an actual doctor very often because they can get monitored and checked on a daily or weekly basis instead of waiting until major symptoms appear. AI will sort out the possibilities and set appropriate action recommendations, much sooner and earlier than now. Most intervention might just be prevention.
So why not? We have ways of making mass production and mass action very cheap.
Education could be mostly free and served to anyone anywhere with a connection to the internet or whatever is used then. People may become augmented, far more than they are now.
With renewable energy and increased efficiency, the world will be far less polluted and material use will fall. That will make a huge difference in health and in overall security.
Beside making our buildings better and far more efficient, we may be able to adapt ourselves to the environments we live in instead of using artificial means. Plus we don’t even use our own abilities being so conditioned to artificial environments.
Just yesterday I taught a young fellow how to adapt his body to much colder temperatures so he would only need a single blanket to sleep comfortably outside at near freezing temperatures.
I think we can go a lot further than that, much further.
It’s up to the next few generations to heal the wounds that have been made, to come to understand the human place in the earth system and more completely understand the earth system. Their task is to have humans learn how to both be human and be able to live on this planet without destroying it. Those are task much more exciting, interesting and challenging than inventing cars, radio, TV, flight, lasers, and space flight. We made the tools and now they need to apply those along with new tools and ideas to get to a new destination, make the earth a Home for all species including humans.
The human race needs to start having a destination, a goal to achieve, not just let things happen and blindly ignore most of what is happening. I may not believe in the singularity but I do believe the human mind is quite malleable and can in general focus upon singular achievements. I think most people will do what works once we figure out what that really means. The rest will have to be kept in check, unlike now where we let them run amok and run the show.
Now I relinquish the soap box to others. Beware the messages and messengers.
CHEVRON: WE WILL SURVIVE UNDER ANY CLIMATE CHANGE SCENARIO
“Energy transitions can take decades, as the amount of time required to turn over the current consuming capital stock and redirect investment to meet global energy demand depends on the asset’s service life,” the report notes, adding that “Oil and gas have a diverse set of end uses. In some uses, like aviation, marine, freight and petrochemicals, there are few, if any, cost-effective and scalable alternatives to oil.”
This may change at some point, as alternatives to everything fossil fuel-related are being sought constantly. Then again, it will take time. Until that time, Chevron’s shareholders have no great reason to worry, the report’s message runs.
the amount of time required to turn over the current consuming capital stock and redirect investment to meet global energy demand depends on the asset’s service life
That’s amusing. In other words, it doesn’t matter if an asset is obsolete or even poisonous, we insist on being paid to depreciate it fully.
It hasn’t worked out that way for several very large US coal companies. Let’s hope that trend continues.
There are cost competitive alternatives for the majority of the uses for oil. If the real cost of oil is internalized, it’s probably 90%.
That’s amusing. In other words, it doesn’t matter if an asset is obsolete or even poisonous, we insist on being paid to depreciate it fully.
It gets better! From the article:
The International Energy Agency’s (IEA) worst-case scenario for Big Oil, Chevron notes, sees fossil fuels’ share in the global energy mix falling from 54 percent to 48 percent by 2040. That’s not really a major fall, which is why Chevron is so confident that its business will not be affected by the climate change fight.
Riiiiight! So Chevron is betting the farm on IEA forecasts?!
Meanwhile the Europeans, Shell Oil, BP and Total are betting on EVs and renewables having major impacts on the oil industry by 2040.
European oil companies, including Shell and rivals like BP (BP) and Total (TOT), have been far quicker than their U.S. rivals to invest in renewables like solar, wind and now even electric car charging.
That makes sense because European investors and governments have been cracking down on oil’s most reliable customer: the internal combustion engine. Norway, France, Germany and the U.K. have all announced efforts to phase out vehicles powered solely by fossil fuels.
A long read ( not for those with thirty second attention spans) about the future of the solar power industry, with lots of commentary on the possible effects of various government policies on the industry.
I’ll just pick this one point from the article which is bullshit and always raises my hackles!
For example, in Germany, over a quarter of an average household’s electricity bill now goes to subsidizing renewable energy, up from 5 percent a decade ago. Customers are unlikely to tolerate paying much more, and the German government has already slashed subsidies for new solar projects.
Bold mine
The fact of the matter is those supposedly high prices are quite affordable in the context of the average German’s cost of living expenses and their standard of living:
The cost of the Energiewende is largely borne by German consumers, who pay a surcharge of around €20 ($23.61) on their energy bills. German households pay more for their electricity than in any other European country except for Denmark, where power costs €0.308 per kilowatt hour to Germany’s €0.298.
Germans Just Love Paying Sky-High Prices for Green Energy
Germans are almost all in favor of expanding the use of renewable energy , according to a study conducted for the country’s Renewable Energies Agency (AEE).
That’s despite the fact that government subsidies for renewables mean that Germans pay more for their electricity than anyone else in Europe.
The AEE’s survey that 95 percent saw the expansion of renewables as important or extremely important. That’s up from 93% in a similar survey last year.
Hi Fred,
Great and highly relevant reply as usual.
When you talk, I quit whatever I’m doing to listen, the way people did in some old ad on tv about a stock brokerage. When the name was mentioned as in ” xxxxxx xxxxx says………” everybody went dead quiet at a party, in order to eaves drop.
I agree, you have to read damned near everything with a strong dose of salt and charcoal these days, so as to prevent being made a fool of, or poisoned.
My usual reply to a comment pointing out the high price of retail electricity in Germany is that the people of the country support the renewables industries whole heartedly for a variety of reasons, including in no particular order, the employment it provides at high wages, the export earnings it provides, and the contribution it makes to German economic and military security.
The German people understand depletion, and not having things available at any price, and that their high living standard is based on the import export model, import materials, and export finished high tech goods and services. Every kilowatt hour they generate fuel free is one they have without having to import oil and gas and even coal, from countries that are NOT necessarily their friends.
One thing you and I have in common is that we are big picture thinkers. You never say much about history, but you are so well informed in other areas that I have no doubt you know the broad outlines of recent history……. why the Russians and Germans will never be real friends….. well, not for another couple of generations at least. By then WWII will really be history, with the last of the people who knew people who fought it or at least survived it ( old grandparents who held them on their knees ) having died themselves.
Germany and German workers are right up there at the very top of the heap in understanding that if they are to preserve their very pleasant and prosperous way of life, they MUST remain at the forefront, technologically, and always have stuff to export, or else be prepared to live without imports, because in the END, imports MUST be paid for by exporting. Otherwise, Germany will become an economic colony of the people who supply the imports, and use the money they earn by exporting to Germany to buy up German real estate, and German companies. If Germany cannot remain a strong exporter, German money will be worthless on the global stage, in terms of paying for large quantities of imported materials of ANY sort.
What the Germans pay out in terms of high retail electricity prices, they get back, and more, in the form of high wage employment and tax collections. They live better than just about anybody else, excepting a few very lucky countries that have slightly higher living standards due to having small populations and very large resources.
BUT…… and this is IMPORTANT……. There’s still plenty of food for thought in this article.
Editors always have agendas, and so do writers. They will emphasize what pleases them, and ignore or paper over what does not.
I try to be as even handed as possible, and tell both sides of any story I bring up, unless somebody else is doing a good job of telling one side only. Then I take the other side.
You never say much about history, but you are so well informed in other areas that I have no doubt you know the broad outlines of recent history…….
I’m certainly no historian but have read quite widely and even read some history books here and there, with a grain of salt added for balance. At the very least I have read the accounts written by my great grandparents who were both land owners and a part of the political class in Hungary and I have the word of mouth accounts of my grandparents and my mother of their exile through Germany during WWII. I also have personal experience with the 1964 Military coup in Brazil and the dictatorship that followed…
Heck, I’ve even read the declaration of independence and personally visited places like Jefferson’s Monticello residence… 😉
THE WORLD IS EMBRACING S.U.V.S. THAT’S BAD NEWS FOR THE CLIMATE.
“It’s the car of the future. It’s taking off in markets all over in the world. The electric vehicle? Hardly. It’s the S.U.V., the rugged, off-road gas-guzzler that America invented and the world increasingly loves to drive. Spurred by rising incomes and lower gas prices, drivers in China, Australia and other countries are ditching their smaller sedans for bigger rides at a rapid pace. For the first time, S.U.V.s and their lighter, more car-like cousins known as “crossovers” made up more than one in three cars sold globally last year, almost tripling their share from just a decade ago, according to new figures from the auto research firm JATO Dynamics.”
I have a hunch that will change in the near future!
BTW, I wish the good folk in the MSM would at the very least stop spreading myths about power, batteries and range anxiety.
S.U.V.s are also less likely to go electric soon. There are technological hurdles to powering a larger car with batteries, and the perception among many automakers remains that drivers of S.U.V.s value power and performance, and don’t want to be constrained by the range anxiety of battery-powered cars.
If that were really an issue we wouldn’t have trucking companies with big fleets looking at electric semi rigs.
There are a number of European countries that are in the process of banning ICE and especially diesel powered vehicles.
Post dieselgate VW has quite a few EVs in the pipeline as does every major European auto manufacturer.
And then there are macho EV vehicles such as this one. http://bollingermotors.com/
Diesels are for wusses! 😉
Tesla should start taking pre-orders on it’s model Y in the fall – that’s Tesla’s more affordable SUV.
Anyone betting on the lack of electric SUVs saving the ICE is kidding themselves.
For February, the Tesla model 3 was the best selling electrified car, beating out the Toyota Prius and Chevy Bolt in 2nd and 3rd place.
Tesla already dominates in the high end luxury car market over anything electric or ICE powered. Thats the entire high end of a pretty profitable market already lost to the ICE vendors. Tic toc , tic toc …. Every day without a ground breaking for a battery factory is another day head start for Tesla. Hard to believe the other car manufacturers are going to just sit back and let Tesla have the entire car market but … tic toc, tic toc…..
Keeping in mind the cost of a Tesla or nearly every other electric or hybrid car out there, there’s not much the traditional automakers will have to worry about over the next 20-25 years at least. In all likelihood that accounts for the remainder of my lifespan as well as probably most of the other men posting here.
BS, it wont take 25 years. The Telsa model 3, the Nissan Leaf and the Hyundai are all very competitive with ICE prices. That’s this year. Even if you want something under 20K that wont take 10 years.
But keeping in mind, the current prices for ICE based cars…
“In the first quarter of 2017, the average price on a new car ran $31,400 after incentives. That’s according to Thomas King, a vice president at J.D. Power and Associates…” The EV is knocking on the mainstream market this year and already dominates the high end luxury market.
Hi Charles,
You’re obviously not up to date on the prices of the more inexpensive electric models available now, although they aren’t get available in large numbers.
That’s changing fast. Within three or four years, almost all the major auto manufacturers will have a variety of electric cars in their showrooms.
An oil supply crisis is inevitable, it’s simply a question of WHEN, rather than IF……………. unless electric cars start selling fast enough to cut seriously into the amount of oil we use, collectively.
Oil doesn’t grow back like peanuts and potatoes, lol.
Every oil field eventually runs near enough to dry that getting more oil out of it costs more than it’s worth.
There are at least three very basic reasons just about every major manufacturer is spending megabucks on electric car research and development, and building or modifying existing manufacturing plants to build electric cars.
One, management is now convinced that electric cars are going to be the preferred choice of new car buyers within another decade or so, since the cost of building them is coming down fast, meaning that they will actually be CHEAPER to own and operate than similar ordinary cars within the easily foreseeable future.
Two, management understands that oil doesn’t grow back like potatoes, and that eventually, gasoline and diesel fuel are going to be very expensive indeed.
Three, the general public is gradually coming to understand that when we take into account the health care costs, the environmental costs, and the national security costs of oil addiction, and warming up to the idea of electrified transportation.
It’s still going to take a few years, but the world’s remaining endowment of affordable oil is shrinking at very roughly eighty to ninety million barrels a day, depending on what you consider to be oil.
We’re using more and more, while less and less is left to be discovered and produced.
they will actually be CHEAPER to own and operate than similar ordinary cars within the easily foreseeable future.
EVs are already as cheap or cheaper to own AND operate. EVs have a higher purchase price, but they’re much cheaper to operate (fuel and maintenance).
Take a look at Edmunds.com. Use the Total Cost of Operation option, and compare the Nissan Leaf to the cheapest Nissan ICEs: their 5 year TCO are both at the very low end of all cars, and about equal. And, of course, the Leaf has much better performance and features than the cheapest ICEs.
I’d love to see one of these rolling by with a couple of surfboards up top…
We never thought Californian police officers would close down a street in Santa Monica to allow Jonny Smith to test drive the extraordinary Volkswagen ID Buzz. But they did.
He also gets a look at the WW ID Crozz.
Jonny delivers a very comprehensive review of these extraordinary vehicles.
Yes, very cool. The VW CEO is all in for EV’s but the board of directors is pushing back on the capex costs. I don’t think it helps that some of those board members are also on the boards of oil companies – a problem Tesla doesn’t have.
But really, with diesel gate and the more recent scandal with testing diesel fumes on humans – VW is likely dead soon if they don’t go EV. It kind of seems doubly bad with the gassing coming from a company originally founded by the Nazis (just history – these weren’t nazis doing this testing, just ordinary executives in theUS). They have the story on the Netflix documentary series “Dirty Money”.
The new CEO is trying his best and they have lots of very cool concepts, like the E-Bugster….
Europe plagued by slow running clocks.
Every electricity powered clock in Europe is running 5 minutes behind the actual time. The root cause is the loss of the legendarily accurate 50 Hz frequency of the pan-European electricity network. Due to “supply shortage” in one single southeastern European country every man and woman in the old continent has to adjust their alarm clocks, oven clocks and so on.
Clocks running on electricity might depend on the quartz-technology or be directly dependent on the frequency of the net. The latter sort of clocks is impacted. The quartz clocks serve as reference now, just like smartphone clocks: they depend on corrections constantly provided over the internet. https://www.entsoe.eu/news-events/announcements/announcements-archive/Pages/News/Frequency-deviations-in-Continental-Europe-including-impact-on-electric-clocks-steered-by-frequency.aspx
Clock?! What’s a clock? I don’t even wear a watch anymore and I haven’t set an alarm clock in years . If I want to know the time I check my smartphone or my notebook.
“The Second Coming”
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
the falcon cannot hear the falconer;
things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
the ceremony of innocence is drowned;
the best lack all conviction, while the worst
are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
when a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
a shape with lion body and the head of a man,
a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
that twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
and what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
-Yeats
“If the center holds, the climate and our eco-sphere are destroyed. How stupid that we are left with disintegration as our best remaining option.”
The so called Greatest Generation is for all practical purposes gone, in terms of making it to the polling place.
The so called Boomers are departing in increasing numbers on a daily basis.
We hear a hell of a lot about a supposed resurgence of religion, but compared to what used to be, it’s hardly worth mentioning. The old line churches are mostly empty on Sunday mornings, and the relatively few new ones that are full aren’t nearly as politically conservative as the older ones they have displaced.
I live in a community that’s about as religious as they come these days, with maybe the exception of a few places in the deep south, or maybe in Mormon country.
And I can say with complete conviction, based on actual experience, that while lip service is paid to the seven days of creation story, etc, young people even in backwoods Baptist churches these days generally believe in deep time and evolution, and make no bones about their beliefs…… so long as they’re out of hearing distance of their elders, lol.
The demographic and cultural trends are rock solid in favor of the Democrats.
All that’s necessary, in my humble opinion, for the D Party to mop the floor with the R’s this fall is that they remember who they are, rather than running run Republican Lite campaigns.
What is your problem ? If it wasn’t for them, you would be writing in German right now. Do you just like to insult everyone or is it because FDR was a Democrat and actually won an American war ? Nearly half a million of them died in the war. They saved Europe from tyranny, turned their enemies into productive allies, won the cold war, put a man on the moon and turned America into a superpower. What have you and Trump done lately apple butter farmer ?
I think 30 some million Russia dead should be given a bit of the credit.
I noticed you don’t write in Russian George. We will see if that’s still true after 4 years of Trump. That “Greatest Generation” is looking better every day.
I also spoke of socalled Boomers, and had I mentioned Millenials or X ‘ers or any other so called generation, I would have done the same.
WWII was fought by the entire country, from ten year olds on the farm to eighty year old people who tended children so younger people could work.
Humans aren’t birds or insects. We reproduce year around. We don’t have our young
at any particular time, every twenty or so years. I try to avoid stereotypes.
Nuance matters.
We don’t really have any accepted stereotype name for the people who were young adults in the thirties, and so too old to put on the uniform in the forties, and the ones we use now to INACCURATELY categorize the SO CALLED younger generations contribute more to confusion than they do to understanding.
Four of my uncles joined up within a few weeks of Pearl Harbor. Only two made it back. My Dad missed joining up because he wasn’t old enough.
But he dropped out of school, as a matter of necessity, and he did a full grown man’s work.
He has never received the slightest recognition for his contribution to the war effort. Hundreds of thousands of people on active duty lived better, ate better, had better clothing, more money, better health care, more free time, etc. They also had an opportunity to participate later in various programs geared specifically to people who were uniformed.
You don’t have anything useful to say.
I doubt you have even the foggiest idea about how the federal government collects and spends so called trust fund monies.
You don’t have even a foggy idea what’s been promised, in relation to what’s going to be available to pay.
My grandparents made out like bandits because they were well into their working years when Social Security was founded, and because they paid in enough to collect the limit, and the limit on contributions was set very low in their day. All of them incidentally lived into their nineties. There’s something to be said for farm life and Bible thumping, although some of the regulars here would rather not admit it.
They had large families, and all of my aunts and uncles worked just about all their lives, and paid in the money my grandparents received.
But the size of the average family dropped by about HALF in the following generation in our case, and the money my older people paid in was spent years and years ago, and they are now collecting money that is BORROWED MONEY.
I’m collecting BORROWED MONEY.
By the time my nieces and nephews are old enough to collect……. well…… they have an average of less than two kids per couple. It’s often said that more young people believe in Santa Claus than in collecting Social Security.
Social Security is the biggest single specific Ponzi scheme in history, and anybody who knows shit from apple butter about history and politics knows this is true.
Nobody can say how long it will stand, but nobody with brains enough to wipe his own ass can possibly believe it can continue indefinitely in it’s current form.
But it’s rather obvious you don’t know shit from apple butter about anything worth mentioning.
I’m a hard core Darwinist myself, with a sound technical education, but I try to live the way you’re taught to live in that old KGB, and one really big reason I collect only modest SS check is that I didn’t have a job at all, except on weekends part time, for the last eight or nine years I could have worked otherwise.
Let’s see now, two people times about fifty thousand per year for ten years plus in nursing homes, I gues I have contributed a little something, and paid for the privilege of making that contribution, lol.
I will continue making this contribution as long as my old Daddy lives. It’s looking like he may break the century mark.
People with good reading comprehension skills will notice that I haven’t said anything indicating I disapprove of the social safety net we enjoy these days.
I just try to tell it like it is, as best I can, or at least like I BELIEVE it is.
Hey Trumpster,
Your Republican party just passed a tax cut for the rich of half a trillion dollars per year. The Social Security trust fund currently has a surplus. Your Republican mantra Koolaid talking points is a distraction from the truth. The rich and powerful are stealing from your poor Republican friends. But, their to dumb from watching Fox News to realize it. America’s debt problems are not Social Security.
“The Social Security Administration collects payroll taxes and uses the money collected to pay Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance benefits by way of trust funds. When the program runs a surplus, the excess funds increase the value of the Trust Fund. At the end of 2014, the Trust Fund contained (or alternatively, was owed) $2.79 trillion, up $25 billion from 2013.[4] The Trust Fund is required by law to be invested in non-marketable securities issued and guaranteed by the “full faith and credit” of the federal government.”
Hi HB,
So ……… you just proved you don’t have the foggiest fucking idea what’s going on.
None of the regulars here, you excepted, need any instruction in this matter, but for your sake, since I feel sorry for you, I’ll try to explain.
MOST of the obligations of the federal government are OFF THE BOOKS.
The Social Security funds aren’t in surplus. They no longer EXIST, except on paper, or computer screens. They’ve been SPENT, and are being spent, as fast as they are collected.
The federal government is running very deeply in the red, and has been, just about every day since I can remember.
Let me try to make it simple enough for you , Simpleton.
Suppose you give your money over to an accountant, and he supposedly puts in a trust fund for safe keeping for you.
Sometimes the rules allow the manager to INVEST the money so held, as in the stock market , or real estate. So there AREN’T any iou’s in this case. There ARE however shares of stock , and deeds to property.
And SOMETIMES the manager may loan out the money, if satisfactory collateral is provided. In this case, the loan documents are held in the trust account, and if the borrower doesn’t pay, the collateral is seized and sold to make the lender whole.
Now it’s AGAINST THE LAW for the trustee to loan the money TO HIMSELF, for perfectly obvious reasons……… well, reasons that are perfectly obvious to people with a few working neurons.
Now UNCLE SAM has in effect loaned the money to HIMSELF, and HE IS SO FAR IN THE RED that there’s a truly substantial risk that he will not be able to meet his obligations.
As a matter of fact, as things are going right now, if we keep on spending more on social services at the current rates of increase, and women don’t go back to having five or six kids each, or we don’t bring in a few tens of millions of immigrants, pronto, well……
Between Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and a few other smaller safety net programs……. there won’t be any money left for anything else unless we make some very drastic changes.
This link is to NPR, which few people think of as a right wing propaganda outfit.
This man is a very highly respected professional in his field, and he tells it like it is, without making excuses for either party.
You can look up him up on Wikipedia.
“RealClearPolicy: Cox and Archer argue that the U.S.’s underlying debt is much higher than the officially stated debt of $16 trillion. They argue that if you add up the unfunded obligations the government has — to Social Security, Medicare, federal workers’ pensions, and so on — the real debt is about $87 trillion. Can that be right?
Kotlikoff: That’s wrong. It’s $222 trillion.
That’s what we economists call the fiscal gap. I don’t know what those guys are looking at, but we economists do it a certain way. We’re not politicians. We’re just doing it the way our theory says to do it. What you have to do is look at the present value of all the expenditures now through the end of time. All projected expenditures, including servicing the official debt. And you subtract all the projected taxes. The present value of the difference is $222 trillion.
So the true size of our fiscal problem is $222 trillion, not $87 trillion. That’s comprehensive and incorporates the official debt. The official debt in the hands of the public is $11 trillion, so the true problem is 20 times bigger than the official debt.”
ORealClearPolicy: Cox and Archer argue that the U.S.’s underlying debt is much higher than the officially stated debt of $16 trillion. They argue that if you add up the unfunded obligations the government has — to Social Security, Medicare, federal workers’ pensions, and so on — the real debt is about $87 trillion. Can that be right?
Kotlikoff: That’s wrong. It’s $222 trillion.
