Comments not related to oil or gas go in this thread please.
266 thoughts to “Open Thread Non-Petroleum, March 14, 2019”
I would love to hear anyone’s comment on the Ted Talk video linked below. That is only if you are willing to take seventeen minutes and thirty-three seconds out of your life to watch and listen to it.
Shellenberger is a nuke lobbyist. Expect him to carefully select his “facts” to be in favour of nuke plants and ignoring anything that would be in favour of renewables.
I’ve already wasted enough of my time on his writings, so I will not waste time hearing him speak the crap I’ve most probably already heard.
Hey butthead, you are attacking the man, not his message. I want arguments against his message, not him personally.
If a man is too goddamn lazy to listen to a man’s argument, then he is a hypocrite when he comments on it.
I am not criticizing or praising his message. I want to hear valid arguments against his message, not ad hominem attacks.
Also, I have googled this man and nowhere does it even suggest that he is a lobbyist. He is a Democrat environmentalist who once ran for Governor of California.
Michael Shellenberger is an American author, environmental policy writer, cofounder of Breakthrough Institute and founder of Environmental Progress. He was named a Time magazine Heroes of the Environment (2008), winner of the 2008 Green Book Award, co-editor of Love Your Monsters (2011) and co-author of Break Through (Houghton Mifflin 2007) and The Death of Environmentalism (2004). He and his co-author Ted Nordhaus have been described as “ecological modernists” and “eco-pragmatists.” In 2015, Shellenberger joined with 18 other self-described ecomodernists to coauthor An Ecomodernist Manifesto. On November 30, 2017, he announced during a New York Times conference that he would run for Governor of California in 2018.
I agree Gerry, the man is about as biased as they get against solar and wind with lots of cherry picked arguments that never even touch on the extreme downsides of nuclear power.
He starts with a claim that 6,000 birds are killed every year by catching fire over Ivanpah. First, as far as I know this has never been filmed. Second, almost no solar is concentrating solar. He’s really stuck on Ivanpah and comes back to it over and over, but that is not the future of solar.
His arguments about taking up too much land are just garbage. See my recent comment on ethanol vs solar to see why. His implication that you have to build solar on undisturbed desert land is a lie, almost all plants are built on previously used land and all could be. It makes sense to build where the power lines are anyway.
His claim that RWE was going to cut down Hambacher Forest “in an attempt to expand solar and wind” is a lie.
He simply dismisses batteries as a solution.
His argument about the costs of solar in Germany are irrelevant, because panel prices have fallen 98% since the big boom.
The whole “nuclear is cheaper” argument ignores the fact that nuclear is almost unbuildable, and that the prices for both solar and wind are collapsing. For example, solar panel prices fell by about 35% in 2018 alone. The fact is that nuclear is almost dead in the West, because nobody can get a grip on the construction costs.
The safety issue ignores the downside risk of nuclear. For example, should Singapore build a nuclear plant? Well, in the unlikely case of a meltdown, the entire country might have to be evacuated. Where would they go? Also, the threat to life stemming from nuclear power will last for tens of thousands of years after the plants have stopped producing power, so looking back over the last 40 isn’t significant.
He also pretends that no construction workers or miners were ever killed in activities associated with nuclear, which seems unlikely. Studies like these are often dubious.
The energy density arguments are meaningless. It made sense in the 50s when arguing about coal, but it simply doesn’t matter. He ignores the water and waste heat issues giant thermal plants bring with them. As I recently posted, traditional thermal is dying. Sadly for them, the nuclear industry is stuck with it.
“There is no plan to deal with solar panels at the end of their 20 year life” is two lies. They will be recycled, and they will last more than 20 years.
His claim that renewables are a plot on the part of fossil fuel companies to sell more fossil fuels is a lie.
His anecdotes about nuclear getting more popular are sad little delusions. He doesn’t have any idea about the way forward. He doesn’t even mention the environmentalist idea of reducing unnecessary consumption, because that would reduce demand for nuclear power. He just pretends to give a shit about the environment to shill for the nuclear energy.
He attacks renewables instead of showing how nuclear is a solution because nuclear isn’t a solution. If it were, the talk would be called “Why nuclear can save the planet.”
He’s just tedious and mendacious.
Following is a 47 minute video but you can watch it on high speed.
It underscores why nuclear can’t compete on economic terms with wind and solar.