That’s what we economists call the fiscal gap. I don’t know what those guys are looking at, but we economists do it a certain way. We’re not politicians. We’re just doing it the way our theory says to do it. What you have to do is look at the present value of all the expenditures now through the end of time. All projected expenditures, including servicing the official debt. And you subtract all the projected taxes. The present value of the difference is $222 trillion.
So the true size of our fiscal problem is $222 trillion, not $87 trillion. That’s comprehensive and incorporates the official debt. The official debt in the hands of the public is $11 trillion, so the true problem is 20 times bigger than the official debt.”
Now considering all the troubles we have staring us in the face already, from the depletion of fossil fuels, to climate change to the exhaustion of our soil and water resources…….
People who are actually capable of thinking a little think maybe it’s time to worry a little.
How much electricity would it take to power all transport with electricity?
Most advocates of electric vehicles have never gone further than the simplistic view that all it takes is windmills and solar panels.
Euan looks at the costs and practical obstacles of this colossal undertaking.
Euan explains what would happen when just 2 consecutive low wind days happen in winter, as occurred about 30 times in Germany this winter.
I can see the pro electric brigade putting their fingers in their ears and singing la la la.
Most advocates of electric vehicles have never gone further than the simplistic view that all it takes is windmills and solar panels.
That’s absolute bullshit! Plenty of researchers have looked at this issue in depth. You may not agree with their conclusions but to argue that their views are simplistic doesn’t hold water. Here’s one study that has been in the news recently. controversial though it may be. http://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(17)30012-0
Meanwhile most Fossil Fuel Trolls and anti science climate change denialists like you and Euan don’t seem to grasp the deadly consequences of not moving off the current BAU path asap. You are the one’s with simplistic unfounded views. Of course as they say, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it!”
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it!”
The above statement would apply if I worked for the fossil fuel industry but I do not.
You are obviously too stupid to know when to use an overly used quote and when it does not apply.
The fact remains many renewable advocates believed that if a country like Germany installed renewable energy at a level of 130% it’s peak consumption, it would only use about 20% coal and gas to fill in the gaps.
At 103Gw of intalled capacity and peak consumption being 70Gw
19,20,21of February are point in case where solar and wind produced only 15% of what industry, shops, hospitals and homes needed.
You will get it one day.
Maggot
LOL! Hey at least maggots are FDA approved and therefore useful in hospitals…
Not sure what Peters are good for? Pumpkin eaters?
Oh, and BTW, quoting an article about solar from 2013?! Seriously? Do you have any idea how out of date that is? The technology alone has advanced light years since then.
The article was written by far sighted people who could see what you still cannot.
The data of Germany electricity production is up to date.
If Germany had 200 Gw of installed nuclear it would not need to burn any coal or gas. Homes could be heated using heat pumps and there would be enough for every vehicle to be electric.
As it is 100Gw of wind and solar leaves Germany on many days producing 90% of demand from coal and gas.
You only think you are environmental, in fact people like you are environmental disasters.
So you want about 200 to 300 nuclear reactors across Germany, basically everyone would be within of few miles of several reactors if distributed across the nation?
Let’s take Peter’s premise worldwide. Right now the odds of a core meltdown are close to one per decade. To build enough nuclear reactors to take over coal and natural gas would mean more than one core meltdown per year on the planet. That does not include accidents at storage facilities, transportation accidents, or deliberate/accidental destruction of facilities due to war.
So we would have substituted relatively temporary toxic systems for a more permanent mutagenic toxic system that would within a century wipe or wreck most of the life off the planet if brought to large scale long term use.
Didn’t Chernobyl and Fukishima prove that containment is a just a word at nuclear facilities and not a reality?
Death, cancers, mutated young anyone? Milk anyone? Food?
As I have state before, much to the amusement of some, people are great at designing future traps. Nuclear power is such a trap, a deadly and long term trap.
Given the scientific evidence that there is no safe dose of radiation, this is an experiment that has already gone awry. Indeed, if this were a true scientific experiment, it would have been halted a long time ago.
The real question is whether we, as a human race, can afford in good conscience to risk annihilation with our continued reliance on nuclear technology. Can we continue to despoil our environment with long-lived radioactive materials that are scattered to the wind and embedded in our precious soil, randomly exposing large populations, and foisting health impacts on unsuspecting future generations who have no choice in this matter?
We must choose to halt this process. To do this we need to quickly abolish all nuclear weapons, and make a dramatic and rapid retreat from the use of nuclear power to generate electricity. Only then will we demonstrate that we recognize and appreciate the true meaning of Einstein’s prophetic words: “The splitting of the atom has changed everything save our mode of thinking. Thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.”
“This place is a message…and part of a system of messages…pay attention to it!
Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.
This place is not a place of honor…no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here…nothing valued is here.
What is here is dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.
The danger is in a particular location…it increases toward a center…the center of danger is here…of a particular size and shape, and below us.
The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.
The danger is to the body, and it can kill.
The form of the danger is an emanation of energy.
The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically.
This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.
Stay Away for 100,000 years!
Not to mention that there is not enough Uranium to fuel them all.
NAOM
How much installed wind and solar will Germany need to reduce coal consumption to zero.
If you give us your calculations at least we can all see that you have given the matter some serious and adult consideration.
Good point NAOM. The nuclear nightmare has just enough fuel to wreck things but not run things.
Nuclear power is not only a biological death trap but an energy dead end. It is not scalable. The viable uranium available would last 5 years if scaled to current global power requirements.
Even at current use there is less than 80 years of viable supply.
Also, follow the money, the economics stink compared to renewables with storage. The huge subsidies continue for the nuclear industry, long after it became mature. The waste management problem has not even been addressed or the cost estimated yet.
The big promise of energy that would be “too cheap to meter” never came. In fact it has gone just the opposite direction.
Peter,
One needs to look at a wider area than a single nation. Tie all of Europe together with an HVDC grid and the problem is much easier to solve. Some small amount of natural gas can back up the system when wind and solar output are low, also demand pricing can solve a lot of problems.
When supply is low price goes up and demand decreases, there are lots of activities which can be put off until prices are lower.
Tie Europe with North Africa (over Gilbratar) and the problem is even easier to solve. Transmission losses are very low over an HVDC grid.
Dennis, there is no problem. This fellow has been producing a lot of excess energy from his home for years now, running a hydrogen car and other mechanicals, never runs out of energy or storage.
If some guy can figure it out with older tech equipment than we have now, there is no problem, just lack of motivation and rotten people getting in the way for their own agendas.
In its high case projection, global nuclear generating capacity increases from 392 GWe at the end of 2016 to 554 GWe by 2030, 717 GWe by 2040 and 874 GWe by 2050. Nuclear’s share of global electricity generation would increase from the current level of about 11% to 13.7% by 2050. This projection – which assumes that current rates of economic and electricity demand growth, particularly in Asia, will continue – reflects that 30-35 new reactors are expected to be grid connected annually starting around 2025
These nuclear folks accuse solar protagonists of living in La La land? How long is it taking to build one nuclear plant, Hinkley Point C in the UK for example? How much is all this nuclear going to cost?
Every couple of years I find an opportunity, like now, to relate my favorite story about the relationship between nuclear power and human nature:
I worken in the ’70s for General Atomic (now “General Atomics) starting up a reactor called Ft. St. Vrain in Colorado. The company had spent $millions training local residents as operators. As the plant was being handed off some clean up and final testing was being done. Two supposedly unrelated, and very minor, incidents occurred. First some idiot painted the exhaust manifold on an emergency generator. Next a clumsy EE short circuited a wire in a control rod system.
The reactor scrammed.
The generator started.
Smoke filled the control room from the painted manifold, which was placed near the control room air intake.
The local operators ran out of the building, jumped in their cars and drove off.
There are some things you just can’t trust humans with.
They could triple glaze 20,000,000 homes for what they are spending on a nuclear plant that may never go into production and have to be abandoned. All that money going on a design that is causing so much trouble to the 2 previous atempts to build it when proven designs are available at a fraction of the cost.
NAOM
Well, if nothing else, I’ll bet I have spent more time in Germany talking to average German citizens than you have.
LOL! As far as me being ‘Environmental’, is that even a thing that someone can aspire to?!
I know of a tramp who stayed in libraries all day to keep warm. He could not read however.
Peter. Careful using Euan as your source for data/ analysis.
He is extremely biased on these issues.
Hard to find someone who goes further out of their way to cherry pick data to fit their predetermined message.
Hickory, can you kindly show some support for your claims regarding Euan’s cherrypicks and biases? Thanks.
Caelan–
This makes all uncomfortable.
The idea that it can’t continue is disturbing.
I’m open———
Euan’s figures don’t look right. I can’t be bothered do critique them country by country but, I have done some numbers for the US. Euan has increased demand based on 2015 figures at 29% as opposed to my rough 2014 figures of less than 20%. I did not consider that most of the electricity used by US refineries would not have been required and refineries use a lot of electricity.
Euan also appears not to have taken into consideration the cost trajectories of EVs, batteries and renewable energy. That is a fatal omission when you are looking at a transition that is going to take more than ten years to happen. When you see a study that does, get back to me.
Things are looking pretty good in Texas for the D’s in the upcoming mid terms. I’m thinking they will pick up as impressive number of seats, local, state and federal level.
So far the Repugs have taken a beating from the Dims—-
We shall see how this progresses.
Huge consequences for the coming election in the Fall.
If the Repugs can hold on, it will be pretty dire for the planet, but may bring a quicker facing of reality by any surviving homo sapiens.
Fun little article at Politico about the benefits and challenges of transitioning to green power and transport at the personal level.
It likely doesn’t contain any new insights to the regular readers of this blog, but the author explains some important concepts in a way that the average non-technical reader will understand without difficulty.
It’s worth the read just for the entertainment value, as the author is quite adept at a good turn of phrase.
“Full disclosure: My wife and I are not car people. At our wedding, in a train station, the rabbi said we’d have a happy marriage as long as we stayed off the road. We do most of our fighting in the car—because I won’t ask for directions, or the kids won’t be quiet, whatever, we get irritable. We don’t think driving is fun or self-expressive, so we didn’t get excited about the gushing reviews of Tesla’s $69,500 Model S luxury sedan that sounded like teenage boys reviewing porn.”
[…]
“The transition to green is increasingly a question of when rather than if, but it will still require some tectonic cultural shifts. We’ve all grown up in a world where the normal way to make power was to dig up plant matter from the Carboniferous Era and then set it on fire, while harnessing the wind and sunlight around us seemed weird. Our normal cars burn that ancient carbon in explosions a few feet in front of us, while powering them with the electricity that runs everything else in our daily lives still seems weird. If you pulled back far enough, you might say it’s our traditional approach to energy that’s been weird. And now that approach is becoming not only unsustainable for our home planet but unnecessarily expensive, the unforgivable sin in the marketplace. It may turn out that our incessant demand for better deals will give future generations something better to remember about us.”
Nuclear war (economic variety) in New Jersey. Mimicking the attitude of Kim Jong-um ( I will cooperate if you guaranty my safety), the nuclear industry of NJ is threatening the power grid unless it gets 300-350 million per year in subsidies “to get through tough economic times”. Cheap natural gas is not only killing coal it’s hurting nuclear power, or at least hurting the company bottom line.
Owners of two New Jersey nuclear plants say they won’t invest in any more capital improvements at the facilities unless they are guaranteed state subsidies to keep them operating during hard financial times.
Public Service Enterprise Group filed notice with the Securities and Exchange Commission Friday that it, along with Exelon, the co-owner of the Salem 1 and 2 reactors in Lower Alloways Creek, had agreed o take the action.
“Exelon Generation and PSEG Nuclear agreed that the funding of these projects may be restored when and if legislation is enacted in New Jersey that sufficiently values the attributes of nuclear generation and Salem benefits from such legislation,” the SEC filing said.
While the utility companies say the state subsidies are critical, groups opposed to the plan say the announcement is a move to “bully’ the Legislature to approve the bill to benefit them.
Cheaper natural gas has hurt the nuclear power industry with low gas prices making nuclear generation not as cost-efficient as it once was.”
So do we keep subsidizing the buggy whip factories or do we get our act together and move on?
I can’t muster much enthusiasm for new nuclear – wind/solar seem a lot cheaper and safer.
But…does it make sense to shut down existing nukes? They are, after all, low carbon. I think they have a point that if that value was recognized that they’d be more competitive.
“They are, after all, low carbon. I think they have a point that if that value was recognized that they’d be more competitive”
With that logic so would wind and solar, thus making the decision a no brainer, which it really is anyway. As you said, safer.
Every day those things run the waste builds up with no place to go. Every day they run the chances of a major problem occurring and loss of containment exist in the real world.
The Salem reactors were commissioned in 1977 and 1981, making them at end of rated life anyway and needing major replacements if they want to continue and get license extensions. Also, they dump their hot cooling water directly into the Delaware Bay with no cooling towers, which is a bit outdated.
The New York Times has reported that, in the 1990s, the Salem reactors were shut down for two years because of maintenance problems.[7] Consultants found several difficulties, including a leaky generator, unreliable controls on a reactor, and workers who feared that reporting problems would lead to retaliation. In 2004, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission took on additional oversight of the Salem plants and increased the monitoring of them.[7] Wikipedia
In general, the original design limits of US nuclear reactors are being extended for a variety of reasons. More knowledge of how materials are damaged by neutrons and corrosion in the reactor environment has come to light. Ways to replace many components have been devised. Still, the attempt to push nuclear power plants to twice their original rating has to be done carefully, considering the potential disaster that can occur. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nuclear-power-plant-aging-reactor-replacement-/
CURRENT DEFORESTATION PACE WILL INTENSIFY GLOBAL WARMING, STUDY ALERTS
“If we go on destroying forests at the current pace — some 7,000 km² per year in the case of Amazonia — in three to four decades, we’ll have a massive accumulated loss. This will intensify global warming regardless of all efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”
“The urgent need to keep the world’s forests standing is even clearer in light of this study. It’s urgent not only to stop their destruction but also to develop large-scale reforestation policies, especially for tropical regions. Otherwise, the effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels won’t make much difference.”
Forget the gas, add up the species lost every day as the rainforests are destroyed. Planting new forests does not make a ecosystem, just a bunch of trees in nice rows. We have done a great job of depopulating the planet of wild species and our newest gig global warming is just one more weapon in the human war against nature.
“Planting new forests does not make a ecosystem…” Yes, planting a mono species, such as lodge pole pine, is hardly creating or maintaining an ecosystem. Frankly, it sickens me.
Truthfully, reforestation is the most effective carbon sequester technique we can possibly practice. Based on your past posting history, we see you enjoy jet setting between Canada and Norway. Have you ever planted a forest of trees to offset your own lifetime personal contribution to global warming? If not why not?
World’s Largest Tropical Reforestation Project to Take Place in the Amazon Rainforest
Conservation International
Published on Sep 16, 2017
At Rock in Rio, a global music festival held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Conservação Internacional CI-Brasil announced it is taking part in a massive reforestation effort in the Brazilian region of the Amazon.
This audacious project is the result of a partnership between CI, the Brazilian Ministry of Environment, the Global Environment Facility (GEF), the World Bank, the Brazilian Biodiversity Fund (Funbio) and Rock in Rio’s environmental arm, “Amazonia Live.” #RockinRio2017 #AmazoniaLive https://blog.conservation.org/2017/09…
As long as you plant the right trees. You can’t replant biodiversity and extinct species though.
NAOM
Johnny92 — “Based on your past posting history, we see you enjoy jet setting between Canada and Norway.” Valid point. Problem is, my family is roughly divided between Canada, Norway and Italy. For me my family trumps other considerations.
I think you’ve summarised the insuperable problem in all this – your genes, through their constructed phenotype, are always going to make sure they, and therefore your family members (existing or yet to be) are always put before any other considerations. Any other behaviour would have seen the genes responsible lost from the gene pool in a few generations (stand by for some comments from group selection proponents).
Let’s not forget the taiga biome, the largest land biome on earth. In many areas forests and animals are and have been in danger from humans. Huge areas are clear cut, many species have been eliminated. Luckily there are regions that have been left alone, but overall the taiga is not what it used to be.
OPIOID CRISIS: OVERDOSE RATES JUMP 30% IN ONE YEAR
The US Midwest was worst hit with overdoses surging by 70%, according to the data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The US opioid crisis claimed 63,600 lives in 2016, the National Center for Health Statistics has previously said.
Till they perish and they suffer—some, ’tis whisper’d—down in hell
Suffer endless anguish, others in Elysian valleys dwell,
Resting weary limbs at last on beds of asphodel.
Surely, surely, slumber is more sweet than toil, the shore
Than labour in the deep mid-ocean, wind and wave and oar;
O, rest ye, brother mariners, we will not wander more.
From The Lotos-eaters By Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Poor diet is a factor in one in five deaths, global disease study reveals
Diet is the second highest risk factor for early death after smoking. Other high risks are high blood glucose which can lead to diabetes, high blood pressure, high body mass index (BMI) which is a measure of obesity, and high total cholesterol. All of these can be related to eating the wrong foods, although there are also other causes.
People get hooked on painkillers and it escalates. It’s real clear the deadliest gateway drug is a prescription. Things are a little better in Colorado since people have other, less deadly, options.
Of course, Jeff Sessions wants to make things worse and go after pot but they even blocked prosecution of some crazy sales (massive quantities to one small drug store) of prescription drugs.
It can’t possibly be that drug companies are pressing to ban Kratom and legal Mary because they would hurt their bottom line …surely not.
It’s not a bad idea, but it looks…not very competitive. It looks a lot more expensive, and less flexible and convenient, than “car-sharing” programs like Zipcar.com.
“So the true size of our fiscal problem is $222 trillion”
Hey Dumb Mother Farmer, I’ve got a bridge to sell you. And by the way, why do you change your screen name more often than your whitey tighties ?
“Starving the beast” is a political strategy employed by American conservatives to limit government spending by cutting taxes, in order to deprive the federal government of revenue in a deliberate effort to force it to reduce spending.
Despite the fervent wishes of some conservatives and the great fears of some liberals, the ‘starve-the-beast’ theory of government is flawed: Tax cuts don’t lead to spending reductions. Case in point: President Trump and the GOP-controlled Congress are set to hike spending in grand fashion.
For someone who says he doesn’t watch TV. You sure know all the Fox News Republican propaganda apple butter.
With the US moving ever onward toward an elitist and undemocratic society, will the horrors and misdeeds of the UK national park systems be the shades of things to come in US parks and federal lands? It seems to be starting to happen now under the current regime.
Slowly we turned, step by step, the bright future gone, a mockery of a best forgotten past to replace it. The present an exceedingly undesirable place to be, yet here we were.
Netflix is worth more than GE or Ford, and it’s creeping up on Disney
By Rani Molla Mar 6, 2018, 12:49pm EST
Netflix is still riding high off of its “beautiful” fourth-quarter earnings report in January. The company added two million more streaming subscribers than expected, and Wall Street responded. Its stock is up 42 percent since then and is now worth about $140 billion.
Netflix has now overtaken McDonald’s and General Electric in market value. It’s edging up on IBM. More importantly, it’s nearing the value of some of its toughest competitors, like Disney and Comcast. Netflix surpassed Time Warner in 2017 and it’s long been worth more than CBS or Viacom.
It’s clearly the age of the couch potato, now pass the chips
Global average temperature was the 3rd warmest on record for February 2018 (after 2016 and 2017) – CopernicusECMWF analysis (ERA-I). This is consistent with the long-term trend.
A large chunk of the polar jet stream has gone missing. The weather models seem to be doing remarkably well given the extreme changes that are happening around the Arctic.
It’s mess now, breaking, combining, breaking out again. Polar view at 250 hPa.
That’s hardly surprising or notable considering how negative (-) the AO has become following the recent SSW event.
You are as dumb as shit.
LOL! That’s an understatement!
Would you mind explaining what’s wrong with my scientific reasoning then?
Weather is not climate. The USA is not the world. Correlation is not causation. Coincidence is not correlation. Cherry picking is not correlating. A blue contour on a daily weather map does not indicate a new ice age. People who are knowledgeable in their field are, as a minimum, able to tell what units a parameter is measured in. Quoting the acronyms of observed quasi-cyclic weather phenomena does not mean you know anything fundamental about them. The climate is warming and it is over 100% due to human activity emitting greenhouse gases. Sun spot activity is not a significant short-term driver of climate. You are a willful ignoramus.
You don’t have any!
What looks like a mess to us is probably merely a transistion phase to another “organized” system. I don’t think nature has a problem with large numbers of interdependent variables, we do. The changes in atmospheric energy flow systems from one “state” to another may actually be a good model of how the earth climate moves from one “state” to another. Actually, more accurately, from one bounded range to another bounded range. They of course operate on two very different time scales.
Diver’s Video Shows ‘Horrifying’ Pollution Near Bali
A diver in Indonesia came across another stark reminder of all the plastic pollution swirling in the oceans.
British diver Rich Horner was exploring a site known as Manta Point near the island of Nusa Penida, the largest of three islands off the southeastern coast of Bali, when he spotted a soup of jellyfish, foliage and garbage. While Bali has become a hot spot for tourists over the years, it’s also infamous for the trash that collects on the island’s shores and waters. Video
We need to get back to glass and paper packaging, the time is coming when there will be more plastic in the worlds oceans than fish . . . plastic shopping bags are on the way out here which is a start.
We need to stop using the ocean as a garbage can.
No plastic, glass or paper! We need to get into 3D printed biopolymers like chitin. This is the 21st century, not the 19th!
It would take a political miracle to make it happen, but all we would need to guarantee the collection and recycling or at least proper landfill disposal of such trash is a mandatory deposit on ALL of it, with the manufacturers and distributors of it being legally required to BUY IT BACK.
People are already paying a buck and a half up for soft drinks at convenience stores. A dime more by the bottler to get his plastic bottle back would result in somebody in need of money picking up every one he could find.
I’m willing to vote for no excuse laws imposing fines large enough to get people’s attention when it comes to throwing out trash.
Let’s say fifty bucks first offense, a hundred second offense, loss of registration and license to drive third offense. Registered owner held responsible if cameras don’t adequately indentify the particular person who tosses the trash.
We already have such cameras at intersections. A few placed here and there where they will do the most good would bring in more revenue than they cost to maintain.
FEMA HAS RADICALLY UNDERESTIMATED HOW VULNERABLE AMERICANS ARE TO FLOODING
“New research claims that official estimates lowballed the risk by, uh, about a factor of three… Combining various datasets on weather, water, population, and building density from the US Geological Survey, the US Army Corps of Engineers, the EPA, and elsewhere, they derived a layered picture of US flood risk that is “significantly higher [in] quality and spatial coverage than those that have previously informed exposure and risk estimations.”
If one thinks that the federal government is not highly concerned about disaster relief and management now, the future will be shocking. As disasters increase in size, frequency and become more widespread, the stress on the financial, material and manpower will exceed the capabilities of even the most beneficent of governments. Long before that insurance companies will reduce or fold their involvement and governments will draw back from assistance as greater demands are put upon them.
How much stress can a system take before it starts to retreat?
We have answers to most of the medical situations we face now, but we cannot control high rates of natural disasters. Eventually we will just abandon areas and people or at least move them out permanently, if there is anywhere to go.
It’s not just floods. The power system in the US is antiquated with large regions supplied by overhead wires. A warming in the winter, some winter rains then a storm with high winds takes down lots of trees, reducing the grid in large areas to near zero.
It might be a very good thing that grid parity of rooftop solar is being reached across the world where the cost of transmission is equal to or greater than the cost of rooftop solar. Storms appear to be having higher winds more often and occurring in combinations not generally seen in given seasons. Heavy precipitation rates are now much more common, putting larger areas at risk of flooding and landslides as well as erosion.
If you want to take out the grid nothings better than an ice storm and freezing rain, like Quebec had near the turn of this century, over one of the main US population centres. Might be possible the way the jet stream is disintegrating every winter now.
Tony Seba thinks the peak power generators will be the first to go on the grid as large scale battery storage provides a less expensive alternative and batteries in general smooth out the grid to save money.
The best single article with plenty of hard data and industry projections I have seen in the last few weeks about the future of the battery industry in general, and electric cars in particular:
“Trump state Democrats want no part of Clinton’s diss on Trump voters
Zach Wolf
Source: CNN
Conor Lamb reacts to Trump’s dig 01:29
Washington (CNN)Hillary Clinton’s frustrated critique of her rejection by a portion of the American electorate has drawn criticism from fellow Democrats who need to win those parts of the country to keep their jobs in November.
And a note to the rest of the party: It’s the same type of area where Conor Lamb declared victory Wednesday morning that Democrats will need to win back (or win anew) if they ever want a House or Senate majority again.”
Some people, not necessarily Trump fans, or even conservatives at all, have been known to refer to CNN as the Clinton News Network.
It takes a while for people to admit their mistakes. In this case, enough time has elapsed for media types to pretend they never made the mistake of supporting the ONE candidate that left the R party salivating at the prospect of running against, knowing that close to half the country would never vote for her no matter WHAT.
This bears repeating.
“And a note to the rest of the party: It’s the same type of area where Conor Lamb declared victory Wednesday morning that Democrats will need to win back (or win anew) if they ever want a House or Senate majority again.”
She didn’t have sense enough as a candidate to keep her contempt for working people to herself, and she doesn’t have sense enough NOW to shut the fuck up.
But as religious people say, God works in mysterious ways, and if she had won, the country would still have been in the hands of the Republicans, because they own two thirds of the government, locally, state by state, and nationally.
Trump in one senses may actually be a blessing in disguise.
He’s turning middle of the roaders and even a lot of very hard core religious people against the R’s, almost as if that’s his PLAN. It isn’t of course, but it’s still the RESULT of his actions and words, and the result may well be that the D party is able to regain control of DC in the mid terms. This is rather unlikely to have happened with any D president in office. The president’s party generally does not do very well in the mid terms.
And while most of us love to point out the damage he has done the country, most of it really isn’t all that bad, because it’s NOT NECESSARILY PERMANENT.
Good people can be put back in charge of environmental regulatory offices, in charge of law enforcement offices, research organizations, and so forth, and the budget cuts can be restored. Rescinded regulations can be put into effect again.
Dumb old farmer KGB agent talks like a coach.
Hey guys, if you want the D’s back in power, don’t make one of the critical mistakes HRC made, don’t go around talking trash about people whose votes you NEED.
Every body except HB , of course. He has said here he doesn’t need the votes of southerners in particular, and by extension, the votes of Christians, working people, white people and white men in particular.
Given that he’s an investor class voter, per his own words, well, I guess he must really like the R tax package, lol, even though he pretends to be a Democrat.
Did Trump fire Tillerson primarily because of family money issues?
This sort of thing is nearly impossible to prove in court, but in the court of public opinion, just about anybody who is closely following the story will find it easy to believe. VERY easy.
I can’t get my head around the fact that a very large number of people seem to believe that crypto currencies are safe.It’s not the technology itself that bothers me, although I don’t pretend to actually understand it, except in principle.
WHAT I don’t understand is why you can be sure somebody will always be willing to accept your crypto money, other than FAITH.
People accept fiat currencies based on faith in the government that issues such currencies.
JUST WHO , in the END, has knowledge of all the workings of a crypto money system?
HOW do you know they aren’t corrupt, or at least, potentially corrupt?
I can see supporting anything that reduces the power of giant banks. Never trust a giant bank, it’s an alien artificial immortal life form without any conscience or values of any sort.
Cornucopian Renewable-Energy Claims Leave Poor Nations in the Dark
And this, while some people, such as on this very collapse/peak energy blog perhaps, express ‘concerns’ for the loss of species/habitat and general despoilment of the environment, including of course anthropogenic climate change, while simultaneously pushing forth a bit of a business-as-usual/government-as-usual, and therefore fossil-fuel-burning and inequity, agenda in the forms, for example, of so-called renewable energy and a continuation of car culture and their inherent mass/mass-production buildouts and effects.
@ Paul (Pukite); insofar as you may think of Javier or at least some of their comments/statistical tweaks here and elsewhere as a kind of evil, and while I may agree, so it is suggested that this subtle and maybe not-so-subtle evil can also be manifest as another prong/flipside of an elite-based ‘retooling of BAU’, as expressed via its peddlers and/or indoctrinates, whether by design, accident, ignorance or irrationality, etc., or maybe a little of all of the above.
Caelan,
You may think there is a simple way to get from A to B as if on a Starship or some other imaginary transport device.
Most others (including me) think that one has to take practical steps (as if walking or riding a bicycle along some path) to get from A to B.
The tweaks of BAU got society from slavery to feudalism and from feudalism to capitalism, more tweaks may get us to the promised land, though what that is for me may be different than what you envision.
Your vision seems appropriate for a World population of about 1 to 10 million, we will need a different vision for the next 500 to 1000 years while human population gradually is reduced due to a population transition to lower fertility levels (maybe 1.5 births per woman over their lives on average). Once we get to very low population levels, then small tribal democracies with little formal government may work fine for those that choose such a life style.
Generally humans behave rather badly and enforcement of some basic rules by some kind of governing body has been the common human solution to this problem.
One cannot just wish that humans behave well, it is not going to happen.
Hi Dennis,
Along with some added info, I’m simply suggesting– and have already done so before– a possible contradiction:
The ‘heat machine’ that’s supposed to wind down yesteryear to save the climate/planet continues to be ‘stoked’:
– Javier and friends are ‘stoking’ it from their side, perhaps via government paycheques for their work and/or via simple ideological indoctrination and…
– You and/or whoever are stoking it from the other side, perhaps via paycheques for your/their work and/or via simple ideological indoctrination…
…such as maybe via guerilla marketing and catch-phrases like ‘thought leader’; ‘brands’ like Elon Musk; and ‘mouthpieces’ like Tony Seba.
It appears as different sides of the same coin which goes something like this:
IOW, we cannot argue for climate/planet responsibility and at the same time argue for the continuation of BAU in its current form, even, to be charitable, where its current form is trying to adapt.
Many adaptations are dead ends.
The rest of your comment seems kind of moot in this context.
Hey Caelan, do you understand the numbers 1/3 and 1/8? Do you understand net energy? Do you understand inherent energy efficiency in the transistion? If you don’t know what I mean then you are not capable of clearly understanding how the transistion automatically dramatically reduces the energy needed by society to perform the same tasks. That is before other energy efficiency efforts are made.
The whole crap about the transition being fully dependent upon fossil fuel until it is completed (as stated in the article) is bogus and not important for many reasons. Maybe a bit of thought and investigation on your part would enlighten you as to why this is true.
The transistion automatically ends the heat engine problem. Many are afraid of that since they personally survive and thrive by the burn.
The whole crap about the transition being fully dependent upon fossil fuel until it is completed (as stated in the article) is bogus
For instance, manufacturing can be powered by renewable power – see the panels on the roof of the gigafactory; and
EVs can (and do) automatically seek out charging periods when renewables are at their maximum.
Also, every panel made and installed, every wind turbine, every EV eliminates a large amount of fossil fuel burn irrespective of what energy builds them.
Just putting the panels where the power is used eliminates mining energy, processing energy, transport energy, FF power burn and waste from using grid transmission.
Yeah.
Horses powered oil wells, and moved oil barrels. Until they didn’t.
Oil moves PV panels. Until it doesn’t.
We are talking about scaling down energy, not scaling up, and AFAIK, PV’s current powering of civilization is almost negligible, laughable, to say nothing of it powering its own processes.
You have not been paying attention to renewable growth nor do you know how much energy it takes to make a PV panel. You are good at Koch brothers driven talking points though. Do you listen to Savage or Gingrich type radio shows?
I think for myself and barely know those people.
Do you eat drink and breathe PV panels? Is your best friend or better half a PV panel?
Renewables (like PV panels) aren’t renewable for one thing, but I’ve been paying enough attention to its growth on a finite planet. Growth happens for certain things up to certain points. So what? Then things fuck up and die, sometimes very rapidly.
You, on the other hand, maybe your PV paying-attention is more along the lines of snorting coke and its got you all stoned.
It’s pretty clear you don’t know what growth is. It is not necessarily related to increased weight of the stuff you have, or in increased energy use.
You like to think of yourself as edgy, but none of this is new. Buckminster Fuller talked about the growing ability to do “more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing”.
For example, I have a small device that fits in my hand. It replaces a camera, most of my paper mail, a radio, a phone, an alarm clock, an answering machine, a rolodex, a magnifying glass, a dictation machine, a pager, a metronome, a dictionary, a synthesizer, a calculator, business cards, a pedometer, stereo equipment, CDs, DVDs, books, maps, electronic navigation devices, a compass, a video camera, a notepad, a calendar, a wristwatch, A TV, a fax, a walkie talkie, a police scanner, a chess board, and so on.
I seem to recall some of us discussing that kind of growth thing, as well as how many people ostensibly conflate energy with technology, ages ago on The Oil Drum.
Your comparison between consolidating ‘elite-system-derived technogadgetry’, and changing over large-scale high-energy forms for lower is laughable.
Fuller is long gone and we are still doing less with more. Meanwhile a lot of that garbage in your list, and the results of their creation, have contaminated the planet. That’s pretty edgy stuff, as we careen toward the edge at full speed.
Fuller is long gone and we are still doing less with more. Meanwhile a lot of that garbage in your list, and the results of their creation, have contaminated the planet.
Nah! He’s still here, just reached out grabbed him right off my bookshelf and took a picture of him with that small device that fits in my hand which alambiquated was talking about. That replaces a camera, most of my paper mail, a radio, a phone, an alarm clock, an answering machine, a rolodex, a magnifying glass, a dictation machine, a pager, a metronome, a dictionary, a synthesizer, a calculator, business cards, a pedometer, stereo equipment, CDs, DVDs, books, maps, electronic navigation devices, a compass, a video camera, a notepad, a calendar, a wristwatch, A TV, a fax, a walkie talkie, a police scanner, a chess board, and so on… BTW, that so on can also include scientific instruments like a high resolution microscopes which would really impress Anton van Leeuwenhoek.
But since you are on here on this site, posting with composted leaves and dirt you are obviously not using anything that might have contaminated the planet right? When are you going to get off your high horse and quit your holier than thou attitude?
Holier Than Thou vs Don’t Give a Fuck
This reply works here as well.
Part of the point there is that if you want to make it personal, Fred, then it works both ways– comparative analyses and all that. So let’s have it.
I mean, it’s not like you’re posting to the net with sticks and leaves, or not lamenting about the trashing of the planet, either.
So do you care about the planet or what? How much? How much are you willing to sacrifice? As much as me? The internet? Your car? Less time for each? House-size? Air conditioning? Some gadgets? Less flights to Brazil? What? All of the above? We might have to.
Do you still want to ‘drive your car and have it too’ while expecting others to go all the way first?
What you call my ‘holier-than-thou attitude’ is in part simply ‘calling out’ some ‘don’t give a fuck’ lifestyles (i.e., ‘The American way-of-life is non-negotiable’?) and/or the forms they take– maybe yours.
And, unfortunately, it would seem that many more of us are going to have to follow suit until the tough don’t-give-a-fuck nuts finally crack– before the planet does. Or die trying. It’s possible.
Here’s a question:
Is there a way to relatively-accurately gauge/evaluate our own personal current energy/ecological footprints? If so, how/where; if not, why?
BTW, far too many, if not most, scientists have sold themselves out to the crony-capitalist plutocracy.
Full Moon
“In the land of haven’t got a clue
I’m not to blame for anything I do
In the land of couldn’t give a fuck
You pay your money and leave the rest to luck…”
Is there a way to relatively-accurately gauge/evaluate our own personal current energy/ecological footprints? If so, how/where; if not, why?
Yes there is but you obviously haven’t put a lot of effort into understanding your own question. You might start by acknowledging that unless you are living alone in a cave you are benefiting from the very things you so like to disparage.
https://www.footprintnetwork.org/our-work/ecological-footprint/
How the Footprint Works
Ecological Footprint accounting measures the demand on and supply of nature.
On the demand side, the Ecological Footprint measures the ecological assets that a given population requires to produce the natural resources it consumes (including plant-based food and fiber products, livestock and fish products, timber and other forest products, space for urban infrastructure) and to absorb its waste, especially carbon emissions.
The Ecological Footprint tracks the use of six categories of productive surface areas: cropland, grazing land, fishing grounds, built-up land, forest area, and carbon demand on land.
On the supply side, a city, state or nation’s biocapacity represents the productivity of its ecological assets (including cropland, grazing land, forest land, fishing grounds, and built-up land). These areas, especially if left unharvested, can also absorb much of the waste we generate, especially our carbon emissions.
No Jevon’s Paradox in there anywhere? So we can’t drive our ICE cars for longer holiday drives because we installed some solar panels that are supposedly reducing our electric bills? Or other countries can’t get some of that extra that was not burned?
See, you don’t understand. It doesn’t matter much if we drive a little more or less, the energy comes direct from the sun in abundance and no pollution from panels or cars. Then the TAAS takes over and the number of cars drop around the world. Energy use drops, pollution drops, noise levels fall, health increases. Next buildings become more and more energy efficient and self sustaining. Soon energy use falls even further, down to less than 20 percent of what was earlier required. With it goes lots of problems.
Extra fuel to other countries that was not burned would mean that it was drilled, produced, refined, transported, delivered and consumed. How could that happen when a large amount of energy displaced it? The price would drop and no one would drill much or do discovery. Oh maybe for a very short time, but the transistion will happen fast once it gets rolling, just a few years to a decade, all the while eating away demand from FF on all fronts. Then those final users of FF will be using the most expensive energy around and be isolated since they are the polluters and people stop making trade agreements with them if they continue. It’s tough to go against 80 to 90 percent of the world.
It all works out. The poorer nations often become suppliers of energy since they are mostly near the equator with lots of sunlight.
It’s all a matter of using what is directly available every day instead of going through all the conniptions we do to get at what is dead and buried, then change it into something partially useful but ultimately destructive. In that way, we are mimicking a natural process rather than trying to avoid one.
Amusing trivia: a large portion of ocean freight, and a large fraction of rail freight, are taken up transporting oil and coal.
Eliminate oil* & coal, and you eliminate a large fraction of ocean transport and rail freight fuel consumption.
*yes, ocean transport is currently powered by oil. So, you start with passenger transport related oil, and you greatly reduce oil exports. Gotta start somewhere, and start virtuous circles…
US refineries use about 18GW. That’s enough to power about 50M EVs…
Unsure what you mean, if you care to elaborate.
When energy diminishes, so will other things, such as, perhaps, as you suggest, ‘energy use drops’ (circular point)… ‘pollution drops, noise levels fall, health increases’…
As I have suggested recently, which may apply here equally or close, “Renewables in this equation would be a correlation, not a causation.”.
I’m in part suggesting that your particular ‘transition’ appears much too late, irrespective of hypothetical and maybe relatively-miniscule efficiencies down the road that may not touch/electrify everything.
I’m also in part suggesting that some people may not actually need, want or be able to afford some things that BAU Green™ may be forcing upon them. It is not a democratic process, not even close.
Where, when and how soon, etc., do those fractions pop up, Gonzo, and for what aspects, elements and processes, etc., and in the face of what other, such as unforeseen, obstacles, etc., such as when/where/how/etc. the social/political/etc. structures change as energy diminishes? Do you think that by reducing energy, everything else that depends on it and is configured to it ‘just so’ just happily reduces along with it?
All these things and more also charitably assumes that pseudorenewables work as advertised, and as we should all know, for many crony-capitalist plutarchy often-useless trinkets and services, this is far from the case. Caveat emptor.
“Where, when and how soon, etc., do those fractions pop up, Gonzo”
Yep, typical name calling is your resort when comprehension fails.
I can tell from your questions that you have no clue and have not taken the time or energy to understand much of anything about that which you so vigorously attack. Take some time to educate yourself on these matters so at least you can respond with a viable debating point instead of just mimicking the propaganda you read.
Gonzo’s a fun mod of GoneFishing and I always call you that, but if it bothers you so and you’d rather not have me call you that, then just let me know. (Besides, you’ve called me ‘Caylee’ or some other funny name-mod like that.)
That said, you still have yet to answer my concerns, and as usual focus on the trivial.
To paraphrase Ron to you recently, don’t be so fucking defensive.
I can offer you a nappy for your tears.
“Gonzo’s a fun mod of GoneFishing and I always call you that”
Gonzo means bizarre or crazy. Look it up. See education helps you to not sound so lame and offensive. Now you know what you are doing. Although I suspect you already did.
So how is it that you are not cracking the books and educating yourself on the topics you talk about?
But more to the point, since I doubt you will pursue my admonishments and advice, what do you think should happen to reduce climate change and get us off the hamster wheel of fossil fuel addiction? If not renewable energy, what and how?
I have a reasonable idea of what gonzo means enough not to need to look it up, but I think there’s a subtle distinction to be made between modding your nickname to Gonzo and outright claiming you as actually being gonzo. Language is dynamic and can change. Besides, GoneFishing isn’t your real name, is it? And, are you always gone fishing? Do you post your comments from a boat or a shoreline? If not, then GoneFishing doesn’t necessarily mean gone fishing, does it? Well then maybe Gonzo doesn’t necessarily have to mean gonzo.
Nevertheless, in a recent previous thread, I think you went with me well beyond the level of my playful tease with your nickname.
Anyway, I have to head out, but will try to take a look at your other comments and points later. I’ll leave you with this however, which may be sufficient, such if I can’t find the time or motivation, and it’s something I’ve writ before hereon: I am not necessarily averse to some forms of technology such as PV panels. What I can be averse to, however, is the context within which those and other forms of technology are derived and implemented, etc..
As Nick G has recently suggested– and I’m inclined to agree to some points– to paraphrase, ‘The problem is political.’.
Gonzo means bizarre or crazy.
GoneFishing means I no longer am a hired corporate scientist but retired and “Gone Fishing” in the literal and abstract sense of life and the world. Now I can do as I please (sometimes). Which is the real point of “going fishing”, to be out in nature or just studying the world and trying to understand, then disseminating it. So be flattered I spend any time on you. 🙂
Instead of baffling yourself with bullshit and hemming and hawing you can either stop using it or continue to, your choice. It reflects on you not me.
You’re no longer a hired corporate scientist and are retired? Did we get that right? This despite your ‘tantrum’ lobbed at me over my pulling a previous comment of yours for ‘external peer review’, being bothered by a nickname mod, while suggesting that I be flattered that you spend any time on me?
I wonder if you’re deliberately trying to assume the definition of ‘gonzo’ to make some kind of point. Like maybe, ‘This is what happens when you call me, Gonzo.’.
How about using your real name by the way? It may have a constructive effect on your rapport and behavior (that I wouldn’t normally ascribe to a retired scientist, though maybe corporates are different). Good luck.
Caelan,
There is no BAU, the only thing that remains constant is change.
Agreed, and we can create the conditions of and for change, for the better.
Dennis – We went from slavery to feudalism and from feudalism to capitalism on the back of ever increasing, portable energy density……period.
Civilization is faltering due to ever decreasing portable energy density and “renewables” do not solve that.
The global economy requires massive surplus energy in order to thrive. TPTB have spent the last 10 to 20 years trying to disprove that fact…hows that going?
“The global economy requires massive surplus energy in order to thrive.”
Should read ” the global economy wastes massive amounts of energy in just about every process it pursues” . The global economy actually needs less than 20 percent of the energy it uses. Most of it is wasted in heat, other inefficiencies and unnecessary pursuits.
I think where we ended up is not where we intended, although more people have better lives now than ever before but the price is too high. So we need to change, adjust our ways and values and stop making the whole world pay the price for our indulgences.
Yes and the current dystem is not going to help that, such as via taxation or technology.
Maybe we should shove the nukes down the holes in the ground we make instead of trying to shove the CO2 back into mother earth. That would solve our major dilemma.
The global economy actually needs less than 20 percent of the energy it uses. Most of it is wasted in heat, other inefficiencies and unnecessary pursuits.
Gee, what next? Will you be telling people they need to study math, physics and chemistry to understand economics… 😉
Economics? Is that like a Disney film where we leave reality for a while then at the end realize we are back in a worse reality with less money and less time and a mind warped by fictions?
Plus we drank soda and ate heavily salted popcorn or candy and lost some health?
No, no amount of studying could correct that. Avoidance is the best thing. 🙂
a big problem with many of the arguments countering the points made in the Stan Cox “cornucopian” article is precisely a lack of an economic model to get from where we were in 2005 to where we need to be by [insert date of choice here]. The past ten years have seen an upheaval and dismantling of the economic practices that existed prior (see any of Watcher’s posts) to such a degree its hard to tell under what economic “system” we are actually operating under. Giving it credit, it has “worked” thus far. But it’s clearly strained, and it’s very very unclear 1) if it can persist much longer; 2) what will take its place should it slump.
All the renewable cheerleaders are saying “we’ve had such and such growth of renewables” in the past 15 years and that growth will continue indefinitely. Just substitute “renewables growth” for “stock market growth” and you sound just like your average wall street journal reader that is completley reliant on the easy-money policies unleashed upon the globe. Once that strains and falters that easy money growth could quickly dry up. And there are so many other problems that the very notion and idea of Peak Oil barely registers any more, to the point that in an economic meltdown of any significant order, it’s again very very unclear if “build out to 100% renewables” will even be part of the discussion of priorities.
I’ve maintained since at least 2010 that our civilization could literally crumble into dust via peak oil without peak oil ever really being recognized as the cause. Reality might never present the bill. Delusion and confusion could persist until the end.
Agreed Twocats. Things could grind down/crumble in so many ways regardless of peak oil, or indirectly from peak oil. And this could happen during the ‘bumpy plateau’ period since the whole system is geared towards growth and has no idea how to live in steady state or decline (from massive overshoot).