CSP had a world’s total installed capacity of 4,815 MW in 2016, up from 354 MW in 2005. As of 2017, Spain accounted for almost half of the world’s capacity, at 2,300 MW, making this country the world leader in CSP. The United States follows with 1,740 MW. Interest is also notable in North Africa and the Middle East, as well as India and China. The global market has been dominated by parabolic-trough plants, which accounted for 90% of CSP plants at one point.[7] The largest CSP projects in the world are the Ivanpah Solar Power Facility (392 MW) in the United States (which uses solar power tower technology) and the Mojave Solar Project (354 MW) in the United States (which uses parabolic troughs).
The global market has been dominated by parabolic-trough plants, which accounted for 90% of CSP plants at one point.
Right! And those CSP plants do not fry birds in flight! So implying that CSP plants, let alone most PV plants, are a major cause of bird deaths by frying is disingenous to say the least! It is a calculated appeal to emotion! It is blatant psychological manipulation. Especially when compared to the one billion birds that die every year when they fly into human-made objects such as buildings with reflective windows. BTW most of those towers of glass require massive amounts of energy to heat and cool. If one truly cares about birds then they should be up in arms about those buildings.
Right, total install capacity is 5 GW. Meanwhile about 104 GW of PV was installed in 2018, and strong growth is expected in 2019.
I don’t claim PV will save the world. But it will crush the existing energy business. That includes a significant percentage of agriculture, which is being used for ethanol palm oil etc.
Shellenberg clickbait headline is just a strawman. Boiling vast amounts of water to generate electricity is on its way out. Gas is switching to much lower footprint combined cycle, which is twice as efficient, but nuclear and (probably) coal can’t escape traditional thermal. Expect to see many fewer cooling towers when you’re 90.
With demand flat and efficiency going through the roof, it’s no wonder the mining business is feeling the heat.
But even those improvements won’t stop renewables. You can’t sell fuel when the guy down the street is harvesting ambient energy for free.
He simply dismisses batteries as a solution.
Well, we are still lithium ion dependent.
The Japanese first commercialized them in the early 1990’s.
It has been a while—–
I have seen that video. It was like being fed a sugar coated turd.
400 nuclear plants currently, going to 15,000 to provide world energy. Might take a few hundred years.
Wouldn’t matter anyway, not enough fuel for more than a few decades, we would never reach 15,000 number. Then what? All energy to be used for deomssioning, cleanup and storage?
Need a major nuclear accident every day?
Want to decommission one per day and build a new one every day(takes 10 years or more just to build one).
Want to use lots of cooling water we don’t have and 120,000 square miles of land just for the facilities?
No mention of the horrors involved with uranium mining.
Read this for a deeper view into the nuclear power scenario. https://phys.org/news/2011-05-nuclear-power-world-energy.html
Nuclear energy is non-scalable, expensive (rising costs) and extremely dangerous since a high tech civilization with plenty of excess energy has not figuted out what to do with it. What would
We have discussed this subject thoroughly in the past at this site.
Yes, yes, yes, I know nuclear energy is bad. It’s horriable. No argument from me on that point. And yes we have discussed this many times in the past. But what we have not discussed is the problems this Ted Talk points out concerning renewable energy.
The argument is seldom, if ever, between good and evil. The argument is almost always between the greater and lesser evil.
Read the article Ron.
Choose a specific point and I will discuss it.
GF, I have no problem with the article. I agree with it. I agree that nuclear power will never power the world.
Nuclear power will never save the world.
Renewables will never save the world.
Both statements are equally true.
Nothing will save the world. Renewables are not the panaceas you guys believe them to be, that’s my argument.
I know, your next question is: Then what the hell are we supposed to do? Well, there will be survivors. Try your damn best to be among them.
Renewables are not the panaceas you guys believe them to be, that’s my argument.
Ron that is a patently false statement! I can’t speak for GF, though I’m pretty sure he is on the same page but at least in my case, I almost always state in unequivocal terms that I do not think that there are any magic bullets that will save us!
I still think we should be doing everything in our power to continue implementing them and transitioning off of fossil fuels!
No question, I know exactly how to deal with the problems.
As far as surviving, no one survives. Life is terminal, so do your best to be valuable and helpful.
I thought you wanted to discuss problems with renewables or nuclear, but you just went off the mental cliff. Ta, ta.