I see renewables as fossil fuel extenders at this point, and for the next 3 decades. Without some dramatic thermodynamic engineering breakthrough all this ‘belief’ in the possibilities of a renewable future for 8 B people and the ‘civil’ society is just wishful thinking/denial.
But when your prospects are poor, sometimes fantasy is a an appropriate response.
I did see a bicycle with the entire frame made with great craftsmanship from bamboo- https://calfeedesign.com/products/bamboo/
“People have more faith in technology that hasn’t been invented than they ever did in God?”
-Art Berman
wow – three decades! You are a glorious light of optimism hickory – i appreciate that.
i’m having trouble spotting this system 4 years (though I have been too pessimistic in the past and try to temper that urge.
don’t get me wrong though – I am in complete favor of ramping up renewables as much as possible and have been impressed with the gains made thus far and pleasantly encouraged by broad swathes of humanity to “gear themselves up” mentally for that transition. That combined with reduced energy lifestyles and population controls, it could be accomplished with only “significant upheavals”.
I just doubt such a transition could occur without one or several “new world orders” appearing to manage and ration the process (and violently put down those that would oppose such a move).
Someone at some point needs to decide who is going to get scarce resources and if the crew that is calling the shots is left to make those decisions then, Hickory my friend, you and I are f-zillicated.
my comment about 3 decades wasn’t very clear- meant to say- ‘for the foreseeable future’ – we are not about to have some glorious implementation global renewables on a scale that will keep up with fossil depletion. Perhaps if we had been serious about it when the first Saudi embargo happened. 1973.
Hickory,
It will not be “glorious”. It will simply be market based economics. As some energy resources become scarce they will increase in price and be utilized more efficiently. In addition alternative sources of energy will become more competitive and output of those sources will increase. The increase in output of alternative sources of energy (wind and solar) and transportation (plugin vehicles) are likely to lead to economies of scale in their manufacture as well as research and development and innovation which will reduce the cost of these alternatives and an acceleration of their rate of adoption.
This is a pretty familiar story in economics, typically told in introductory university economics courses.
The story is pretty well agreed in mainstream economics.
Coffee Signals With Dennis
Dennis, I’m unsure ‘we’ have anything, if we ever did, like a market-based economy, except in artifice and the machinations of relatively-useless so-called-economics courses/books.
What we appear to have instead is an engineered economy, perhaps in some regards similar to the old Soviet Union, ironically.
‘We’ appear to have NASA-as-SpaceX and ‘Government Motors’-as-Tesla; we have Exxon’s T., Rex in government, with the Koch brothers appearing as a convenient ‘distractive device/ruse’ (as if Big Oil has nothing to do with renewables); we have Big Oil/Big ‘Government’ ostensibly in, or getting into, so-called renewables and the chained-up tax-slaves paying for it, among many other misadventures; we have AGW denialism, whose ‘denialists’ may be funded out of the same Big Government offices as the renewables teams; we have Bitcoin as a possible government invention; we have the ‘desperation’ of shale oil as apparently fundamentally unprofitable; we have the apparent urgency of AGW that is not being addressed (and why should it be, cuz renewable buildout); we have a mess of proxy wars in MENA; and so forth.
You want to call that a ‘market economy’? If so, maybe you would do well to take a trip up here and have me have you smell the coffee in person at one of our local coffee shops. ?
Digital Man
“He picks up scraps of conversation
Radio and radiation
From the dancers and romancers
With the answers, but no clue…
I agree with gist of your statement Dennis , but I think there is a strong probability that timing of the ramp up will be too late. Bad planning, poor foresight.
A disorderly and chaotic transition, with rapid downsizing bringing out the worst in ‘humanity’.
Hickory,
I agree the ride is unlikely to be smooth. There is likely to be quite a bit of economic disruption which will lead to changes both positive and negative.
Hi Caelan,
We do not live in a utopian universe.
You may believe the market based economy of Canada is not different from the planned economy of the Soviet Union.
I would disagree strongly.
The world is not perfect, never has been, and is unlikely to be so in the future.
Well regulated capitalist economies with representative democratic socialist political systems are a terrible thing, just better than anything else humans have devised so far, in my opinion.
Jef,
Mostly that was the transition to capitalism, very little change from slavery to feudalism.
I disagree that dependence on fossil fuels cannot be overcome. Much of that dense energy is wasted, only about 25% of it is utilized in the case of internal combustion powered transportation. In the case of electrically powered transportation about 80-90% of energy is utilized cutting energy needs by at least 69%.
Likewise there is at least 60% of thermal energy waste in coal and natural gas power plants, for home heating where some modern boilers can achieve 95% efficiency, but air sourced heat pumps produce 2.5 units of heat for every unit of energy consumed and ground source heat pumps as much as 5 units of heat per unit of energy consumed.
As we transition away from fossil fuel and move to wind solar and electric transport there will be plenty of surplus energy.
The faltering economy has been growing at similar growth rate of real GDP per capita since about 1970.
A free market (which properly accounts for externalities) will price fossil fuels appropriately as they become scarce, they will be used more efficiently and other forms of energy will take their place.
Yeah.
And…why would anyone say electricity isn’t dense and portable??
Caelan, being one of those you regularly accuse of kowtowing to some capitalist plutocracy or what ever, I will gladly chime in here. In response to Peter’s incessant knocking of renewables, I decided to read “The Energy Imperative: 100 Percent Renewable Now” by Hermann Scheer since I’ve had it lying around since I bought it and never read it. Interestingly, while reading it, you have come to mind, a lot. You wanna know why? I’ve reached page 44 of 172 pages and had to take a break to prepare my report on the EIA’s Electric Power Monthly, which was released on Tuesday evening but, from what I’ve read so far, Scheer was very concerned about the political, legal and financial systems that have developed around our current energy systems. One of the things he keeps harping on is that renewables by their very nature are incompatible with large centralised systems. He seemed to favor somewhat anarchic systems of every country, region, town, village, family or individual for themselves and was very critical of the currently entrenched power systems.
He struck me as a little bit of a bull in a china shop type of guy, advocating for laws that would result in the dissolution of the current power structure. The German Renewable Energy Act, appears to have been an attempt to do exactly that. One of Scheers arguments was that it could not be expected that the beneficiaries of the current status quo would co-operate with the dismantling of the system they benefit from. Peter’s constant protestations fit the resistance the established power structure would have to these changes to a “t”. Rather thank try and come up with solutions to the challenges of trying to go 100% renewable, people like Peter would rather point to the challenges and suggest that they are intractable. People like Elon Musk on the other hand, look at the challenges and spend most of their time trying to figure out how to overcome them.
I would be really interested in hearing what you think about Scheers ideas should you ever get a chance to read any of his books. I even see some of the ideas Tony Seba talks about in his presentations in the book I am reading. The failure of “experts” to anticipate in disruptive change is discussed and at least one of the same examples that Seba uses is mentioned. Scheer died four years before Seba’s “Clean Disruption” was published so one has to wonder if any of them got ideas from each other. So, before you go prattling on about the continuation of BAU etc. please be reminded that Hermann Scheer, one of renewable energy’s staunchest champions, was certainly not advocating anything close to the continuation of BAU. As far as “the establishment” goes, he must have made some bitter enemies with his outspoken advocacy of change and stinging criticism of the status quo. I can imagine that there were fair number of people who were extremely relieved when he died, supposedly of natural causes. Hans Josef Fell, who was his colleague in advocating for renewables and has taken up the mantle of advocacy since Scheer’s death is not in the same league, not by a long shot.
Alan, the diminishing of large-scale energy appears incompatible with large-scale centralization. Power simply cannot be projected out as far.
Renewables in this equation would be a correlation, not a causation.
Part of my concerns, however, are that they may offer sufficient power to maintain at least some dangerous levels of centralization/centralized pseudoauthority, and torturously drag this whole thing out, at the ongoing expense of people and planet.
The implications are that some of you might be willing participants– blissfully ignorant or otherwise– in the planet’s continued demise by the renewable/BAU/GAU narrative(s) and agendas.
“1 March 2018 (AFP) – Puerto Rico’s power grid broke down again on Thursday, leaving some 800,000 customers without power, as the US Caribbean possession struggles to recover five months after Hurricane Maria slammed the island.”
If this happened in Jamaica, and our islandboy was doing permaculture on his land, say, and maybe with a little microecovillage community he helped create on it, he might be far less affected.
Solar panels are green plants. You can eat them, other species can eat them, they fertilize the soils, they self-propagate and grow, they help retain water and soil, they help increase biodiversity, they manage the climate/microclimates, they can be fermented to provide ethanol, bees use them to in part make beeswax that can be used for candles and maybe some forms of waterproofing, and they sequester carbon, etc..
Try that with PVs.
Try commenting on this blog with leaves and dirt. 🙂
One-trick pony there…
I’ll take plants over PVs and in-person interaction over the internet any day.
Caelan,
Then I suggest you take the conversation to your local coffee shop.
I already do.
You could forgo the use of electricity, as it supports so much evil in the World (or so you seem to believe).
If we cannot manage our, to paraphrase you upthread, ‘terrible systems’, then forgoing electricity is what we will likely be doing.
In any case, it appears that so-called developed countries will have to forgo much of their current lifestyle demands on the planet. Presumably, this includes some automotive, and electrical. Presumably, again, this may include your car, Dennis.
Caelan,
It is possible cars will not be used in the future, perhaps you have never used a car. That’s great, if true.
From memory you travelled to China in the past.
Did you swim?
Hmmm, I wonder if very many have come to the conclusion that it is human nature to build complex mechanical systems and reorganize nature into new forms. To think we can do otherwise may be highly irrational, akin to asking the leopard to change it’s spots or a duck to avoid water.
We can of course see where our actions are dangerous and harmful, modifying them. But to think we can deny our basic characteristics might be the most foolhardy of our many delusions.
Also, to assume we know where the human conglomerate set of actions are actually headed, in the long run, might be merely another case of grand self-delusion.
It’s a Whitefish repair that failed.
Reality check:
(The Guardian) – The dwindling North Atlantic right whale population is on track to finish its breeding season without any new births, prompting experts to warn again that without human intervention, the species will face extinction.
Scientists observing the whale community off the US east coast have not recorded a single mother-calf pair this winter. Last year saw a record number of deaths in the population. Threats to the whales include entanglement in lobster fishing ropes and an increasing struggle to find food in abnormally warm waters.
The combination of rising mortality and declining fertility is now seen as potentially catastrophic.
Ironically I just read this piece in Fortune:
Germans Just Love Paying Sky-High Prices for Green Energy
http://fortune.com/2017/08/08/germans-renewable-energy-energiewende-subsidies/
The cost of the Energiewende is largely borne by German consumers, who pay a surcharge of around €20 ($23.61) on their energy bills. German households pay more for their electricity than in any other European country except for Denmark, where power costs €0.308 per kilowatt hour to Germany’s €0.298.
However, as the latest survey – conducted by Kantar Emnid on the AEE’s behalf – shows, enthusiasm for renewables is increasing if anything. “The survey results show the breadth of the societal consensus supporting the Energiewende in Germany,” said AEE deputy managing director Nils Boenigk.
The main reasons for that support? Future energy security and the fight against climate change. “People in Germany know the deployment must continue so we can fulfil our obligations regarding climate protection and future generations,” said Boenigk.
BTW, a little side note here regarding calling Tony Seba a mouth piece. I equate that statement as assuming that Tony Seba is personally invested either ideologically, politically or financially in a particular outcome with regards to renewables, EVs etc… Having read him and watched his lectures my take on him, is that he has invested a considerable amount of time and effort into studying the various manifestations and consequences of disruptive technologies. Now he may be right, he may be wrong, perhaps somewhere in between, regardless, I have never gotten the impression that he is selling an ideology. As far as I can tell he is just reporting what he has learned.
Anyways, I’m really no longer all that interested in wasting my time trying to convince reactionaries, who insist that the world is a stark contrast between black and white, that reality is both complex and nuanced with millions of shades of grey!
http://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system/
Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System
By Donella Meadows~
You could say paradigms are harder to change than anything else about a system, and therefore this item should be lowest on the list, not second-to-highest. But there’s nothing physical or expensive or even slow in the process of paradigm change. In a single individual it can happen in a millisecond. All it takes is a click in the mind, a falling of scales from eyes, a new way of seeing. Whole societies are another matter — they resist challenges to their paradigm harder than they resist anything else.
So how do you change paradigms? Thomas Kuhn, who wrote the seminal book about the great paradigm shifts of science,7 has a lot to say about that. In a nutshell, you keep pointing at the anomalies and failures in the old paradigm, you keep coming yourself, and loudly and with assurance from the new one, you insert people with the new paradigm in places of public visibility and power. You don’t waste time with reactionaries; rather you work with active change agents and with the vast middle ground of people who are open-minded.
^^ Lip-service bullshit above ^^
So much so, that it’s nauseating. That must be what it’s for. ‘Let’s nauseate Cae.’
If we truly believed those kinds of things, we’d variously challenge the current paradigm, but so much of your commentary here over the years has consisted of the intellectual analingus of the current paradigm, creativeless rips and plugs of assorted cutting-edge trendoids. What makes it worse are those who backpeddle, such as from claiming to be proponents of anarchism and to being proud to ass-lick leadership and contradictory. WTF?
Some people would make The Donald look stable.
BTW, don’t forget color and other things beyond human perception, besides your shades of grey.
Fred hit a nerve there!
Well given that I had a computer graphics art studio in NY at one time, I probably have forgotten more about color palettes than most will ever learn.
Now imagine if someone is a Tetrachromat!
http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2015/02/what-like-see-a-hundred-million-colors.html
Tetrachromats can see colors that most people cannot — up to 100 million, estimates suggest, which is 100 times that of the average human. Most people have three cells, or receptors, in their retinas, but tetrachomats have a fourth receptor, which may be what allows for their heightened color perception. They are usually female, and it’s estimated that about 12 percent of women carry the gene for this fourth receptor. Carrying the gene doesn’t guarantee that you’ll wind up with heightened color vision, but those who both have the gene and who are immersed in a wide range of colors from a very young age appear to be more likely to develop the ability. Researchers are still in the very early stages in their understanding of this condition, so there aren’t any hard numbers on how often it manifests itself.
Then there is Synesthesia.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJbtgxs-wZc
Consciousness, Synesthesia, and Art (V.S. Ramachandran)
But some people see the world in plain black and white.
Spectrum (C.~1992)
Neurochemical tones of a very narrow spectrum
An infinitely variable palette of frequencies they called ‘color’
Red green blue were enough for those who could not see all there was…
‘Infrared’… ‘What lovely hues’…
‘What were humans really like?’, it wondered…
Not a human could respond…
Red green blue were enough for those who could not see all there was…
LOL! As usual, you pick something out of the blue (pun intended), that seems to demonstrate a profound lack of knowledge and curiosity about the physical world around you and how humans perceive it due to inherent biological and cultural limitations.
Ironically most humans could not even recognize as a distinct color, the part of the electromagnetic spectrum that corresponds to wavelengths of 450–495 nm until modern times. There isn’t even a word for blue in most ancient and even some modern human cultures…
Not a human could respond…
Bull! Speak for yourself, Kemosabe!
A poet once said, “The whole universe is in a glass of wine.” We will probably never know in what sense he said that, for poets do not write to be understood.
Richard Feynman
https://www.sciencealert.com/humans-couldn-t-even-see-the-colour-blue-until-modern-times-research-suggests
Links to actual scientific papers in article if anyone is interested.
Fred – I seem to remember some theory that we all had the receptors to see into the UV but it got blocked out at the cornea. Also that turtles or some, similar animal, could see well into the UV.
Interestingly there wasn’t a word for orange the colour in English until the first such fruit were imported to the UK
ps – my memory is not to be trusted much these days.
I’m not sure about UV, will have to research that but infrared more likely.
http://www.sci-news.com/biology/science-humans-can-see-infrared-light-02313.html
Humans Can See Infrared Light, Scientists Say
Human eyes can detect light at wavelengths in the visual spectrum; other wavelengths, such as infrared and ultraviolet, are supposed to be invisible, but an international group of scientists from Poland, Switzerland, Norway and the United States, has found that under certain conditions, it’s possible for humans to see infrared light. Using cells from the retinas of mice and people, and infrared lasers, the group found that when laser light pulses rapidly, light-sensing cells in the retina sometimes get a double hit of infrared energy. When that happens, the eye is able to detect light that falls outside the visible spectrum.
Re: The colour and the fruit ‘orange’ in the Anglo Saxon vernacular and other languages… BTW, the spell checker on POB doesn’t like the British spelling of the word ‘color’ 😉
Interesting comments from many cultures and back grounds here’s a sampling:
https://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,5753,-25319,00.html
English uses the same word -“orange” for both the color and the fruit. I have subsequently found out that the same is true in French, German and Hungarian. Are there any languages where the two words are different?
Tony May, London, England
In Catalan ‘taronja’ is the fruit, while ‘carbassa’- which incidentally means pumpkin – is often used to refer to the colour. Nevertheless, people do use ‘taronja’ for the colour, although I have been told that this is somewhat incorrect and a bad habit picked up from Spanish.
M. Lockwood, Besal¿ Spain
In Romanian the fruit is called “portocala” while the colour is “porticaliu/ portocalie” (masc/fem) There is not much of a difference between the two words, I admit, but maybe someone knows the etymology of “portocala”?
Christina, Bucharest, Romania
In Greek, the word for both the colour and the fruit is ‘portokali’ which I presume comes from the name of the country ‘Portugal’, the same as in Romanian. There is a small difference in pronunciation: 3rd syllable for the fruit and final syllable for the colour.
Nic Sinclair, Pannonhalma Hungary
>>Persian/Farsi: Orange(fruit)= >>purteghal Orange(colour)=narenji Actually, the Persian for an orange was also narange, so they were the same. The Persian narange was rather bitter, but it was still exported to Europe. But the Portugese created a new sweeter variety, and when this was reimported back into Persia they called it the purtegale.
ralph ellis, Northwich uk
@Fred, people who have had their cornea removed are able to see into the UV. Colour ranges vary from person to person and even eye to eye. I see things redder with my left eye and bluer with my right – errr, exactly what shade is that that I am looking at.
NAOM
Oh, in Spanish Naranja is an orange and Toronja a Grapefruit.
(J pronounced as H).
TKS, NAOM and George for opening my eyes to UV vision in humans 😉
I was aware of various insects being able to see UV. Especially certain butterflies that display wing patterns that can only be seen with UV sensitive vision.
Ironically color in butterfly wings is usually due to structure and not pigment.
BTW the word for both the color orange and the fruit in Portuguese is, ‘Laranja’. the ‘J’ is pronounced hard not soft like in Spanish.
Back to butterfly wings:
https://asknature.org/strategy/wing-scales-cause-light-to-diffract-and-interfere/#.Wps_dejwaM8
Wings of Morpho butterflies create color by causing light waves to diffract and interfere.
Look Ma! No blue pigment here.
.
Salmon is kinda orange.
Colors are pretty arbitrary. Newton chose seven colors of the rainbow because he figured there must be a connection to the seven planets – Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. If he’d had some mystic reason for choosing six, orange would be a much more obscure color.
Of course it’s a poem, Fred.
Glad to see it inspired some interesting discourse.
Island
You are misrepresenting me totally in order not to face real problems that exist.
https://www.energy-charts.de/power.htm
I keep on putting up the actual facts of electricity delivered in Germany today.
Yet unfortunately the reality of it does not sink in because glib statements about cold storage and heat storage are much easier than trying to figure out where 50GW of electricity comes from at 5pm on a November, December, January, February or even March windless evening.
The childish absurdity to criticize everyone who points out basic and obvious problems is a sad inevitable outcome of spoilt children who have grown up to be adults who have never learnt that they cannot have something because they want it.
Anyway you really don’t understand the calamities heading towards us.
Billions of tonnes of topsoil are lost every year, only soil can grown the main crops such as wheat, barley, potatoes.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/dec/02/arable-land-soil-food-security-shortage
The aquifers of the world are running out and many farms will turn to dust as already some have.
https://www.fluencecorp.com/groundwater-depletion-compounds-china-water-scarcity/
The global fish stocks are collapsing.
http://wwf.panda.org/what_we_do/endangered_species/cetaceans/threats/fishstocks/
On top of that every year another 80 million consuming being will want their share of a shrinking pie.
So don’t worry to much about solar panels it is the last thing that will matter.
You keep on presenting these facts as if they are not well known and as if no one has ever addressed them. I have not been able to read any more of Scheer’s book since last week since I have been focusing on other matters, so I can’t tell you what his ideas were yet. Remember, Scheer was one of the biggest protagonists of the Energiewende and spent a good deal of his time during interviews and presentations explaining why it could not be left up to the incumbents to drive the transition. Have you ever watched anything featuring talks by Scheer or interviews with him? It’s pretty obvious you haven’t read any of his books.
“The childish absurdity to criticize everyone who points out basic and obvious problems is a sad inevitable outcome of spoilt children who have grown up to be adults who have never learnt that they cannot have something because they want it. “
I don’t know where you are going with that and who you are referring to (me or Musk) but if that was directed at me, try imagine what it was like to grow up in the seventies in Jamaica with both parents being teachers. My dad was a high school principal for the first four years of that decade after which he tried to get out of that profession while my mum, a British expatriate, rose up through the ranks at a new school, eventually becoming vice principal herself after I had left high school (the same one she taught at). I guess that makes me really spoiled, what with being lavished with the largess of the income of Jamaican high school teachers, LOL!
Here’s a hint. My interest in and ability to work on cars was partially as a result of trying to keep the family cars running, a 1961 Rover 100 and a 1972 Austin Maxi 1750, the first British hatchback. By the time we moved to the town where I finished high school both cars had started to show signs of living very close to the sea, rust and both were exhibiting the legendary (un) reliability of British cars of their era. Let’s just say those cars provided a lot of opportunities to learn how to fix stuff. In addition cars from that era required a “tune up” every three months or so, a skill I had mastered by the time I finished high school. One of the standing jokes at my high school was how my mum was always parking the car at the beginning of the downward slope of the school driveway, just in case it wouldn’t start and we had to push start it, a technique only people who can drive manual transmissions know anything about. Let’s just say, my upbring has made me very careful about deciding what it is that “I want” bearing in mind that everything has a cost.
“Anyway you really don’t understand the calamities heading towards us.”
As for that statement, I discovered theoildrum.com back in late 2007, early 2008 and was an active participant in several discussions there. When TOD went dormant, I eventually settled here and would have to be very dense not to uderstand what we are facing. Having said that, when you add declining oil production to that mix, if something is not found to make up for declining FF production, the whole world will eventually end up looking like Haiti. You obviously think that nuclear is the best option for filling the void. I live in the tropics and beg to differ. Almost anywhere in the tropics could probably survive largely on solar energy. In terms of scaling, over 100 GW of PV capacity was added worldwide in 2017 with the figures for the five previous years being 76.8, 50.9, 40.1, 38.4 and 30.0 GW(source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics). Notice a trend? From the same source, adding more than 100 GW to their cumulative capacity at the end of 2016 leads to over 400 GW of capacity worldwide, over 99% of which has been installed since the end of 2004. In contrast according to this article from http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/ , Nuclear capacity could more than double by 2050, says IAEA
If nuclear power’s potential as a low-carbon energy source grows in recognition and advanced reactor designs further improve both safety and radioactive waste management, the use of nuclear power could grow significantly, the report says.
In its high case projection, global nuclear generating capacity increases from 392 GWe at the end of 2016 to 554 GWe by 2030, 717 GWe by 2040 and 874 GWe by 2050. Nuclear’s share of global electricity generation would increase from the current level of about 11% to 13.7% by 2050. This projection – which assumes that current rates of economic and electricity demand growth, particularly in Asia, will continue – reflects that 30-35 new reactors are expected to be grid connected annually starting around 2025. This rate of connections was last seen in 1984, when 33 new reactors were connected to the grid, the IAEA noted. However, it says 33 grid connections by 2025 “would require immediate action today”.
So, the optimistic scenario from your team has nuclear capacity taking more than 25 years to double? And you think nuclear can save the world? Talk about “childish absurdity”!
Nuclear power is both a biological death trap and non-scalable due to both lack of viable fuel and very high costs. Anyone promoting nuclear energy as a means of global energy supply has no concern for the living world as well as a very unrealistic view of the technology, it’s economics and ability to scale.
Island
I am not surprised you failed again to even try to answer the vital question.
Where does the electricity come from at 5pm during winter when it is pitch black and will remain so for 15 Hours and Europe is in the middle of a calm of three day.
I will help you, by telling you where it will not come from.
Hydro power at the moment can deliver about 5% of Europe’s needs, even building hydro and pumped storage in every place suitable would only produce about 12%. Remember pumped storage lasts for only 3 to 6 hours and in winter solar is very limited.
Obviously not from nuclear because people without any knowledge are allowed to make decisions out of fear rather than the best engineers in the world. More people are killed on roads in a day than all the nuclear power accidents combined, but don’t let facts interfere with mindless bias.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/602051/fail-safe-nuclear-power/
How would cars be recharged at night with little wind?
Where does the 50Gw come from?
Norfolk VA is getting ready for rising sea levels.
https://www.npr.org/2018/03/01/589634980/norfolk-requires-developers-to-do-more-against-flooding
Virginia has a large tidewater region with recurrent flooding. Here is a very comprehensive study of the state’s tidewater region with problems analyzed and actions to be taken. There is a series of repetitive loss region maps to survey. A graph shows the Hague has increased flooding events over 5 times that compared to the 1930-1950’s period.
http://ccrm.vims.edu/recurrent_flooding/Recurrent_Flooding_Study_web.pdf
The Arctic heat blob anomaly has shifted slightly south and now connects across Greenland and eastern Canada all the way to Mexico. Further east the Euro-Siberian cold sandwich is wrapped in warm anomaly.
That cold weather in Europe is wiping out all the fancy rhododendrons and azaleas and palms in European gardens. They were already starting to bud thanks to the warm winter.
And they got snow in Naples.
I certainly hope your thoughts and prayers are going out to that Greenland ice, because if it slides off the island there’ll be hell to pay.
Between the ponds/lakes forming, the black carbon, dirty ice and algae the surface of the melt region on the Greenland ice cap is getting darker. Now it looks like the cloud cover in summer has been reducing allowing more input of light energy into the system.
Decreasing cloud cover drives the recent mass loss on the Greenland Ice Sheet
The Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS) has been losing mass at an accelerating rate since the mid-1990s. This has been due to both increased ice discharge into the ocean and melting at the surface, with the latter being the dominant contribution. This change in state has been attributed to rising temperatures and a decrease in surface albedo. We show, using satellite data and climate model output, that the abrupt reduction in surface mass balance since about 1995 can be attributed largely to a coincident trend of decreasing summer cloud cover enhancing the melt-albedo feedback. Satellite observations show that, from 1995 to 2009, summer cloud cover decreased by 0.9 ± 0.3% per year. Model output indicates that the GrIS summer melt increases by 27 ± 13 gigatons (Gt) per percent reduction in summer cloud cover, principally because of the impact of increased shortwave radiation over the low albedo ablation zone. The observed reduction in cloud cover is strongly correlated with a state shift in the North Atlantic Oscillation promoting anticyclonic conditions in summer and suggests that the enhanced surface mass loss from the GrIS is driven by synoptic-scale changes in Arctic-wide atmospheric circulation.
http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/6/e1700584
GOES-S just launched a few seconds ago. So far so good.
More than 40 people in Europe have died so far due to the extreme cold, so respectfully now is not an appropriate time to make jokes about garden plants and Greenland ice.
And how many other people died in Europe in that same time period? Let’s get some perspective. In terms of lives, what happens to Greenland ice is a bit more important. It’s not a joke.
I guess the silver lining to that cloud is less Europeans.
http://www.euronews.com/2017/08/02/alert-in-europe-over-rising-temperatures
Alert in Europe over rising temperatures
Climate change related heat has killed thousands of Europeans every summer over the last couple of years.
The Netherlands Central Bureau of Statistics reckons that on average 200 more Dutch people will die every week during a heat wave, a 10 percent rise in deaths.
Last summer 64 people died in Portugal due to fires related to climate change
Heat is a much greater problem than cold! I think you are the real joke!
If the Greenland ice sheet melts, the sea level will rise by 25 feet. It’s not a joke.
3 feet is all it’ll take to flood the Mekong delta every year.
http://www.climatehotmap.org/global-warming-locations/mekong-river-delta-vietnam.html
Much of the world food production takes place very close to sea level, and sea level rise will see food exporters becoming food importers.
3 feet and most of South Florida is a diving area.
Of course, the Mekong is more important.
3 feet will also get about half of the US Navy’s docks.
With any luck Mar-a-Lago will go first.
Putin boasts that Russia has a nuclear-powered cruise missile that can penetrate U.S. defense shields
“The thing that sounds mad, the nuclear-propulsion thing, is potentially feasible,” he said, adding: “I think it’s insane.”
https://www.pressherald.com/2018/03/01/putin-boasts-that-russia-has-a-nuclear-powered-cruise-missile-that-can-penetrate-u-s-defense-shields/
Also, The radiation was detected from the test flight…
Looks like the cold war never ended and it is now working it’s way up to hot. No place to hide folks. Putin better watch out, Trump might tweet at him and then fire several more people.
LOL! he is targeting South Florida… Ironic since it has a large population of Russian mafia types. And of course, Mar-a-Lago !
What is more important than trusting and peaceful US – Russia co-existence for the future of the Planet? Russia had 100x fold casualties than US in WW2. What would you expect when agreements are violated and troops deployed along their border? Putin is considered to be a centralist but DC seems to be hell-bent on forcing him to be Hawkish to save face. If you like your home you can keep it. Maybe not!
https://www.coasttocoastam.com/guest/cohen-stephen-f/67527
https://audioboom.com/posts/6697221-tales-of-the-new-cold-war-fear-of-the-russians-is-old-fashioned-american-politics-part-1-of-2-stephen-f-cohen-nyu-princeton-eastwestaccord-com
https://audioboom.com/posts/6697223-tales-of-the-new-cold-war-fear-of-the-russians-is-old-fashioned-american-politics-part-2-of-2-stephen-f-cohen-nyu-princeton-eastwestaccord-com
New efficient, low-temperature catalyst for hydrogen production
Scientists have developed a new low-temperature catalyst for producing high-purity hydrogen gas while simultaneously using up carbon monoxide (CO). The discovery-described in a paper set to publish online in the journal Science on Thursday, June 22, 2017-could improve the performance of fuel cells that run on hydrogen fuel but can be poisoned by CO.
https://phys.org/news/2017-06-efficient-low-temperature-catalyst-hydrogen-production.html
Converting CO2 into usable energy
In addition to the unique energetic properties of single atoms, the CO2 conversation reaction was facilitated by the interaction of the nickel atoms with a surrounding sheet of graphene. Anchoring the atoms to graphene enabled the scientists to tune the catalyst and suppress HER.
To get a closer look at the individual nickel atoms within the atomically thin graphene sheet, the scientists used scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) at Brookhaven’s Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN), a DOE Office of Science User Facility. By scanning an electron probe over the sample, the scientists were able to visualize discrete nickel atoms on the graphene.
Our state-of-art transmission electron microscope is a unique tool to see extremely tiny features, such as single atoms,” said Sooyeon Hwang, a scientist at CFN and a co-author on the paper.
“Single atoms are usually unstable and tend to aggregate on the support,” added Dong Su, also a CFN scientist and a co-author on the paper. “However, we found the individual nickel atoms were distributed uniformly, which accounted for the excellent performance of the conversion reaction.”
To analyze the chemical complexity of the material, the scientists used beamline 8-ID at the National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II)—also a DOE Office of Science User Facility at Brookhaven Lab. The ultra-bright x-ray light at NSLS-II enabled the scientists to “see” a detailed view of the material’s inner structure.
https://phys.org/news/2018-03-co2-usable-energy.html#nRlv
The February 2018 temperature map is out. An enormous area of the country had temperatures 15 °F or more below normal for the entire month. Some areas were even 20 °F below normal.
Eastern Montana experienced a top 5 coldest February of all time. In Miles City, the record for the coldest February on record was broken by 1.4 °F, incredible considering such records are often broken by only a few tenths of a degree.
In Havre (see chart below), the average February temperature was just 1.5 °F, also an all-time record low. The whole month ended up 20.7 °F below normal. Six days had an average daytime temperature more than 30 °F below normal, including one date (February 12th) with an average temperature that was an astounding 45 °F below normal!
{DELETED – too long use a link}
An enormous area of the country had temperatures 15 °F or more below normal for the entire month.
Really?! Compared to the areas on that map with above normal temps, it looks pretty damn small to me…
I guess you had to be there without a car. 🙂
Better stated, a large area experienced monthly temperatures 15 °F or more below normal, while no areas experienced temperatures 15 °F or more above normal. The highest above normal temperatures were in the 10-15 °F range. Keep in mind too Montana is not small. It is the fourth largest state by area and about the same size as the whole of Japan.
Meanwhile the northern hemisphere (pretty big place) is 1.2 C above average and the Arctic 5.3C above average. Montana being 1/250 of the northern hemisphere has to get a lot colder to make any difference at all.
Below are temperature deviation data (in Fahrenheit degrees), relative to 1971-2000 averages, for 9 locations in northern North America.
Location ……..February 2018 January-February 2018
Prudhoe Bay, AK …….20.93…………….. 14.46
Moosonee, Ontario 1.57 ………………….1.90
Nome, AK …………..12.66 ……………7.07
Churchill, Manitoba -1.64 ……………1.16
Iqaluit, Nunnuvut -1.88 …………..-3.35
Goose Bay, NFL… -4.88 …………..-1.54
Yellowknife, NWT….. 1.79 ………………….3.88
Sault Ste. Marie, MI 3.30 ……………3.64
Hibbing, MN …..-8.98 …………………-3.74
Average …………………2.58 ………………….2.61
In much of northern North America it was below average for most of February with a big warm up in the last 10 days. On Feb. 18, Iqaluit was 7.61 F below average but ended up only 1.88 F below average. Churchill, Manitoba was 6.55 F below average on February 19 but ended the month only 1.64 F below average.
The most obvious deviation was that for Prudhoe Bay at +20.93 F. That continues a string of major positive deviations for the last 4 months:
November +15.50 F
December +19.04 F
January +8.61 F
February +20.93 F
Cold in Montana in February. Imagine that.
I’m glad some things still seem regular,
even if all the idiots did vote for a charlatan.
Bob- did you get your Trump Univ diploma up on the wall yet?
It is always interesting to read your posts Bob.
The main thing I notice, North America hasn’t enjoyed as much of the warming the rest of the world has enjoyed. Seems, because of our position on the planet, we bear the weight of of glaciers, ie first to form, last to leave.
It is curious tho that this late in a post-ice-age event Greenland has not melted a lot more. Also that Antarctica remains intact. This clearly shows how cold the modern period since the last ice age has been.
It is curious tho that this late in a post-ice-age event Greenland has not melted a lot more. Also that Antarctica remains intact. This clearly shows how cold the modern period since the last ice age has been.
Really?!
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/02/06/1717312115
Climate-change–driven accelerated sea-level rise detected in the altimeter era
R. S. Nerem, B. D. Beckley, J. T. Fasullo, B. D. Hamlington, D. Masters and G. T. Mitchum
PNAS 2018; published ahead of print February 12, 2018, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1717312115
Significance
Satellite altimetry has shown that global mean sea level has been rising at a rate of ∼3 ± 0.4 mm/y since 1993. Using the altimeter record coupled with careful consideration of interannual and decadal variability as well as potential instrument errors, we show that this rate is accelerating at 0.084 ± 0.025 mm/y2, which agrees well with climate model projections. If sea level continues to change at this rate and acceleration, sea-level rise by 2100 (∼65 cm) will be more than double the amount if the rate was constant at 3 mm/y.
Abstract
Using a 25-y time series of precision satellite altimeter data from TOPEX/Poseidon, Jason-1, Jason-2, and Jason-3, we estimate the climate-change–driven acceleration of global mean sea level over the last 25 y to be 0.084 ± 0.025 mm/y2. Coupled with the average climate-change–driven rate of sea level rise over these same 25 y of 2.9 mm/y, simple extrapolation of the quadratic implies global mean sea level could rise 65 ± 12 cm by 2100 compared with 2005, roughly in agreement with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 5th Assessment Report (AR5) model projections.
All scientific gobbledygook. What’s the altimeter era? Satellite altimetry? Altimetry isn’t even in the dictionary, have to force auto correct to accept it. Interannual and decadal? More words not in the dictionary. TOPEX/Poseidon, Jason-1, Jason-2, and Jason-3? “Simple extrapolation of the quadratic”? You need to keep things simple for the working man, or better yet just be up front and truthful about how much your looking to raise my taxes to fund your job.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/altimeter
https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/altimetry
Your move.
NAOM
You need to keep things simple for the working man, or better yet just be up front and truthful about how much your looking to raise my taxes to fund your job.
You want the truth? You can’t handle the truth!
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/14/trumps-tax-breaks-rich-wont-trickle-down-working-americans
Trump’s tax breaks for the rich won’t trickle down to help working Americans
The Joint Committee on Taxation found that, on average, households earning between $20,000 and $40,000 would end up paying more, not less, under the House GOP plan. Several analyses have found that between 25% and 45% of middle-class Americans would ultimately pay more, not less, under the tax plan.
“The point is, you can never be too greedy.”
Donald Trump during campaign
“Only stupid people pay taxes!” President Trump
“My IQ is one of the highest — and you all know it! Please don’t feel so stupid or insecure; it’s not your fault.”
Donald Trump
If you think education is expensive — try ignorance. — Derek Bok
If you can’t be bothered to find these things out for yourself, then you are really not entitled to contribute to the debate.
I think that between now and the elections in November the Repub/Trump tax law will be very popular with voters. Most will see a reduction in their witholding and celebrate by spending and borrowing more. It will help more Republicans get elected.
I suspect that most of the additional costs to the voter will happen in more subtle ways and be obvious after the election. You can bet that the Republican devotion to balanced budgets will return with a vengence regarding expenditures on such “wasteful” items as Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP, WIC and the evil-0f-evils Social Security.
I see they use “we show” in that document.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/mar/02/clean-coal-kemper-plant-mississippi-problems
Bosses at world’s most ambitious clean coal plant kept problems secret for years
Kemper’s failure could be a serious setback for global climate policy and plans to reach the Paris climate targets. International climate agreements rely heavily on developing practical carbon capture technologies that have so far largely proved elusive. Kemper was slated to be the largest coal carbon capture plant ever built, touted as potentially the first of many similar projects worldwide.
Does Russia Have Leverage Over Trump?
https://www.thenation.com/article/does-russia-have-leverage-over-trump/
Tulip mania: the classic story of a Dutch financial bubble is mostly wrong
Anne Goldgar
https://theconversation.com/amp/tulip-mania-the-classic-story-of-a-dutch-financial-bubble-is-mostly-wrong-91413
Right now, it’s Bitcoin. But in the past we’ve had dotcom stocks, the 1929 crash, 19th-century railways and the South Sea Bubble of 1720. All these were compared by contemporaries to “tulip mania”, the Dutch financial craze for tulip bulbs in the 1630s. Bitcoin, according some sceptics, is “tulip mania 2.0”.
Why this lasting fixation on tulip mania? It certainly makes an exciting story, one that has become a byword for insanity in the markets. The same aspects of it are constantly repeated, whether by casual tweeters or in widely read economics textbooks by luminaries such as John Kenneth Galbraith.
Tulip mania was irrational, the story goes. Tulip mania was a frenzy. Everyone in the Netherlands was involved, from chimney-sweeps to aristocrats. The same tulip bulb, or rather tulip future, was traded sometimes 10 times a day. No one wanted the bulbs, only the profits – it was a phenomenon of pure greed. Tulips were sold for crazy prices – the price of houses – and fortunes were won and lost. It was the foolishness of newcomers to the market that set off the crash in February 1637. Desperate bankrupts threw themselves in canals. The government finally stepped in and ceased the trade, but not before the economy of Holland was ruined.
Yes, it makes an exciting story. The trouble is, most of it is untrue.
Yes, it makes an exciting story. The trouble is, most of it is untrue.
As are most of the stories about Bitcoin.
It helps to actually understand that Bitcoin is just one of about a thousand currently existing cryptocurrencies. Comparing it to stocks or companies totally misses the point. Anyone who has ever exchanged US dollars in a foreign country knows that people speculate on the future value of the US dollar on both the official and the black markets. I have personally witnessed US dollar currency bubbles. Same with many other global currencies. But I digress!
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamiehopkins/2017/11/29/bitcoin-might-be-a-bubble-but-digital-currencies-are-not/#13aaddef5d02
Bitcoin Might Be A ‘Bubble’ But Digital Currencies Are Not
You have likely seen some articles discussing the sudden rise in value of Bitcoin over the past year. Bitcoin has experienced a surge in value. However, the surge in attention and value has also attracted a number of critics, including Vanguard founder Jack Bogle and Nobel Prize winner Professor Joseph E. Stiglitz from Columbia University. They have both attacked Bitcoin saying that it’s a “bubble,” comparing it to many Dotcom companies that were really shell companies offering little value and not “backed by anything.” Stiglitz actually went so far to say Bitcoin should be outlawed and said it doesn’t serve any useful social function. While I have tremendous respect for the intellect and vision of many of the critics of Bitcoin, I also feel that they are missing the point. And I will just say it, Professor Stiglitz is wrong. First, digital currencies have already been adopted and outlawing them would set the U.S. down a very dangerous path. The future will be paved with disruptive technological advances, as the past hundred years have been, and we should embrace and drive these developments, not cling to bygone notions of currencies. Cryptocurrencies and digital currencies, like Bitcoin, have a role and are gaining traction because they do offer value that existing currencies fail to provide.
Bold mine
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2018/03/03/flat-earth-conference-coming-to-edmonton-this-summer_a_23376128/
I wonder if the organizer will make any money.
It’s hard for me to imagine that anybody fool enough to believe in a flat earth will have money enough to get there.
The thought of flat Earthers flying is funny in it’s own right.
Tamino’s new blog
Dissecting Data: CO2
https://climateyes.wordpress.com/2018/02/26/dissecting-data-co2/#more-75
Running a standard eyeball over the last but one graph there appears to be a 30 year cycle. Ok, 2 cycles and using a ‘looks like’ is not very scientific and begs more data with further analysis, so, can anyone suggest a natural cycle that matches that?
NAOM
so, can anyone suggest a natural cycle that matches that?
Yeah, the natural cycle of the seasonal uptake of CO2 by land plants in the northern hemisphere, which he clarifies here:
This looks like it’s mostly yearly fluctuation. Let’s plot this same data, but instead of plotting residual by time, let’s plot it by month. That way, all the Januarys will be plotted in one place, all the Februarys, etc. up to all the Decembers. When we do that, these CO2 residuals paint this picture of a seasonal pattern:
But at the end of the day once you subtract the residuals it is the quadratic fit to the data, that really tells the story of accelerating rise of anthropogenic CO2
Probably the most important result is encompassed in that long-term quadratic model — it’s certainly the bulk of the change over the last 60 years. It fits the data well enough that it gives a good estimate, not only of the value of the long term trend, but of the rate of increase as well.
.
Seasonal makes sense for the fine signal but it is the 30 year cycle when you subtract that that has me wondering.
NAOM
I think it’s just a good quadratic fit with a kink in the middle, which shows higher emissions than the curve just before 1990 and then reverted back to trend just after. I don’t know the reason (China? Big fires in the tropics?).
It’s just about impossible for me , or anybody else, to keep up with all the news relevant to understanding what will be happening over the next couple of generations.
One thing that I haven’t seen discussed to my satisfaction , in depth, HONESTLY, anywhere, is the real overall impact of the welfare state we have constructed for old people in western societies.
I’m currently making out like a bandit myself, considering the combined value of my very modest social security check and the large value of Medicare, even though I’m not sick- not yet anyway. I paid in a LOT at times, but more years than not, I didn’t pay in much at all, sometimes nothing, because I lived some years without generating any taxable income. I have significant non taxable income right now, in terms of my net worth, because I own real estate that is appreciating nicely.
And there are countless millions of younger people collecting various benefits from various safety net programs as well.
I AM NOT ARGUING FOR OR AGAINST SUCH PROGRAMS within the context of this comment. I do generally support them, although I also realize there’s a great deal of waste and fraud to be considered in any HONEST discussion of them.
What I’m saying is that anything I read about them is generally slanted, sometimes subtly but more often blatantly, either in favor of or against them.
So what is the real overall LONG TERM EFFECT of such programs on the economy, local, national, world wide?
How much more discretionary income would a typical working person have if we weren’t paying the taxes that support old farts like me, and my even older Dad? What would we be spending it on?
If we were to quit paying huge sums from the public purse to keep millions of old terminally ill people alive for another few weeks, how big a bang would those same dollars make if we spent them on programs to keep children healthy? How much would a statistical measure such as life expectancy fall if we were to eliminate this spending on people who are going to die anyway within a few days?
The last couple of hundred grand we spent on my mother to keep her with us for the last two or three years- in and out of intensive care but at home, not even in a nursing home- would have added hundreds of years, maybe thousands of years, to the lives of younger people, had it been spent on preemptive measures to PREVENT younger people falling ill in the first place.
But I don’t want a discussion about the merits of the welfare state, that’s covered wall to wall and tree top tall all over the msm and the net.
I would like to hear the the thoughts of the regulars here about what the economy would look like if we DIDN’T have the welfare state.