This is so damn frustrating. The video brought up so many problems with renewables and you wouldn’t touch one of them. That was the mental cliff. Ta, ta.
I said “Choose a specific point and I will discuss it.”
I was not about to shotgun that presentation, it was mostly BS.
Again, if you have a specific question or point to discuss about renewable energy, bring it up. I am sure myself or others will discuss it.
Of course it’s frustrating, Ron, that’s what trolls live on.
Schellenberg doesn’t give a shit about saving the planet, and the claim that renewables are the solution to all problems is a strawman argument.
There’s no question that you are super smart, but in this case you’ve simply been taken in by a troll, and need to sharpen your critical media consumption skills.
Renewables are not flawless, and they are not zero impact. No reasonable person claims they will solve all the planet’s problems.
Trolls like Schellenberg want you to feel angry and frustrated, because it clouds your judgement. His arguments have about as much substance as Trump’s claims that The Wall is a national emergency. They go out of their way to avoid substance.
Or as the Big Lebowski might have said to him, “You’re not wrong, you’re just an asshole.”
There’s no question that you are super smart, but in this case you’ve simply been taken in by a troll, …
Wrong on both counts. I am not super smart and I was not taken by a troll. I simply asked for opinions on this video. Mainly I wanted opinions on the problems with renewables. I got none. All anyone could come up with was they did not believe that concentrated solar burns burds. It does. Other than that I got almost nothing. That was what was frustrating.
Ron,
Other than that I got almost nothing. That was what was frustrating.
That is simply not true!
A number of people did rebut his points! alimbiquated certainly did.
While you say it is frustrating I say it is beyond tiring to have to rebut the same bullshit over and over again.
I have to agree with GF on this one if you have a specific point of Shellenberger’s that you want to address, then by all means please cite it and I’m sure there are people here who will be willing to address it!
BTW anyone who goes to Hungary, the country that produced the group known as the Martians, many of whom worked on the Manhattan project, Paul Erdős, Paul Halmos, Theodore von Kármán, John G. Kemeny, John von Neumann, George Pólya, Leó Szilárd, Edward Teller, and Eugene Wigner. Not to mention the Inventor of the Rubik’s cube and then holds up a Rubik’s cube to illustrate his point about nuclear energy is someone I personally want to just punch in the nose!
Ron,
yes, you were taken in by a troll. That doesn’t mean you actually believe his bullshit. It means you propagated it. Look at this thread. It’s all about Shellenberg. He won. The fact that he’s full of shit doesn’t matter.
Guys like him are like measles, they don’t have any goal other than self propagation. If they manage that they win. You have to immunize yourself.
Okay Fred, some did post rebuttals. But I am still frustrated. I still don’t see it as the bullshit almost everyone on this list see it as. There are some very serious problems with renewables just as there are very serious problems with fossil fuel and nuclear power.
And everyone who criticizes renewables is a troll or a lobbyist. I will leave it at that.
There are some very serious problems with renewables
Absolutely! IMHO, many of them are really systemic. So they are shared with nuclear and fossil fuels at the root level.
But why don’t you pick a specific point from Shellenberger’s presentation and let’s look at the pros and cons in a rational methodical way.
While we may not be experts, many of us have looked at these issues in great detail over a considerable time scale. We are aware of our own biases and I don’t think it is all that easy to pull the wool over our eyes. Especially not collectively as a group. My own views have certainly changed since back in the days of TOD. Not to mention that technology has been changing with exponentially increasing speed in many parallel fields.
2012 wasn’t all that long ago yet it is almost prehistoric times compared to where technology is today.
Many of those points may have been valid back then but are like a horse and buggy compared to a new Tesla now. Yet often times we still hear them touted as reasons why renewables won’t work today! But trolls have an easy job because very few people take the time to even try to keep up with all the changes!
That doesn’t in any way mean that I think we are saved. Personally I’ve been looking at ecosystems and the news is grim and getting grimmer by the day!
But neither nuclear, fossil fuels or renewables will solve any of that because it is a systemic problem and caused by how our entire industrial civilization is structured.
Cheers!
I really love Budapest! 😉
Seriously though, aside from any other objection, economics is the main reason that nuclear is not now nor will it be, barring some some serious technological upgrades, competitive with wind or solar.
While natural gas may still be an economically viable competitor at the moment it won’t be for long as it is still an emitter of CO2 and a finite resource to boot.