Would we still be having four or five kids , or two or less per woman?
Would we be a decade or two further along in terms of solving the cancer problem, or a decade or two further behind?
Would we have a surplus of decent housing, relative to today, because we would be building more new houses, and dying sooner,leaving them empty?
It’s hard to find an intellectually honest discussion of the value of our built infrastructure, including housing, which will be inherited by the younger generations, as we old farts die off.
Unless I turn into a medical basket case and the state spends a LOT of money on me, I will be leaving behind permanent improvements built by my own hands worth far more than I will ever collect in welfare benefits. But most people I know at the moment haven’t really contributed anything at all that is permanent, to the future welfare of the people, excepting whatever public property has been built with the portion of their tax money that is spent on infrastructure or research.
Are the younger generations actually winners, or losers, in terms of the transfer of wealth from generation to generation?
Any relevant links are appreciated, and thanks in advance.
“How much more discretionary income would a typical working person have if we weren’t paying the taxes that support old farts like me”
Trumpster, the simple fact that you are asking this question shows you are drinking the conservative right wing mantra, that favors the rich 5% business owners. Half your Social Security and Medicare contributions are paid by your employer. Do your really think that if that contribution tax was eliminated. Your employer would put it all into your pay check pocket? Social Security is designed to pay a large proportion to low income contributors than high income. Another example of poor government haters shooting themselves in the foot(but we all know your poor friends enjoy hurting themselves with guns) with Conservative anti government values.
“What would we be spending it on?”
If you need to ask this question, it’s another reason why the American people need Social Security. You shouldn’t be spending the money. You should be saving the money for future old age. Social Security is an annuity insurance government program with lower overhead costs then the private sector can’t match. It’s not an investment. There are personal 401K and Roth’s vehicles for that purposes.
“The last couple of hundred grand we spent on my mother to keep her with us for the last two or three years”
Again Trumpster you are looking a gift horse in the mouth. But clearly at the time, you didn’t stand up and refuse health care for your mother for a social benefit. Why would you ask others to do something you couldn’t do yourself ?
“I would like to hear the the thoughts of the regulars here about what the economy would look like if we DIDN’T have the welfare state.”
There would be a lot of elderly like yourself living in cardboard boxes. This country is wealthy enough to support health care for all(just ask your buddy Bernie). Trumpster, you are a good example of right wing media and religion indoctrination mantra.
If it makes you feel better. Your more than welcome to reply with an HRC hate rant.
HB you seem to have really missed OFM’s point altogether. I would charge you with overdeveloped knee-jerk reaction.
HB, you’re a goddamned idiot.
But keep it up, because you constantly demonstrate that you are utterly incapable of having an original thought, or thinking outside your very small partisan box.
I asked for opinions, but I don’t want yours, because you are utterly incapable of critical thinking.
You are undoubtedly unaware of it, but plenty of rather well educated very true blue big D Democrats have serious misgivings about whether we will be able to support old people much longer, the way we do now, due to the demographics involved, due to falling birthrates, women having their kids later, due to falling incomes among working people, due to people living longer with chronic diseases that are expensive to treat.
This sort of problem requires big picture thinking, SYSTEMS thinking. Some of the countries that are farther along on the path to stable populations, or declining populations, are already wondering how in hell they will manage, and are putting serious resources into possibly having robots do a large part of the necessary work.
Some people are so concerned they are ready and willing and maybe even EAGER to have large numbers of immigrants ….. low skilled and poorly educated, as a rule, if they are going to do the sort of work involved in this case……. allowed into their countries, which in effect means simply postponing the day of reckoning.
We already have people who are double and even triple dippers, on pensions, and we have a number of cities in this country already bankrupt because local politicians who knew they would either be dead or long retired before their giveaways came home to roost in the form of life time health care and pensions for city employees.
Such recklessness has a hell of a lot to do with the Rust Belt BEING the Rust Belt.
The socalled Social Security Trust Fund doesn’t even exist, except as a chimera on paper, because it’s literally impossible for a REAL trust fund to be operated by the same people who take in and spend the money. A TRUSTEE holds money for someone else, for SAFE KEEPING.
The SS trust fund loans out the incoming money to the rest of the federal government, which promptly spends it, replacing it with IOU’s.
But the federal government is FUCKING BROKE, as has been readily acknowledged by more than a few of the other regulars here, in commenting about the lack of resources needed to solve our various problems such as air pollution, water pollution, the inevitable depletion of fossil fuels, etc.
The usual short hand for this discussion is something along the lines of “eternal growth is impossible” so we have to figure out how to live steady state with declining resources, or at least with far fewer resources.
There’s a day coming, almost for sure, for dead sure imo, that we aren’t going to be ABLE to pay for benefits that have been promised.
So it behooves us to be thinking about how people are going to deal with their economic and health care problems later on.
You don’t have anything to add, other than partisan rants.
You might want to think about getting your money out of oil, in the event you really have any. A lot of the regulars here think the oil industry is a damned poor investment choice.
Now as far as HRC is concerned, the Democratic Party is still in the hands of her old octupus like old time political machine, in terms of control of the party office and levers of power.
But the younger generation of rising Democrats washed its hands of her sometime back. She’s history now. Not too many Democrats are willing to say so in public, so far, because not many people of any stripe want to admit they have made a major mistake, but DAMNED FEW people are still actively defending her.
Monica Lewinsky wasn’t a trailer park whore, as she was painted by the liberal establishment, which was determined to protect Bill and Hill.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/feb/27/monica-lewinsky-says-bill-clinton-affair-was-gross-abuse-of-power
She was the VICTIM, a kid, in intellectual terms, and Bill was the predator, and you’re one of the idiots who refuses to recognize such an obvious truth, while hypocritically screaming about Republicans and conservative southern people voting for Roy Moore.
Well, they were doing the same exact thing, in moral terms, as you have been doing…… covering up for one of their own.
“There’s a day coming, almost for sure, for dead sure”
Actually Trumpster, I think you have a thing for HRC. You seem to enjoy writing about her. You started your post all up tight and tense with me. Then by the time you finished unloading your rant on HRC. Your all laid back and calm like a teenager boy hiding his playboy magazine. I guess it’s an applebutter “day coming” Lewinsky thing. I’m “almost for sure, for dead sure” you should wash your blue dress overalls.
“federal government is FUCKING BROKE”. “The so called Social Security Trust Fund doesn’t even exist” and yet it allows Trumpster to “currently make out like a bandit”.
I’m sure the Federal government can afford your $620 Social Security check every month.
“plenty of rather well educated very true blue big D Democrats”
Thank you Trumpster, I wish I could say the same for your Republicans.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jthm6X3fltI
Trumpster, you need to watch starting at 37 minutes
OFM:
I’ve wondered about the same issues. The numbers on how much of the nation’s wealth is “squandered” on those like me, 74 yo, that might be better spent elsewhere. I’m having rotator cuff surgery tomorrow. It will cost me $250. Four years ago I had a stent put in for an abdominal aneurysm. It cost me $500, the Medicare bill was about $90,000. I can say with certainty that I never paid that much into Medicare in about 40 years of high income wages.
I think we are living in the tail end of a period where we thought that economic growth would solve all of these issues. The data is telling us that it won’t.
As to your question: what would the society look like without these expenditures? I don’t see the issues being anything like you suggest. I see a return of the social upheaval of the progressive era, lots of violence in the streets, lots of political turmoil as different power centers vie angrily for their share of the pie.
But then I see that coming anyway.
“HB you seem to have really missed OFM’s point altogether. I would charge you with overdeveloped knee-jerk reaction.”
And yet Trumpster responded to my comment and ignored you. I charge you with applebutter.
Jim – totally agree. I’m not quite your age and still haven’t any major health issues (but I’d be a fool to think they aren’t coming). In the UK system our social care system is failing, and the NHS is unlikely to be far behind. The private pension system is gradually cracking, very few are fully funded even with what is recognised as share values being higher than they rightly should. We recently had the college lecturers striking for a government bail out because some of their pension expectations (which are really high) aren’t going to be met. Pretty much every single commentary on these assumes they can be solved by just getting the right political party in power and a return to growth. It just isn’t going to happen. My generation have had it pretty good, but part of the cost is that we’ve destroyed the prospects for the millenials. They aren’t going to retire or have a healthy rewarding old age, they aren’t mostly going to have interesting jobs or live in a world that is better every day. They are the most stressed generation ever and yet they aren’t complaining much yet – maybe the zombification through smart phones, social media and advertising indoctrination will work for some time, but when it doesn’t watch out.
Pretty much every single commentary on these assumes they can be solved by just getting the right political party in power and a return to growth. It just isn’t going to happen. My generation have had it pretty good, but part of the cost is that we’ve destroyed the prospects for the millenials.
I certainly agree with with the first part of that but I’m not quite as willing to completely write off the ‘millenials’ and the prospects of future generations.
Case in point this TED talk which is interesting for its content but also because of the speaker’s views about the problem solving capabilities of those so called millenials. Humanity may indeed be fucked if it continues on that growth based path but even that is not an absolute given. Who knows, those millenials might yet develop technology that makes medical procedures dirt cheap for the masses. They may create completely new political and steady state economic systems.
Anyways, a nice little TED talk for many reasons.
https://www.ted.com/talks/dustin_schroeder_how_we_look_kilometers_below_the_antarctic_ice_sheet/up-next
How we look kilometers below the Antarctic ice sheet
I’m not writing off millennials. Rather I fear the day they wake up and decide us old fogies need to be held responsible for our profligacy. But I do think their priorities are completely distorted at the moment – e.g. there really isn’t any need for any more software that allows someone to get something that they would be far better off not buying ordered a millisecond faster and delivered a couple of minutes quicker.
Fred and George,
I think it’s wrong to point fingers at any generation. The root of most of the problems arise from the rapid growth of the human population on a finite earth. Millennial’s have enjoyed their share of the advancements in standard of living from technology, my boomer generation never imagined. They are also part of the population problem as much as anyone else.
The technology and advancements to reduce costs will come from society as a whole. It’s basic economics when a cost becomes expensive for a product. The profit incentive for alternatives will drive the market place to control costs. Look what happened after years of expensive and $100 per barrel oil. Society will continue to realize the cost of pollution and environmental damage, just maybe to late.
What is your interpretation of what happened after (I think only about three or four) years of $100 plus oil. Mine is that we had huge over-investment from the oil industry which is still feeding through to the supply side, and was exacerbated by the very low interest rates, and then a price crash, which might have staved off another recession.
George, I think you have it right except the staved off recession. I would argue that the crash in oil price in late 2014, actually slowed the American economy down for about a year. After the great recession the American oil industry was a leading job and growth simulator. American oil producers cut capex and drilling so much in early 2015. That it slowed the entire economy. Consumers loaded with debt were slow to respond by spending their savings at the pump. Now I think we are seeing a more balanced economic stimulus from the oil industry and lower price at the pump.
I also think at the turn of the century and early Bush Administration the oil industry was under investing in capex. We were coming to the end of the easy big oil finds. Plus with the low prices and the massive Middle East reserves. No one wanted to invest into expensive capex oil. After the failure of the Iraq war, change in liability laws in fracking and increase in oil price. The shale boom ground work was in place.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Policy_Act_of_2005
I wasn’t really talking about only American. It has so many resources still that not much is going to harm it in the near term, on average anyway. I think the trouble there is when you look beyond the average – the wealth disparity is huge and getting worse, there is no history of that ever ending well and is often seen just before an Empire’s collapse
Here is another thought, in the early years of the shale revolution of about 4 million bpd increase over 4 years. Iran got about a million bpd removed from the world market because of sanctions. Falsely giving signals shale wasn’t effecting supply. Near the end of the 4 year ran, Iran restored that million bpd. Bam, an over supplied market. Who would have guessed?
After World War 2, America was about the only industrial nation that wasn’t in ruins. There were plenty of jobs to build a nation at home and supply the world. That advantage is long gone. The rest of the world is now hungry and ready to compete. Without trade today, America’s standard of living would plummet because it could never produce what it currently consumes. American won’t really under stand this until the value of the dollar collapses. Sometimes you have to hit rock bottom before you can rebuild.
“My generation have had it pretty good, but part of the cost is that we’ve destroyed the prospects for the millenials. They aren’t going to retire or have a healthy rewarding old age, they aren’t mostly going to have interesting jobs or live in a world that is better every day. ”
First of all the world was not getting better every day, it was steadily being destroyed. Only if one takes a very narrow view of the world in a portion of it was it actually getting better.
My response is why not? Why can’t they have a better world and interesting occupations or endeavors? Forget retirement, it is not the way to go except for those physically and mentally incapable. Sure there will be large challenges to face but that just makes it more interesting. Give them credit, the 20th century was a nightmare scenario of horrific wars. Many survived and thrived. Many did not but we kept going. The 21st century will also have it’s disasters, but we have more knowledge, tools and communication now.
As far as medical goes, many may be much healthier than we are. The cost of biosensors is falling and computing is cheap. Future generations may not go to an actual doctor very often because they can get monitored and checked on a daily or weekly basis instead of waiting until major symptoms appear. AI will sort out the possibilities and set appropriate action recommendations, much sooner and earlier than now. Most intervention might just be prevention.
So why not? We have ways of making mass production and mass action very cheap.
Education could be mostly free and served to anyone anywhere with a connection to the internet or whatever is used then. People may become augmented, far more than they are now.
With renewable energy and increased efficiency, the world will be far less polluted and material use will fall. That will make a huge difference in health and in overall security.
Beside making our buildings better and far more efficient, we may be able to adapt ourselves to the environments we live in instead of using artificial means. Plus we don’t even use our own abilities being so conditioned to artificial environments.
Just yesterday I taught a young fellow how to adapt his body to much colder temperatures so he would only need a single blanket to sleep comfortably outside at near freezing temperatures.
I think we can go a lot further than that, much further.
It’s up to the next few generations to heal the wounds that have been made, to come to understand the human place in the earth system and more completely understand the earth system. Their task is to have humans learn how to both be human and be able to live on this planet without destroying it. Those are task much more exciting, interesting and challenging than inventing cars, radio, TV, flight, lasers, and space flight. We made the tools and now they need to apply those along with new tools and ideas to get to a new destination, make the earth a Home for all species including humans.
The human race needs to start having a destination, a goal to achieve, not just let things happen and blindly ignore most of what is happening. I may not believe in the singularity but I do believe the human mind is quite malleable and can in general focus upon singular achievements. I think most people will do what works once we figure out what that really means. The rest will have to be kept in check, unlike now where we let them run amok and run the show.
Now I relinquish the soap box to others. Beware the messages and messengers.
CHEVRON: WE WILL SURVIVE UNDER ANY CLIMATE CHANGE SCENARIO
“Energy transitions can take decades, as the amount of time required to turn over the current consuming capital stock and redirect investment to meet global energy demand depends on the asset’s service life,” the report notes, adding that “Oil and gas have a diverse set of end uses. In some uses, like aviation, marine, freight and petrochemicals, there are few, if any, cost-effective and scalable alternatives to oil.”
This may change at some point, as alternatives to everything fossil fuel-related are being sought constantly. Then again, it will take time. Until that time, Chevron’s shareholders have no great reason to worry, the report’s message runs.
https://ca.yahoo.com/finance/news/chevron-survive-under-climate-change-153000986.html
the amount of time required to turn over the current consuming capital stock and redirect investment to meet global energy demand depends on the asset’s service life
That’s amusing. In other words, it doesn’t matter if an asset is obsolete or even poisonous, we insist on being paid to depreciate it fully.
It hasn’t worked out that way for several very large US coal companies. Let’s hope that trend continues.
There are cost competitive alternatives for the majority of the uses for oil. If the real cost of oil is internalized, it’s probably 90%.
I’m curious: I’ve heard that China is using coal as a petrochemical feedstock. For example: https://cen.acs.org/articles/95/i12/Chinas-key-feedstock-above.html?type=paidArticleContent
Anybody heard much about that?
That’s amusing. In other words, it doesn’t matter if an asset is obsolete or even poisonous, we insist on being paid to depreciate it fully.
It gets better! From the article:
The International Energy Agency’s (IEA) worst-case scenario for Big Oil, Chevron notes, sees fossil fuels’ share in the global energy mix falling from 54 percent to 48 percent by 2040. That’s not really a major fall, which is why Chevron is so confident that its business will not be affected by the climate change fight.
Riiiiight! So Chevron is betting the farm on IEA forecasts?!
Meanwhile the Europeans, Shell Oil, BP and Total are betting on EVs and renewables having major impacts on the oil industry by 2040.
http://money.cnn.com/2017/10/12/investing/shell-oil-buys-electric-car-charging/index.html
European oil companies, including Shell and rivals like BP (BP) and Total (TOT), have been far quicker than their U.S. rivals to invest in renewables like solar, wind and now even electric car charging.
That makes sense because European investors and governments have been cracking down on oil’s most reliable customer: the internal combustion engine. Norway, France, Germany and the U.K. have all announced efforts to phase out vehicles powered solely by fossil fuels.
A long read ( not for those with thirty second attention spans) about the future of the solar power industry, with lots of commentary on the possible effects of various government policies on the industry.
http://foreignpolicy.com/2018/03/01/cant-stop-the-shining/
I’ll just pick this one point from the article which is bullshit and always raises my hackles!
For example, in Germany, over a quarter of an average household’s electricity bill now goes to subsidizing renewable energy, up from 5 percent a decade ago. Customers are unlikely to tolerate paying much more, and the German government has already slashed subsidies for new solar projects.
Bold mine
The fact of the matter is those supposedly high prices are quite affordable in the context of the average German’s cost of living expenses and their standard of living:
The cost of the Energiewende is largely borne by German consumers, who pay a surcharge of around €20 ($23.61) on their energy bills. German households pay more for their electricity than in any other European country except for Denmark, where power costs €0.308 per kilowatt hour to Germany’s €0.298.
Germans Just Love Paying Sky-High Prices for Green Energy
http://fortune.com/2017/08/08/germans-renewable-energy-energiewende-subsidies/
Germans are almost all in favor of expanding the use of renewable energy , according to a study conducted for the country’s Renewable Energies Agency (AEE).
That’s despite the fact that government subsidies for renewables mean that Germans pay more for their electricity than anyone else in Europe.
The AEE’s survey that 95 percent saw the expansion of renewables as important or extremely important. That’s up from 93% in a similar survey last year.
Hi Fred,
Great and highly relevant reply as usual.
When you talk, I quit whatever I’m doing to listen, the way people did in some old ad on tv about a stock brokerage. When the name was mentioned as in ” xxxxxx xxxxx says………” everybody went dead quiet at a party, in order to eaves drop.
I agree, you have to read damned near everything with a strong dose of salt and charcoal these days, so as to prevent being made a fool of, or poisoned.
My usual reply to a comment pointing out the high price of retail electricity in Germany is that the people of the country support the renewables industries whole heartedly for a variety of reasons, including in no particular order, the employment it provides at high wages, the export earnings it provides, and the contribution it makes to German economic and military security.
The German people understand depletion, and not having things available at any price, and that their high living standard is based on the import export model, import materials, and export finished high tech goods and services. Every kilowatt hour they generate fuel free is one they have without having to import oil and gas and even coal, from countries that are NOT necessarily their friends.
One thing you and I have in common is that we are big picture thinkers. You never say much about history, but you are so well informed in other areas that I have no doubt you know the broad outlines of recent history……. why the Russians and Germans will never be real friends….. well, not for another couple of generations at least. By then WWII will really be history, with the last of the people who knew people who fought it or at least survived it ( old grandparents who held them on their knees ) having died themselves.
Germany and German workers are right up there at the very top of the heap in understanding that if they are to preserve their very pleasant and prosperous way of life, they MUST remain at the forefront, technologically, and always have stuff to export, or else be prepared to live without imports, because in the END, imports MUST be paid for by exporting. Otherwise, Germany will become an economic colony of the people who supply the imports, and use the money they earn by exporting to Germany to buy up German real estate, and German companies. If Germany cannot remain a strong exporter, German money will be worthless on the global stage, in terms of paying for large quantities of imported materials of ANY sort.
What the Germans pay out in terms of high retail electricity prices, they get back, and more, in the form of high wage employment and tax collections. They live better than just about anybody else, excepting a few very lucky countries that have slightly higher living standards due to having small populations and very large resources.
BUT…… and this is IMPORTANT……. There’s still plenty of food for thought in this article.
Editors always have agendas, and so do writers. They will emphasize what pleases them, and ignore or paper over what does not.
I try to be as even handed as possible, and tell both sides of any story I bring up, unless somebody else is doing a good job of telling one side only. Then I take the other side.
You never say much about history, but you are so well informed in other areas that I have no doubt you know the broad outlines of recent history…….
I’m certainly no historian but have read quite widely and even read some history books here and there, with a grain of salt added for balance. At the very least I have read the accounts written by my great grandparents who were both land owners and a part of the political class in Hungary and I have the word of mouth accounts of my grandparents and my mother of their exile through Germany during WWII. I also have personal experience with the 1964 Military coup in Brazil and the dictatorship that followed…
Heck, I’ve even read the declaration of independence and personally visited places like Jefferson’s Monticello residence… 😉
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/special-counsel-wants-documents-trump-numerous-campaign-associates-n853386
Some homo sapiens have a bit of intelligence:
http://www.desdemonadespair.net/2018/03/state-ends-atlantic-salmon-farming-in.html
A dose of reality for the EV evangelists,
THE WORLD IS EMBRACING S.U.V.S. THAT’S BAD NEWS FOR THE CLIMATE.
“It’s the car of the future. It’s taking off in markets all over in the world. The electric vehicle? Hardly. It’s the S.U.V., the rugged, off-road gas-guzzler that America invented and the world increasingly loves to drive. Spurred by rising incomes and lower gas prices, drivers in China, Australia and other countries are ditching their smaller sedans for bigger rides at a rapid pace. For the first time, S.U.V.s and their lighter, more car-like cousins known as “crossovers” made up more than one in three cars sold globally last year, almost tripling their share from just a decade ago, according to new figures from the auto research firm JATO Dynamics.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/03/climate/suv-sales-global-climate.html
I have a hunch that will change in the near future!
BTW, I wish the good folk in the MSM would at the very least stop spreading myths about power, batteries and range anxiety.
S.U.V.s are also less likely to go electric soon. There are technological hurdles to powering a larger car with batteries, and the perception among many automakers remains that drivers of S.U.V.s value power and performance, and don’t want to be constrained by the range anxiety of battery-powered cars.
If that were really an issue we wouldn’t have trucking companies with big fleets looking at electric semi rigs.
There are a number of European countries that are in the process of banning ICE and especially diesel powered vehicles.
Post dieselgate VW has quite a few EVs in the pipeline as does every major European auto manufacturer.
And then there are macho EV vehicles such as this one. http://bollingermotors.com/
Diesels are for wusses! 😉
Jaguar just announced their compact SUV….
https://www.jaguarusa.com/all-models/i-pace/index.html
It’s pretty expensive (90k or so), but will compete against the Tesla model X.
Hyundai unveils the Kona Electric compact SUV with a range of up to 292 miles.
https://electrek.co/2018/02/27/hyundai-kona-electric-compact-suv/
Should be more affordable than the Tesla’s X or the Jaguar, especially the lower range option.
Tesla should start taking pre-orders on it’s model Y in the fall – that’s Tesla’s more affordable SUV.
Anyone betting on the lack of electric SUVs saving the ICE is kidding themselves.
For February, the Tesla model 3 was the best selling electrified car, beating out the Toyota Prius and Chevy Bolt in 2nd and 3rd place.
Tesla already dominates in the high end luxury car market over anything electric or ICE powered. Thats the entire high end of a pretty profitable market already lost to the ICE vendors. Tic toc , tic toc …. Every day without a ground breaking for a battery factory is another day head start for Tesla. Hard to believe the other car manufacturers are going to just sit back and let Tesla have the entire car market but … tic toc, tic toc…..
Keeping in mind the cost of a Tesla or nearly every other electric or hybrid car out there, there’s not much the traditional automakers will have to worry about over the next 20-25 years at least. In all likelihood that accounts for the remainder of my lifespan as well as probably most of the other men posting here.
BS, it wont take 25 years. The Telsa model 3, the Nissan Leaf and the Hyundai are all very competitive with ICE prices. That’s this year. Even if you want something under 20K that wont take 10 years.
But keeping in mind, the current prices for ICE based cars…
“In the first quarter of 2017, the average price on a new car ran $31,400 after incentives. That’s according to Thomas King, a vice president at J.D. Power and Associates…” The EV is knocking on the mainstream market this year and already dominates the high end luxury market.
Hi Charles,
You’re obviously not up to date on the prices of the more inexpensive electric models available now, although they aren’t get available in large numbers.
That’s changing fast. Within three or four years, almost all the major auto manufacturers will have a variety of electric cars in their showrooms.
An oil supply crisis is inevitable, it’s simply a question of WHEN, rather than IF……………. unless electric cars start selling fast enough to cut seriously into the amount of oil we use, collectively.
Oil doesn’t grow back like peanuts and potatoes, lol.
Every oil field eventually runs near enough to dry that getting more oil out of it costs more than it’s worth.
There are at least three very basic reasons just about every major manufacturer is spending megabucks on electric car research and development, and building or modifying existing manufacturing plants to build electric cars.
One, management is now convinced that electric cars are going to be the preferred choice of new car buyers within another decade or so, since the cost of building them is coming down fast, meaning that they will actually be CHEAPER to own and operate than similar ordinary cars within the easily foreseeable future.
Two, management understands that oil doesn’t grow back like potatoes, and that eventually, gasoline and diesel fuel are going to be very expensive indeed.
Three, the general public is gradually coming to understand that when we take into account the health care costs, the environmental costs, and the national security costs of oil addiction, and warming up to the idea of electrified transportation.
It’s still going to take a few years, but the world’s remaining endowment of affordable oil is shrinking at very roughly eighty to ninety million barrels a day, depending on what you consider to be oil.
We’re using more and more, while less and less is left to be discovered and produced.
they will actually be CHEAPER to own and operate than similar ordinary cars within the easily foreseeable future.
EVs are already as cheap or cheaper to own AND operate. EVs have a higher purchase price, but they’re much cheaper to operate (fuel and maintenance).
Take a look at Edmunds.com. Use the Total Cost of Operation option, and compare the Nissan Leaf to the cheapest Nissan ICEs: their 5 year TCO are both at the very low end of all cars, and about equal. And, of course, the Leaf has much better performance and features than the cheapest ICEs.
I’d love to see one of these rolling by with a couple of surfboards up top…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQut6ks3nSY
VW ID Buzz | Fully Charged
We never thought Californian police officers would close down a street in Santa Monica to allow Jonny Smith to test drive the extraordinary Volkswagen ID Buzz. But they did.
He also gets a look at the WW ID Crozz.
Jonny delivers a very comprehensive review of these extraordinary vehicles.
Official Volkswagen info:
http://www.volkswagen.co.uk/about-us/…
Yes, very cool. The VW CEO is all in for EV’s but the board of directors is pushing back on the capex costs. I don’t think it helps that some of those board members are also on the boards of oil companies – a problem Tesla doesn’t have.
But really, with diesel gate and the more recent scandal with testing diesel fumes on humans – VW is likely dead soon if they don’t go EV. It kind of seems doubly bad with the gassing coming from a company originally founded by the Nazis (just history – these weren’t nazis doing this testing, just ordinary executives in theUS). They have the story on the Netflix documentary series “Dirty Money”.
The new CEO is trying his best and they have lots of very cool concepts, like the E-Bugster….
Europe plagued by slow running clocks.
Every electricity powered clock in Europe is running 5 minutes behind the actual time. The root cause is the loss of the legendarily accurate 50 Hz frequency of the pan-European electricity network. Due to “supply shortage” in one single southeastern European country every man and woman in the old continent has to adjust their alarm clocks, oven clocks and so on.
Clocks running on electricity might depend on the quartz-technology or be directly dependent on the frequency of the net. The latter sort of clocks is impacted. The quartz clocks serve as reference now, just like smartphone clocks: they depend on corrections constantly provided over the internet.
https://www.entsoe.eu/news-events/announcements/announcements-archive/Pages/News/Frequency-deviations-in-Continental-Europe-including-impact-on-electric-clocks-steered-by-frequency.aspx
Clock?! What’s a clock? I don’t even wear a watch anymore and I haven’t set an alarm clock in years . If I want to know the time I check my smartphone or my notebook.
“The Second Coming”
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
the falcon cannot hear the falconer;
things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
the ceremony of innocence is drowned;
the best lack all conviction, while the worst
are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
when a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
a shape with lion body and the head of a man,
a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
that twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
and what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
-Yeats
“If the center holds, the climate and our eco-sphere are destroyed. How stupid that we are left with disintegration as our best remaining option.”
The so called Greatest Generation is for all practical purposes gone, in terms of making it to the polling place.
The so called Boomers are departing in increasing numbers on a daily basis.
We hear a hell of a lot about a supposed resurgence of religion, but compared to what used to be, it’s hardly worth mentioning. The old line churches are mostly empty on Sunday mornings, and the relatively few new ones that are full aren’t nearly as politically conservative as the older ones they have displaced.
I live in a community that’s about as religious as they come these days, with maybe the exception of a few places in the deep south, or maybe in Mormon country.
And I can say with complete conviction, based on actual experience, that while lip service is paid to the seven days of creation story, etc, young people even in backwoods Baptist churches these days generally believe in deep time and evolution, and make no bones about their beliefs…… so long as they’re out of hearing distance of their elders, lol.
The demographic and cultural trends are rock solid in favor of the Democrats.
All that’s necessary, in my humble opinion, for the D Party to mop the floor with the R’s this fall is that they remember who they are, rather than running run Republican Lite campaigns.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/millennials-rsquo-climate-views-could-sway-10-house-elections-this-november/
“The so called Greatest Generation”
What is your problem ? If it wasn’t for them, you would be writing in German right now. Do you just like to insult everyone or is it because FDR was a Democrat and actually won an American war ? Nearly half a million of them died in the war. They saved Europe from tyranny, turned their enemies into productive allies, won the cold war, put a man on the moon and turned America into a superpower. What have you and Trump done lately apple butter farmer ?
I think 30 some million Russia dead should be given a bit of the credit.
I noticed you don’t write in Russian George. We will see if that’s still true after 4 years of Trump. That “Greatest Generation” is looking better every day.
I also spoke of socalled Boomers, and had I mentioned Millenials or X ‘ers or any other so called generation, I would have done the same.
WWII was fought by the entire country, from ten year olds on the farm to eighty year old people who tended children so younger people could work.
Humans aren’t birds or insects. We reproduce year around. We don’t have our young
at any particular time, every twenty or so years. I try to avoid stereotypes.
Nuance matters.
We don’t really have any accepted stereotype name for the people who were young adults in the thirties, and so too old to put on the uniform in the forties, and the ones we use now to INACCURATELY categorize the SO CALLED younger generations contribute more to confusion than they do to understanding.
Four of my uncles joined up within a few weeks of Pearl Harbor. Only two made it back. My Dad missed joining up because he wasn’t old enough.
But he dropped out of school, as a matter of necessity, and he did a full grown man’s work.
He has never received the slightest recognition for his contribution to the war effort. Hundreds of thousands of people on active duty lived better, ate better, had better clothing, more money, better health care, more free time, etc. They also had an opportunity to participate later in various programs geared specifically to people who were uniformed.
You don’t have anything useful to say.
I doubt you have even the foggiest idea about how the federal government collects and spends so called trust fund monies.
You don’t have even a foggy idea what’s been promised, in relation to what’s going to be available to pay.
My grandparents made out like bandits because they were well into their working years when Social Security was founded, and because they paid in enough to collect the limit, and the limit on contributions was set very low in their day. All of them incidentally lived into their nineties. There’s something to be said for farm life and Bible thumping, although some of the regulars here would rather not admit it.
They had large families, and all of my aunts and uncles worked just about all their lives, and paid in the money my grandparents received.
But the size of the average family dropped by about HALF in the following generation in our case, and the money my older people paid in was spent years and years ago, and they are now collecting money that is BORROWED MONEY.
I’m collecting BORROWED MONEY.
By the time my nieces and nephews are old enough to collect……. well…… they have an average of less than two kids per couple. It’s often said that more young people believe in Santa Claus than in collecting Social Security.
Social Security is the biggest single specific Ponzi scheme in history, and anybody who knows shit from apple butter about history and politics knows this is true.
Nobody can say how long it will stand, but nobody with brains enough to wipe his own ass can possibly believe it can continue indefinitely in it’s current form.
But it’s rather obvious you don’t know shit from apple butter about anything worth mentioning.
I’m a hard core Darwinist myself, with a sound technical education, but I try to live the way you’re taught to live in that old KGB, and one really big reason I collect only modest SS check is that I didn’t have a job at all, except on weekends part time, for the last eight or nine years I could have worked otherwise.
Let’s see now, two people times about fifty thousand per year for ten years plus in nursing homes, I gues I have contributed a little something, and paid for the privilege of making that contribution, lol.
I will continue making this contribution as long as my old Daddy lives. It’s looking like he may break the century mark.
People with good reading comprehension skills will notice that I haven’t said anything indicating I disapprove of the social safety net we enjoy these days.
I just try to tell it like it is, as best I can, or at least like I BELIEVE it is.
Hey Trumpster,
Your Republican party just passed a tax cut for the rich of half a trillion dollars per year. The Social Security trust fund currently has a surplus. Your Republican mantra Koolaid talking points is a distraction from the truth. The rich and powerful are stealing from your poor Republican friends. But, their to dumb from watching Fox News to realize it. America’s debt problems are not Social Security.
“The Social Security Administration collects payroll taxes and uses the money collected to pay Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance benefits by way of trust funds. When the program runs a surplus, the excess funds increase the value of the Trust Fund. At the end of 2014, the Trust Fund contained (or alternatively, was owed) $2.79 trillion, up $25 billion from 2013.[4] The Trust Fund is required by law to be invested in non-marketable securities issued and guaranteed by the “full faith and credit” of the federal government.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_Trust_Fund
Hi HB,
So ……… you just proved you don’t have the foggiest fucking idea what’s going on.
None of the regulars here, you excepted, need any instruction in this matter, but for your sake, since I feel sorry for you, I’ll try to explain.
MOST of the obligations of the federal government are OFF THE BOOKS.
The Social Security funds aren’t in surplus. They no longer EXIST, except on paper, or computer screens. They’ve been SPENT, and are being spent, as fast as they are collected.
The federal government is running very deeply in the red, and has been, just about every day since I can remember.
Let me try to make it simple enough for you , Simpleton.
Suppose you give your money over to an accountant, and he supposedly puts in a trust fund for safe keeping for you.
Sometimes the rules allow the manager to INVEST the money so held, as in the stock market , or real estate. So there AREN’T any iou’s in this case. There ARE however shares of stock , and deeds to property.
And SOMETIMES the manager may loan out the money, if satisfactory collateral is provided. In this case, the loan documents are held in the trust account, and if the borrower doesn’t pay, the collateral is seized and sold to make the lender whole.
Now it’s AGAINST THE LAW for the trustee to loan the money TO HIMSELF, for perfectly obvious reasons……… well, reasons that are perfectly obvious to people with a few working neurons.
Now UNCLE SAM has in effect loaned the money to HIMSELF, and HE IS SO FAR IN THE RED that there’s a truly substantial risk that he will not be able to meet his obligations.
As a matter of fact, as things are going right now, if we keep on spending more on social services at the current rates of increase, and women don’t go back to having five or six kids each, or we don’t bring in a few tens of millions of immigrants, pronto, well……
Between Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and a few other smaller safety net programs……. there won’t be any money left for anything else unless we make some very drastic changes.
This link is to NPR, which few people think of as a right wing propaganda outfit.
https://www.npr.org/2011/08/06/139027615/a-national-debt-of-14-trillion-try-211-trillion
This one in from real clear.
https://www.realclearpolicy.com/blog/2012/12/01/economist_laurence_kotlikoff_us_222_trillion_in_debt_363.html
This man is a very highly respected professional in his field, and he tells it like it is, without making excuses for either party.
You can look up him up on Wikipedia.
“RealClearPolicy: Cox and Archer argue that the U.S.’s underlying debt is much higher than the officially stated debt of $16 trillion. They argue that if you add up the unfunded obligations the government has — to Social Security, Medicare, federal workers’ pensions, and so on — the real debt is about $87 trillion. Can that be right?
Kotlikoff: That’s wrong. It’s $222 trillion.
That’s what we economists call the fiscal gap. I don’t know what those guys are looking at, but we economists do it a certain way. We’re not politicians. We’re just doing it the way our theory says to do it. What you have to do is look at the present value of all the expenditures now through the end of time. All projected expenditures, including servicing the official debt. And you subtract all the projected taxes. The present value of the difference is $222 trillion.
So the true size of our fiscal problem is $222 trillion, not $87 trillion. That’s comprehensive and incorporates the official debt. The official debt in the hands of the public is $11 trillion, so the true problem is 20 times bigger than the official debt.”
ORealClearPolicy: Cox and Archer argue that the U.S.’s underlying debt is much higher than the officially stated debt of $16 trillion. They argue that if you add up the unfunded obligations the government has — to Social Security, Medicare, federal workers’ pensions, and so on — the real debt is about $87 trillion. Can that be right?
Kotlikoff: That’s wrong. It’s $222 trillion.
That’s what we economists call the fiscal gap. I don’t know what those guys are looking at, but we economists do it a certain way. We’re not politicians. We’re just doing it the way our theory says to do it. What you have to do is look at the present value of all the expenditures now through the end of time. All projected expenditures, including servicing the official debt. And you subtract all the projected taxes. The present value of the difference is $222 trillion.
So the true size of our fiscal problem is $222 trillion, not $87 trillion. That’s comprehensive and incorporates the official debt. The official debt in the hands of the public is $11 trillion, so the true problem is 20 times bigger than the official debt.”
Now considering all the troubles we have staring us in the face already, from the depletion of fossil fuels, to climate change to the exhaustion of our soil and water resources…….
People who are actually capable of thinking a little think maybe it’s time to worry a little.
How much electricity would it take to power all transport with electricity?
Most advocates of electric vehicles have never gone further than the simplistic view that all it takes is windmills and solar panels.
Euan looks at the costs and practical obstacles of this colossal undertaking.
http://euanmearns.com/how-much-more-electricity-do-we-need-to-go-to-100-electric-vehicles/
Our motorways are crammed with lorries and they would require even more power.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/mar/06/driverless-lorries-tested-on-uk-motorways
Euan explains what would happen when just 2 consecutive low wind days happen in winter, as occurred about 30 times in Germany this winter.
I can see the pro electric brigade putting their fingers in their ears and singing la la la.
Most advocates of electric vehicles have never gone further than the simplistic view that all it takes is windmills and solar panels.
That’s absolute bullshit! Plenty of researchers have looked at this issue in depth. You may not agree with their conclusions but to argue that their views are simplistic doesn’t hold water. Here’s one study that has been in the news recently. controversial though it may be.
http://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(17)30012-0
Meanwhile most Fossil Fuel Trolls and anti science climate change denialists like you and Euan don’t seem to grasp the deadly consequences of not moving off the current BAU path asap. You are the one’s with simplistic unfounded views. Of course as they say, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it!”
Fred Maggot
I said most, not all.
http://www.businessinsider.com/renewable-energy-storage-problem-2013-11?IR=T
I guess all these scientists are trolls also.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it!”
The above statement would apply if I worked for the fossil fuel industry but I do not.
You are obviously too stupid to know when to use an overly used quote and when it does not apply.
The fact remains many renewable advocates believed that if a country like Germany installed renewable energy at a level of 130% it’s peak consumption, it would only use about 20% coal and gas to fill in the gaps.
At 103Gw of intalled capacity and peak consumption being 70Gw
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-consumption-and-power-mix-charts
The amount of renewable delivered for consumption in Germany was around 30%, nearly 70% was delivered by Coal, Gas and Nuclear.
Most renewable advocates are beginning to realise exactly how difficult the transition will be on practical levels.
https://www.energy-charts.de/power.htm?source=conventional&year=2018&week=8
19,20,21of February are point in case where solar and wind produced only 15% of what industry, shops, hospitals and homes needed.
You will get it one day.
Maggot
LOL! Hey at least maggots are FDA approved and therefore useful in hospitals…
Not sure what Peters are good for? Pumpkin eaters?
Oh, and BTW, quoting an article about solar from 2013?! Seriously? Do you have any idea how out of date that is? The technology alone has advanced light years since then.
The article was written by far sighted people who could see what you still cannot.
The data of Germany electricity production is up to date.
If Germany had 200 Gw of installed nuclear it would not need to burn any coal or gas. Homes could be heated using heat pumps and there would be enough for every vehicle to be electric.
As it is 100Gw of wind and solar leaves Germany on many days producing 90% of demand from coal and gas.
You only think you are environmental, in fact people like you are environmental disasters.
So you want about 200 to 300 nuclear reactors across Germany, basically everyone would be within of few miles of several reactors if distributed across the nation?
Let’s take Peter’s premise worldwide. Right now the odds of a core meltdown are close to one per decade. To build enough nuclear reactors to take over coal and natural gas would mean more than one core meltdown per year on the planet. That does not include accidents at storage facilities, transportation accidents, or deliberate/accidental destruction of facilities due to war.
So we would have substituted relatively temporary toxic systems for a more permanent mutagenic toxic system that would within a century wipe or wreck most of the life off the planet if brought to large scale long term use.
Didn’t Chernobyl and Fukishima prove that containment is a just a word at nuclear facilities and not a reality?
Death, cancers, mutated young anyone? Milk anyone? Food?
As I have state before, much to the amusement of some, people are great at designing future traps. Nuclear power is such a trap, a deadly and long term trap.
Given the scientific evidence that there is no safe dose of radiation, this is an experiment that has already gone awry. Indeed, if this were a true scientific experiment, it would have been halted a long time ago.
The real question is whether we, as a human race, can afford in good conscience to risk annihilation with our continued reliance on nuclear technology. Can we continue to despoil our environment with long-lived radioactive materials that are scattered to the wind and embedded in our precious soil, randomly exposing large populations, and foisting health impacts on unsuspecting future generations who have no choice in this matter?
We must choose to halt this process. To do this we need to quickly abolish all nuclear weapons, and make a dramatic and rapid retreat from the use of nuclear power to generate electricity. Only then will we demonstrate that we recognize and appreciate the true meaning of Einstein’s prophetic words: “The splitting of the atom has changed everything save our mode of thinking. Thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.”
https://thebulletin.org/radiation-exposure-and-power-zero-0
It’s two minutes to midnight.
Let’s take Peter’s premise worldwide.
Yeah, what could possibly go wrong?
I suggest that all proponents of nuclear energy watch this documentary film about the Finish nuclear waste repository.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HArxuzs1AA
Onkalo, Into Eternity
“This place is a message…and part of a system of messages…pay attention to it!
Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.
This place is not a place of honor…no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here…nothing valued is here.
What is here is dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.
The danger is in a particular location…it increases toward a center…the center of danger is here…of a particular size and shape, and below us.
The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.
The danger is to the body, and it can kill.
The form of the danger is an emanation of energy.
The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically.
This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.
Stay Away for 100,000 years!
Not to mention that there is not enough Uranium to fuel them all.
NAOM
How much installed wind and solar will Germany need to reduce coal consumption to zero.
If you give us your calculations at least we can all see that you have given the matter some serious and adult consideration.
Good point NAOM. The nuclear nightmare has just enough fuel to wreck things but not run things.
Nuclear power is not only a biological death trap but an energy dead end. It is not scalable. The viable uranium available would last 5 years if scaled to current global power requirements.
Even at current use there is less than 80 years of viable supply.
Also, follow the money, the economics stink compared to renewables with storage. The huge subsidies continue for the nuclear industry, long after it became mature. The waste management problem has not even been addressed or the cost estimated yet.
The big promise of energy that would be “too cheap to meter” never came. In fact it has gone just the opposite direction.
Peter,
One needs to look at a wider area than a single nation. Tie all of Europe together with an HVDC grid and the problem is much easier to solve. Some small amount of natural gas can back up the system when wind and solar output are low, also demand pricing can solve a lot of problems.
When supply is low price goes up and demand decreases, there are lots of activities which can be put off until prices are lower.
Tie Europe with North Africa (over Gilbratar) and the problem is even easier to solve. Transmission losses are very low over an HVDC grid.
Dennis, there is no problem. This fellow has been producing a lot of excess energy from his home for years now, running a hydrogen car and other mechanicals, never runs out of energy or storage.
If some guy can figure it out with older tech equipment than we have now, there is no problem, just lack of motivation and rotten people getting in the way for their own agendas.
http://www.hydrogenhouseproject.org/index.html
I just finished composing a response to Peter upthread and want to highlight a little gem I found while composing it:
Nuclear capacity could more than double by 2050, says IAEA
In its high case projection, global nuclear generating capacity increases from 392 GWe at the end of 2016 to 554 GWe by 2030, 717 GWe by 2040 and 874 GWe by 2050. Nuclear’s share of global electricity generation would increase from the current level of about 11% to 13.7% by 2050. This projection – which assumes that current rates of economic and electricity demand growth, particularly in Asia, will continue – reflects that 30-35 new reactors are expected to be grid connected annually starting around 2025
These nuclear folks accuse solar protagonists of living in La La land? How long is it taking to build one nuclear plant, Hinkley Point C in the UK for example? How much is all this nuclear going to cost?