I was not familiar with Shellenberger prior to this talk but was not impressed by his arguments and found him to be a propagator of many half truths and myths, Not to mention that frying birds in mid flight is definitely not a major issue at most solar farms… Perhaps I’m biased, but in my view, his overall body language made him come across as someone who is insincere.
After my recent trip to Europe I am now personally more convinced than ever that solar and wind will be the long term winners. Nuclear is being phased out and natural gas is still a finite fossil fuel that is sold as clean energy, but it is anything but that!
Cheers!
Maybe we need to expand this problem. Our new dependency upon electricity for just about everything now should be questioned. Machines need electricity, people don’t. I propose we need to start looking at new ways to live that are less dependent upon electricity and large external energies. Start the weaning process and head in other directions, ones that fit the planet we live upon.
But that is a little further down the road, if the road still exists in the future.
Not to mention that frying birds in mid flight is definitely not a major issue at most solar farms…
A macabre fireworks show unfolds each day along I-15 west of Las Vegas, as birds fly into concentrated beams of sunlight and are instantly incinerated, leaving wisps of white smoke against the blue desert sky.
Workers at the Ivanpah Solar Plant have a name for the spectacle: “Streamers.”
And the image-conscious owners of the 390-megawatt plant say they are trying everything they can think of to stop the slaughter.
Federal biologists say about 6,000 birds die from collisions or immolation annually while chasing flying insects around the facility’s three 40-story towers, which catch sunlight from five square miles of garage-door-size mirrors to drive the plant’s power-producing turbines.
In addition, coyotes eat dozens of road runners trapped along the outside of a perimeter fence that was designed to prevent federally threatened desert tortoises from wandering onto the property.
Federal biologists say about 6,000 birds die from collisions or immolation annually while chasing flying insects around the facility’s three 40-story towers, which catch sunlight from five square miles of garage-door-size mirrors to drive the plant’s power-producing turbines.
OK! So how many birds are actually incinerated vs collisions? How many concentrating solar plants like this one in California are there. I suspect not many!
And yes. birds that collide with tall man made structures do indeed often succumb as a consequence of these collisions. However this is most definitely not a problem unique to solar farms. Buildings are much more dangerous to birds. Are we going to start tearing down all our glass towers?!
About one billion birds die every year when they unwittingly fly into human-made objects such as buildings with reflective windows. Such collisions are the largest unintended human cause of bird deaths worldwide—and they are a serious concern for conservationists.
All I’m saying is let’s keep things in a bit of perspective.
There are environmentalists and then there are people concerned about the natural world.
Hi Folks,
How many birds are killed in collisions with windows in office buildings and other smaller buildings annually?
How many are killed by domestic cats?
How many are killed by pesticides ?
How many are killed by little boys with bb guns?
How many concentrating solar power plants have been built in the USA, and how many are on the drawing boards?
Here’s a link to a reputable site with answers to most of these questions.
Sometimes the answer to a problem is simple as falling off a log, except that nut case holier than thou types prevent viable solutions from being implemented.
If that six thousand birds are flying in and around the facility because there are tons of flying insects there, then getting rid of the insects wouldn’t be all that big a problem.
That’s what insecticides are FOR.
Sure they’re less than environmentally ideal as insect control measures, but life is ALL about trade offs.
In terms of the BIG PICTURE, six thousand birds don’t amount to a silent sweet smelling fart, never mind serious shit.
Almost all solar farms consist of PV panels which operate at low temperature and do not fry any birds. Mirror collector systems are rare and are unnecessary. If one needs to produce steam directly parabolic troughs should do.
PV has the huge advantage of using both direct and diffuse radiation. It also can be placed in built environments (no need to remove animals and plants).
Agriculture uses 30 percent of US land area. PV could supply all electrical power needs with 0.4 percent land area and a lot of that could be in areas that are already developed.
Exactly! Which is just one of many reasons why I think Michael Shellenberger’s TED talk is mostly cherry picked BS! Furthermore his body language creeps me out. He strikes me as a phony!
The man doth protest too much, methinks!
And using a Rubik’s cube in Hungary to illustrate his point was pretty pathetic!
>Dead insects and possibly birds
In other words, nobody can show me a picture of this happening to a bird.
And again, almost no solar is built this way.
Darn: You beat me to it, Ron I was going to post the same video.
alimbiquated Wrote:
“He’s really stuck on Ivanpah and comes back to it over and over, but that is not the future of solar.”