Every couple of years I find an opportunity, like now, to relate my favorite story about the relationship between nuclear power and human nature:
I worken in the ’70s for General Atomic (now “General Atomics) starting up a reactor called Ft. St. Vrain in Colorado. The company had spent $millions training local residents as operators. As the plant was being handed off some clean up and final testing was being done. Two supposedly unrelated, and very minor, incidents occurred. First some idiot painted the exhaust manifold on an emergency generator. Next a clumsy EE short circuited a wire in a control rod system.
The reactor scrammed.
The generator started.
Smoke filled the control room from the painted manifold, which was placed near the control room air intake.
The local operators ran out of the building, jumped in their cars and drove off.
There are some things you just can’t trust humans with.
They could triple glaze 20,000,000 homes for what they are spending on a nuclear plant that may never go into production and have to be abandoned. All that money going on a design that is causing so much trouble to the 2 previous atempts to build it when proven designs are available at a fraction of the cost.
NAOM
Well, if nothing else, I’ll bet I have spent more time in Germany talking to average German citizens than you have.
LOL! As far as me being ‘Environmental’, is that even a thing that someone can aspire to?!
I know of a tramp who stayed in libraries all day to keep warm. He could not read however.
Peter. Careful using Euan as your source for data/ analysis.
He is extremely biased on these issues.
Hard to find someone who goes further out of their way to cherry pick data to fit their predetermined message.
Hickory, can you kindly show some support for your claims regarding Euan’s cherrypicks and biases? Thanks.
Caelan–
This makes all uncomfortable.
The idea that it can’t continue is disturbing.
I’m open———
Euan’s figures don’t look right. I can’t be bothered do critique them country by country but, I have done some numbers for the US. Euan has increased demand based on 2015 figures at 29% as opposed to my rough 2014 figures of less than 20%. I did not consider that most of the electricity used by US refineries would not have been required and refineries use a lot of electricity.
Euan also appears not to have taken into consideration the cost trajectories of EVs, batteries and renewable energy. That is a fatal omission when you are looking at a transition that is going to take more than ten years to happen. When you see a study that does, get back to me.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2018/03/06/your-cheat-sheet-for-how-to-sound-smart-about-tuesdays-texas-primaries/?utm_term=.66520ba92bcb
Things are looking pretty good in Texas for the D’s in the upcoming mid terms. I’m thinking they will pick up as impressive number of seats, local, state and federal level.
So far the Repugs have taken a beating from the Dims—-
We shall see how this progresses.
Huge consequences for the coming election in the Fall.
If the Repugs can hold on, it will be pretty dire for the planet, but may bring a quicker facing of reality by any surviving homo sapiens.
Fun little article at Politico about the benefits and challenges of transitioning to green power and transport at the personal level.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/03/05/my-life-in-the-elusive-green-economy-217213
It likely doesn’t contain any new insights to the regular readers of this blog, but the author explains some important concepts in a way that the average non-technical reader will understand without difficulty.
It’s worth the read just for the entertainment value, as the author is quite adept at a good turn of phrase.
Natures way of telling you:
https://s.w-x.co/wu/high-tide-scituate-3.4.18-swenson-835px.jpg
Nuclear war (economic variety) in New Jersey. Mimicking the attitude of Kim Jong-um ( I will cooperate if you guaranty my safety), the nuclear industry of NJ is threatening the power grid unless it gets 300-350 million per year in subsidies “to get through tough economic times”. Cheap natural gas is not only killing coal it’s hurting nuclear power, or at least hurting the company bottom line.
Owners of two New Jersey nuclear plants say they won’t invest in any more capital improvements at the facilities unless they are guaranteed state subsidies to keep them operating during hard financial times.
Public Service Enterprise Group filed notice with the Securities and Exchange Commission Friday that it, along with Exelon, the co-owner of the Salem 1 and 2 reactors in Lower Alloways Creek, had agreed o take the action.
“Exelon Generation and PSEG Nuclear agreed that the funding of these projects may be restored when and if legislation is enacted in New Jersey that sufficiently values the attributes of nuclear generation and Salem benefits from such legislation,” the SEC filing said.
While the utility companies say the state subsidies are critical, groups opposed to the plan say the announcement is a move to “bully’ the Legislature to approve the bill to benefit them.
Cheaper natural gas has hurt the nuclear power industry with low gas prices making nuclear generation not as cost-efficient as it once was.”
http://www.nj.com/lottery/index.ssf/2018/03/a_lottery_player_in_nj_just_won_1k_a_week_for_life.html
So do we keep subsidizing the buggy whip factories or do we get our act together and move on?
I can’t muster much enthusiasm for new nuclear – wind/solar seem a lot cheaper and safer.
But…does it make sense to shut down existing nukes? They are, after all, low carbon. I think they have a point that if that value was recognized that they’d be more competitive.
“They are, after all, low carbon. I think they have a point that if that value was recognized that they’d be more competitive”
With that logic so would wind and solar, thus making the decision a no brainer, which it really is anyway. As you said, safer.
Every day those things run the waste builds up with no place to go. Every day they run the chances of a major problem occurring and loss of containment exist in the real world.
The Salem reactors were commissioned in 1977 and 1981, making them at end of rated life anyway and needing major replacements if they want to continue and get license extensions. Also, they dump their hot cooling water directly into the Delaware Bay with no cooling towers, which is a bit outdated.
The New York Times has reported that, in the 1990s, the Salem reactors were shut down for two years because of maintenance problems.[7] Consultants found several difficulties, including a leaky generator, unreliable controls on a reactor, and workers who feared that reporting problems would lead to retaliation. In 2004, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission took on additional oversight of the Salem plants and increased the monitoring of them.[7] Wikipedia
In general, the original design limits of US nuclear reactors are being extended for a variety of reasons. More knowledge of how materials are damaged by neutrons and corrosion in the reactor environment has come to light. Ways to replace many components have been devised. Still, the attempt to push nuclear power plants to twice their original rating has to be done carefully, considering the potential disaster that can occur.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nuclear-power-plant-aging-reactor-replacement-/
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/03/california-climate-change-fires-flood-landslide
CURRENT DEFORESTATION PACE WILL INTENSIFY GLOBAL WARMING, STUDY ALERTS
“If we go on destroying forests at the current pace — some 7,000 km² per year in the case of Amazonia — in three to four decades, we’ll have a massive accumulated loss. This will intensify global warming regardless of all efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”
“The urgent need to keep the world’s forests standing is even clearer in light of this study. It’s urgent not only to stop their destruction but also to develop large-scale reforestation policies, especially for tropical regions. Otherwise, the effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels won’t make much difference.”
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/180306141559.htm
Forget the gas, add up the species lost every day as the rainforests are destroyed. Planting new forests does not make a ecosystem, just a bunch of trees in nice rows. We have done a great job of depopulating the planet of wild species and our newest gig global warming is just one more weapon in the human war against nature.
“Planting new forests does not make a ecosystem…” Yes, planting a mono species, such as lodge pole pine, is hardly creating or maintaining an ecosystem. Frankly, it sickens me.
Truthfully, reforestation is the most effective carbon sequester technique we can possibly practice. Based on your past posting history, we see you enjoy jet setting between Canada and Norway. Have you ever planted a forest of trees to offset your own lifetime personal contribution to global warming? If not why not?
Would you like to contribute to this project?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vw8qVMckt2E
World’s Largest Tropical Reforestation Project to Take Place in the Amazon Rainforest
Conservation International
Published on Sep 16, 2017
At Rock in Rio, a global music festival held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Conservação Internacional CI-Brasil announced it is taking part in a massive reforestation effort in the Brazilian region of the Amazon.
This audacious project is the result of a partnership between CI, the Brazilian Ministry of Environment, the Global Environment Facility (GEF), the World Bank, the Brazilian Biodiversity Fund (Funbio) and Rock in Rio’s environmental arm, “Amazonia Live.” #RockinRio2017 #AmazoniaLive https://blog.conservation.org/2017/09…
As long as you plant the right trees. You can’t replant biodiversity and extinct species though.
NAOM
Johnny92 — “Based on your past posting history, we see you enjoy jet setting between Canada and Norway.” Valid point. Problem is, my family is roughly divided between Canada, Norway and Italy. For me my family trumps other considerations.
I think you’ve summarised the insuperable problem in all this – your genes, through their constructed phenotype, are always going to make sure they, and therefore your family members (existing or yet to be) are always put before any other considerations. Any other behaviour would have seen the genes responsible lost from the gene pool in a few generations (stand by for some comments from group selection proponents).
Let’s not forget the taiga biome, the largest land biome on earth. In many areas forests and animals are and have been in danger from humans. Huge areas are clear cut, many species have been eliminated. Luckily there are regions that have been left alone, but overall the taiga is not what it used to be.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5JeH5Gy_jBQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avDmKGQPoFs
Status and Trends of Arctic Biodiversity
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydGhSUKSGiI
WTF is going on?
OPIOID CRISIS: OVERDOSE RATES JUMP 30% IN ONE YEAR
The US Midwest was worst hit with overdoses surging by 70%, according to the data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The US opioid crisis claimed 63,600 lives in 2016, the National Center for Health Statistics has previously said.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-43305340
Till they perish and they suffer—some, ’tis whisper’d—down in hell
Suffer endless anguish, others in Elysian valleys dwell,
Resting weary limbs at last on beds of asphodel.
Surely, surely, slumber is more sweet than toil, the shore
Than labour in the deep mid-ocean, wind and wave and oar;
O, rest ye, brother mariners, we will not wander more.
From The Lotos-eaters By Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Poor diet is a factor in one in five deaths, global disease study reveals
Diet is the second highest risk factor for early death after smoking. Other high risks are high blood glucose which can lead to diabetes, high blood pressure, high body mass index (BMI) which is a measure of obesity, and high total cholesterol. All of these can be related to eating the wrong foods, although there are also other causes.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/sep/14/poor-diet-is-a-factor-in-one-in-five-deaths-global-disease-study-reveals
These maps show that counties where opioid deaths and prescription rates are highest are also places where Trump won big in 2016
http://www.businessinsider.com/maps-counties-where-opioid-deaths-are-high-trump-2016-crisis-2017-10
I found an interesting county map of opioid prescriptions last July. http://peakoilbarrel.com/open-thread-non-petroleum-july-9-2017/#comment-608655
People get hooked on painkillers and it escalates. It’s real clear the deadliest gateway drug is a prescription. Things are a little better in Colorado since people have other, less deadly, options.
Of course, Jeff Sessions wants to make things worse and go after pot but they even blocked prosecution of some crazy sales (massive quantities to one small drug store) of prescription drugs.
It can’t possibly be that drug companies are pressing to ban Kratom and legal Mary because they would hurt their bottom line …surely not.
NAOM
Too soon?
New record low annual maximum in Arctic sea ice
https://ads.nipr.ac.jp/vishop.ver1/data/graph/plot_extent_n_v2.csv
PIOMAS volume is in clear second place behind last year and might be heading for and early maximum after low growth in February.
http://neven1.typepad.com/blog/2018/03/piomas-march-2018.html
This one’s about relatively new biz of renting cars for as little as a day at a time, and allowing the customer to pick and choose different models.
It may eventually result in a lot fewer new cars being sold.
https://www.fastcompany.com/40538266/your-next-car-might-be-a-subscription
It’s not a bad idea, but it looks…not very competitive. It looks a lot more expensive, and less flexible and convenient, than “car-sharing” programs like Zipcar.com.
“So the true size of our fiscal problem is $222 trillion”
Hey Dumb Mother Farmer, I’ve got a bridge to sell you. And by the way, why do you change your screen name more often than your whitey tighties ?
“Starving the beast” is a political strategy employed by American conservatives to limit government spending by cutting taxes, in order to deprive the federal government of revenue in a deliberate effort to force it to reduce spending.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast
Despite the fervent wishes of some conservatives and the great fears of some liberals, the ‘starve-the-beast’ theory of government is flawed: Tax cuts don’t lead to spending reductions. Case in point: President Trump and the GOP-controlled Congress are set to hike spending in grand fashion.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/beltway/2018/02/06/starving-the-beast-the-tax-cuts-and-jobs-act-seems-to-be-feeding-it/#44e603c23d64
For someone who says he doesn’t watch TV. You sure know all the Fox News Republican propaganda apple butter.
With the US moving ever onward toward an elitist and undemocratic society, will the horrors and misdeeds of the UK national park systems be the shades of things to come in US parks and federal lands? It seems to be starting to happen now under the current regime.
http://www.monbiot.com/2018/03/03/parklife/
Slowly we turned, step by step, the bright future gone, a mockery of a best forgotten past to replace it. The present an exceedingly undesirable place to be, yet here we were.
Netflix is worth more than GE or Ford, and it’s creeping up on Disney
By Rani Molla Mar 6, 2018, 12:49pm EST
https://www.recode.net/2018/3/6/17086244/netflix-worth-more-market-cap-chart-2017-ge-general-electric-ford-disney
Netflix is still riding high off of its “beautiful” fourth-quarter earnings report in January. The company added two million more streaming subscribers than expected, and Wall Street responded. Its stock is up 42 percent since then and is now worth about $140 billion.
Netflix has now overtaken McDonald’s and General Electric in market value. It’s edging up on IBM. More importantly, it’s nearing the value of some of its toughest competitors, like Disney and Comcast. Netflix surpassed Time Warner in 2017 and it’s long been worth more than CBS or Viacom.
It’s clearly the age of the couch potato, now pass the chips
Global average temperature was the 3rd warmest on record for February 2018 (after 2016 and 2017) – CopernicusECMWF analysis (ERA-I). This is consistent with the long-term trend.
http://climate.copernicus.eu/resources/data-analysis/average-surface-air-temperature-analysis/monthly-maps/surface-air-6
A large chunk of the polar jet stream has gone missing. The weather models seem to be doing remarkably well given the extreme changes that are happening around the Arctic.
It’s mess now, breaking, combining, breaking out again. Polar view at 250 hPa.
That’s hardly surprising or notable considering how negative (-) the AO has become following the recent SSW event.
You are as dumb as shit.
LOL! That’s an understatement!
Would you mind explaining what’s wrong with my scientific reasoning then?
Weather is not climate. The USA is not the world. Correlation is not causation. Coincidence is not correlation. Cherry picking is not correlating. A blue contour on a daily weather map does not indicate a new ice age. People who are knowledgeable in their field are, as a minimum, able to tell what units a parameter is measured in. Quoting the acronyms of observed quasi-cyclic weather phenomena does not mean you know anything fundamental about them. The climate is warming and it is over 100% due to human activity emitting greenhouse gases. Sun spot activity is not a significant short-term driver of climate. You are a willful ignoramus.
You don’t have any!
What looks like a mess to us is probably merely a transistion phase to another “organized” system. I don’t think nature has a problem with large numbers of interdependent variables, we do. The changes in atmospheric energy flow systems from one “state” to another may actually be a good model of how the earth climate moves from one “state” to another. Actually, more accurately, from one bounded range to another bounded range. They of course operate on two very different time scales.
Diver’s Video Shows ‘Horrifying’ Pollution Near Bali
A diver in Indonesia came across another stark reminder of all the plastic pollution swirling in the oceans.
British diver Rich Horner was exploring a site known as Manta Point near the island of Nusa Penida, the largest of three islands off the southeastern coast of Bali, when he spotted a soup of jellyfish, foliage and garbage. While Bali has become a hot spot for tourists over the years, it’s also infamous for the trash that collects on the island’s shores and waters. Video
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/diver-nusa-penida-plastic-pollution-manta-point_us_5a9f6218e4b002df2c5ec6b5
Yair . . .
We need to get back to glass and paper packaging, the time is coming when there will be more plastic in the worlds oceans than fish . . . plastic shopping bags are on the way out here which is a start.
We need to stop using the ocean as a garbage can.
No plastic, glass or paper! We need to get into 3D printed biopolymers like chitin. This is the 21st century, not the 19th!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wHT-FsCJjM
The Biggest Revolution in 3D Printing is Yet to Come
It would take a political miracle to make it happen, but all we would need to guarantee the collection and recycling or at least proper landfill disposal of such trash is a mandatory deposit on ALL of it, with the manufacturers and distributors of it being legally required to BUY IT BACK.
People are already paying a buck and a half up for soft drinks at convenience stores. A dime more by the bottler to get his plastic bottle back would result in somebody in need of money picking up every one he could find.
I’m willing to vote for no excuse laws imposing fines large enough to get people’s attention when it comes to throwing out trash.
Let’s say fifty bucks first offense, a hundred second offense, loss of registration and license to drive third offense. Registered owner held responsible if cameras don’t adequately indentify the particular person who tosses the trash.
We already have such cameras at intersections. A few placed here and there where they will do the most good would bring in more revenue than they cost to maintain.
FEMA HAS RADICALLY UNDERESTIMATED HOW VULNERABLE AMERICANS ARE TO FLOODING
“New research claims that official estimates lowballed the risk by, uh, about a factor of three… Combining various datasets on weather, water, population, and building density from the US Geological Survey, the US Army Corps of Engineers, the EPA, and elsewhere, they derived a layered picture of US flood risk that is “significantly higher [in] quality and spatial coverage than those that have previously informed exposure and risk estimations.”
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/3/2/17070222/us-flood-risk
If one thinks that the federal government is not highly concerned about disaster relief and management now, the future will be shocking. As disasters increase in size, frequency and become more widespread, the stress on the financial, material and manpower will exceed the capabilities of even the most beneficent of governments. Long before that insurance companies will reduce or fold their involvement and governments will draw back from assistance as greater demands are put upon them.
How much stress can a system take before it starts to retreat?
We have answers to most of the medical situations we face now, but we cannot control high rates of natural disasters. Eventually we will just abandon areas and people or at least move them out permanently, if there is anywhere to go.
It’s not just floods. The power system in the US is antiquated with large regions supplied by overhead wires. A warming in the winter, some winter rains then a storm with high winds takes down lots of trees, reducing the grid in large areas to near zero.
It might be a very good thing that grid parity of rooftop solar is being reached across the world where the cost of transmission is equal to or greater than the cost of rooftop solar. Storms appear to be having higher winds more often and occurring in combinations not generally seen in given seasons. Heavy precipitation rates are now much more common, putting larger areas at risk of flooding and landslides as well as erosion.
If you want to take out the grid nothings better than an ice storm and freezing rain, like Quebec had near the turn of this century, over one of the main US population centres. Might be possible the way the jet stream is disintegrating every winter now.
Tony Seba thinks the peak power generators will be the first to go on the grid as large scale battery storage provides a less expensive alternative and batteries in general smooth out the grid to save money.
Watch at 20 minutes::
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kxryv2XrnqM&t=2453s
The best single article with plenty of hard data and industry projections I have seen in the last few weeks about the future of the battery industry in general, and electric cars in particular:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-08/the-battery-will-kill-fossil-fuels-it-s-only-a-matter-of-time
Says it all:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/14/us/politics/pennsylvania-congressional-race-conor-lamb-trump.html
The source is a Tesla cheerleader type, but never the less…. some good solid info, and well worth the read.
PV now going in at the mega factory.
https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-gigafactory-1-solar-rooftop-array/
From CNN today:
“Trump state Democrats want no part of Clinton’s diss on Trump voters
Zach Wolf
Source: CNN
Conor Lamb reacts to Trump’s dig 01:29
Washington (CNN)Hillary Clinton’s frustrated critique of her rejection by a portion of the American electorate has drawn criticism from fellow Democrats who need to win those parts of the country to keep their jobs in November.
And a note to the rest of the party: It’s the same type of area where Conor Lamb declared victory Wednesday morning that Democrats will need to win back (or win anew) if they ever want a House or Senate majority again.”
Some people, not necessarily Trump fans, or even conservatives at all, have been known to refer to CNN as the Clinton News Network.
It takes a while for people to admit their mistakes. In this case, enough time has elapsed for media types to pretend they never made the mistake of supporting the ONE candidate that left the R party salivating at the prospect of running against, knowing that close to half the country would never vote for her no matter WHAT.
This bears repeating.
“And a note to the rest of the party: It’s the same type of area where Conor Lamb declared victory Wednesday morning that Democrats will need to win back (or win anew) if they ever want a House or Senate majority again.”
She didn’t have sense enough as a candidate to keep her contempt for working people to herself, and she doesn’t have sense enough NOW to shut the fuck up.
But as religious people say, God works in mysterious ways, and if she had won, the country would still have been in the hands of the Republicans, because they own two thirds of the government, locally, state by state, and nationally.
Trump in one senses may actually be a blessing in disguise.
He’s turning middle of the roaders and even a lot of very hard core religious people against the R’s, almost as if that’s his PLAN. It isn’t of course, but it’s still the RESULT of his actions and words, and the result may well be that the D party is able to regain control of DC in the mid terms. This is rather unlikely to have happened with any D president in office. The president’s party generally does not do very well in the mid terms.
And while most of us love to point out the damage he has done the country, most of it really isn’t all that bad, because it’s NOT NECESSARILY PERMANENT.
Good people can be put back in charge of environmental regulatory offices, in charge of law enforcement offices, research organizations, and so forth, and the budget cuts can be restored. Rescinded regulations can be put into effect again.
Dumb old farmer KGB agent talks like a coach.
Hey guys, if you want the D’s back in power, don’t make one of the critical mistakes HRC made, don’t go around talking trash about people whose votes you NEED.
Every body except HB , of course. He has said here he doesn’t need the votes of southerners in particular, and by extension, the votes of Christians, working people, white people and white men in particular.
Given that he’s an investor class voter, per his own words, well, I guess he must really like the R tax package, lol, even though he pretends to be a Democrat.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/03/clinton/555563/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=politics-daily-newsletter&utm_content=20180314&silverid=NDQ1NDc0NTQ5NzQ2S0
Food for thought, for those with sufficient attention span and leisure to read it.
Worthy of the time to read them:
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/03/ancient-dna-history/554798/
Insight into the influence of politics on science to be found in this one.
https://forward.com/opinion/396570/trump-fired-tillerson-to-protect-jared-kushner/?attribution=next-article
Did Trump fire Tillerson primarily because of family money issues?
This sort of thing is nearly impossible to prove in court, but in the court of public opinion, just about anybody who is closely following the story will find it easy to believe. VERY easy.
Calling FRED,
This one’s especially for you.
Please elaborate.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610442/berkeley-ca-is-considering-an-ico-unlike-any-other/
I can’t get my head around the fact that a very large number of people seem to believe that crypto currencies are safe.It’s not the technology itself that bothers me, although I don’t pretend to actually understand it, except in principle.
WHAT I don’t understand is why you can be sure somebody will always be willing to accept your crypto money, other than FAITH.
People accept fiat currencies based on faith in the government that issues such currencies.
JUST WHO , in the END, has knowledge of all the workings of a crypto money system?
HOW do you know they aren’t corrupt, or at least, potentially corrupt?
I can see supporting anything that reduces the power of giant banks. Never trust a giant bank, it’s an alien artificial immortal life form without any conscience or values of any sort.