Solar panels are worse. They create a lot of waste to refine Sillcon, and you still need to clear the land of any wildlife and vegetation. Plus a solar farm is one tornado or strong hurricane away from getting trashed.
GoneFishing Wrote:
“Wouldn’t matter anyway, not enough fuel for more than a few decades, we would never reach 15,000 number. Then what? All energy to be used for deomssioning, cleanup and storage?”
Totally agree. As Einstein put it, you cannot solve a problem using the same level of thinking that created it.
Ron Wrote:
“Nothing will save the world. Renewables are not the panaceas you guys believe them to be, that’s my argument.”
Yup. Most people here are worried about future energy production or the environment, I am worried about a full scale nuclear war that will absolute trash the planet and make Permian–Triassic extinction look like a drop in the bucket.
GoneFishing Wrote:
“Almost all solar farms consist of PV panels which operate at low temperature and do not fry any birds.”
But the Lead, Cadmium and other toxic metals used in PV probably will kill them by contaminating the ground water. Most people don’t have a clue on how much waste and contaminated water is created during PV construction.
”
“But the Lead, Cadmium and other toxic metals used in PV probably will kill them by contaminating the ground water. Most people don’t have a clue on how much waste and contaminated water is created during PV construction.”
We need to see the actual weight figures for lead, cadmium and other toxic metals in poly crystalline silicon panels. References if you want to be believed.
Most people don’t have a clue on how much waste and contaminated water is created during PV construction.”
Perhaps whoever came up with statement meant to say PV manufacture, because as someone who actually worked on rooftop PV installations I can assure the reading audience that there is zero contamination that occurs in the construction process.
BTW, at least in South Florida, permits for rooftop solar installations need to be certified by a civil engineer to withstand Cat 5 hurricane wind speeds! I know, because I actually did the drawings that were signed off on and personally took them to the permitting offices on multiple occasions.
Of course no response, because the cadmium types are thin film representing 5% of the wattage production and since they are thin film far less than that in actual weight construction compared to the non-toxic silicon based systems.
In other words for silicon, beyond the factory, where things can and should be controlled, there is no problem at all. Although I am sure the anti-renewable mole people are fast cooking up more fake stories about how nuclear and fossil fuel is great and renewables are dangerous or don’t work.
Yeah, but the republicans don’t want pollution control, cuts the bottom line.
NAOM
That’s why industry is moving to civilized countries, like China.
I watched the video.
Some of the points raised about solar and wind are valid. They are dilute, compared to what we are used to anyway. The material/waste involved in manufacture and lifecycle is surely of concern.
Other points are nearly ridiculous- birds, safety, cost (compared to nucs particularly).
Overall, I’d say the guys message is delivered in such a heavily bias (cherry-picked) way, that he severely discredits himself.
If nuclear energy was fail safe from human and mechanical imperfections, and radiation wasn’t involved, and it could be deployed in a de-centralized manner, and it was a hell of lot more affordable, I’d be intrigued to consider it.
My inclination is to not trust human beings to get that whole thing right. Talk about playing with fire!
I do think that relying on renewables will require a massive downsizing in the human footprint on the planet. The sooner we focus on managing the contraction, the better. I’m not sure it can be managed. The best attempt yet was China 1 child per family, but they have abandoned that effort 100 yrs too early.
>I do think that relying on renewables will require a massive downsizing in the human footprint on the planet.
You’ve got that backwards. It will allow a reduced footprint. For example I calculated in a recent thread that you would need a tenth of the land in the US currently planted in corn for ethanol to replace the output of the entire electricity industry, and maybe another tenth to generate all energy for transportation. This would reduce the agriculture footprint by tens of millions of acres, and shut down nearly all of the coal, oil and gas industry as well.
I have also done similar calculations about water here. Check out this video:
Notice the remark he makes in passing: Tuscon gets more rainwater than it consumes, so importing water from the Colorado River, which is the largest cause energy consumption in the state, is pure waste.
Alim-
“You’ve got that backwards. It will allow a reduced footprint.”
Well, good. I was fearing that 8-9 Billion people would be prone to cutting down most of the forests when they have no more fossil fuel to burn. etc.
Either way, we will eventually arrive at smaller footprint. You believe it will through well-implemented renewable deployment [?], and I believe it will be via a harsh downsizing. I hope you are right.
Tuscon gets more rainwater than it consumes, so importing water from the Colorado River, which is the largest cause energy consumption in the state, is pure waste.
Yeah, that’s typical socialist communist thinking! We can’t have ideas like this being propagated . Think of all the corporations, bankers, politicians who won’t be getting their cuts due to an ending of the infinite growth fossil fuel based system! Good heavens can you imagine a community getting its water supply for free from the sky?! You can’t even tax that, It needs to be made illegal! /SARC!
Ironically, since Tuscon gets it’s water from the Colorado River in Colorado it is literally illegal to harvest rain water that falls on your own roof!
Exactly how much rainwater you’re allowed to collect and use varies across the U.S.—for example, under a Colorado law passed in 2016, homeowners are now allowed to catch and use two rain barrels (a total of 110 gallons) from their rooftops, but no more. (For the full list of rules state by state, check this resource guide, courtesy of the Natural Conference of State Legislatures.)
Fuck that!
Ron , I don’t often post as both you and OFM cover most of what I agree with ( thanks for that )
but to lighten the mood , and to put the question this way ,
I think most people are familiar with the dramatic loss of insect life across much of the planet.
If you want to actually hear one of the important researchers speak on the subject of insect loss and trophic cascade, here is Brad Lister speaking about his research in the forests of Puerto Rico.
I wonder when the information about particular species will be revealed, if ever.
It’s a huge job and the interest is apparently minimal considering it’s importance.
As I told OFM on the previous thread, no house will stand if it’s foundation crumbles.
I think most people are familiar with the dramatic loss of insect life across much of the planet.
MOST PEOPLE?! Surely you jest? Even on this site I suspect if you did a poll on the petroleum side you’d find most people are unaware!
Quite right Fred, I did not say exactly what I meant.
I am sure a lot of people at least know about the problem, since it has been across MSM several times. Now as to grasping the problem or caring, that narrows the number to probably a few million.
But if that is your biggest concern, well…
Happy Pi day everyone.
It’s 3-14. Just like pi.
I thought that was two years ago? 🙂
31416
More like four 😉
31415
Depends if you are a rounder or truncater. 😉
NAOM
Hi Fred,
I tend to round so 3.14159=3.1416 when rounded (at least the way I do it.)
Jeepers creepers, Dennis! Don’t you think I knew that?!
Not to mention that march 14th is pi day, every year but only in cultures that write the date as month followed by day! In Brazil for example we would write 14/3. Since there are only twelve months in a year they don’t have a pi day in Brazil!
Rhubarb.
Sure! You can even calculate the diagonal with Pythagoras 😉
.
I prefer that in a crumble, for pie I prefer gooseberry.
NAOM
Hi Fred,
So 4 years ago in Brazil. 🙂
Global Resources Outlook
2019: Natural Resources for the Future We Want
Following Ron’s inquiry regarding thoughts on problems with renewable implementation, I would like to list those problems, as I understand them, in hopes of sparking discussion here. Not all of these problems are killers, and for every problem I will list I know there are some proposed solutions. Those solutions are of course unproven, since the current scale of renewable deployment is far too small to have run into these problems to significant degree.
Anyway, the problems as I understand them, for your discussion:
1. Intermittency
Imagining a fully renewable grid requires managing intermittency at a massive scale. Even over vast geographic areas (I know one study in particular that examined much of Northern Europe), there can be extended periods of time when renewable production from both solar and wind is drastically reduced. Dealing with this intermittency in order to keep the grid powered on will require massive amounts of energy storage, and even with the massively reduced costs of batteries over the last few decades, batteries are still inconceivably expensive for covering this intermittency. To understand this, compute say 24 hours worth of storage of Britain’s electricity use, then figure out the cost of the batteries required to store that. Then compare to Britain’s GDP.
2. Primacy of fossil fuels
As of now, no solar panel and no wind turbine has ever been built without fossil fuel inputs at some stage of the production. Until this has been done in practice, renewables are not “renewable”, they are “rebuildable with fossil fuels”. And, while this is true, if the cost of fossil fuels increases then so too will the cost of renewables, removing decreases in renewable price over the preceding decades.
3. Material requirements
Some have proposed and calculated that many of the materials required for renewable deployment are in short supply and will become limiting factors if renewable deployment becomes large. This is hotly contested. I have personally done calculations of this manner, and tend to agree that materials will be a limiting factor, especially in regards to batteries.
4. Inability of batteries to power heavy equipment
Large ships, tractors, large machines, all cannot be conceivably powered by battery tech anywhere near the battery tech of today. So they need liquid fuel.
These are the biggest issues with renewables I know of. If anyone else (looking at you Iron Mike) would like to add, please do.
SIGH! Most of the issues you list are non issues!
I’ll just post one example to counter your point 4. Inability of batteries to power heavy equipment
Who says electric powertrains are just for cars? Netherlands-based Pon Equipment converted a Caterpillar excavator to battery power. The company hopes this one-off project will serve as a template for future zero-emission construction equipment.
The electric excavator, dubbed Z-Line (for zero-emission), is based on a Caterpillar 323F. Pon replaced the diesel engine with a massive 300-kilowatt-hour battery pack. The pack weighs 3.4 tons, compared to the one-ton weight of the original engine (the entire machine weighs about 26 tons). At least the battery pack provides enough juice for five to seven hours of operation, while a full charge takes one to two hours, according to Pon.
As I stated, not all the issues are killers, and there are proposed solutions to all of them in one way or another. Whether those solutions will end up working is what is up for debate. I am of the opinion they will not, and your dramatic sighs and declarations to the contrary will not convince me, nor will individual solutions to very small parts of the problem that have not yet been deployed at scale.
But as is often said here, we will see.
Whether those solutions will end up working is what is up for debate. I am of the opinion they will not,
These are your choices: You can lead, follow or get out of the way!
Those solutions are working and are being scaled up but that takes time. The process could be speeded up, a lot, but those who have the power to do that are still living in the 1800s. See my point to Hickory, below, that it needs a ‘tick all the boxes’ approach not a ‘tick one box’. No, I am not confident that we can escape our fate but I know, with 100% certainty, that if we do nothing that is the end. If we are to make a change we had better do it damn fast.
NAOM
There is probably a ready market for such excavators today, because it’s necessary to do construction work right outside hospitals and other places where it’s critical that there be no loud noise, especially long continued loud noise.
Putting such a big battery in an excavator is relatively easy, because they swing around,on a pivot, and need a lot of dead weight anyway. The battery can double as part of the counterweight.
Fitting such a big battery into a dozer or truck is going to be a tougher problem, and may require a new layout.
For a digger, adding supercaps to a battery system makes sense. Recover electricity when lowering loads and supplying bursts of power when needed.
NAOM
1. Intermittency
UK is developing tidal power which can offset this. Much electricity is simply wasted, at night while solar is not available. Demand can be varied to cope (demand side management). Batteries are a growing potential. V2G will provide huge amounts of available storage. New types of batteries are coming to fulfillment and many are well suited to stationary use. There are many other energy storage strategies (note: energy storage not electricity storage) such as heat, cold, liquids, gases.
2. Primacy of fossil fuels
As renewables grow more renewables will use renewable electricity in their production. Many plants are re-utilising their non-saleable production to self power. Fossil fuels are sooo 19th century and, in case you didn’t noice, we are in the 21st!
3. Material requirements
No material shortfalls are expected. There are plenty of choices out there.
4. Inability of batteries to power heavy equipment
So what? Many of the heaviest earthmoving equipment and mining equipment is powered by electricity supplied over cables or pickups, typically overhead but don’t forget live rails. There are electric tractors, now, and tractors could also be replaced with electric traction engines (see previous sentence). Trains can be electric (see above). Ships can use sail or synthetic fuels.
Now, where is the problem? There are lots of solutions out there just to knock it down.
NAOM
“Batteries are a growing potential. V2G will provide huge amounts of available storage.”
Unlikely since people aren’t buying them. Only a tiny fraction of vehicles sold are EV. Also all solid state batteries degrade and fail. This is because the chemical reactions occur on the battery terminals, (Anode, Cathode) you get dendrites and thining over time.
“As renewables grow more renewables will use renewable electricity in their production”
All commercial PV\Wind Farms use NatGas turbines for backup and regulation. They run 24/7. When the Sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing NatGas supplies 100% of the power.
Really this is all pointless. In the 2020’s the global economic system is going to collapse as debt & demographics crush it. World Debt will top $250 Trillion, and will take off as boomers move into retirement. We would have been in worse shape if the Boomers didn’t continue to work well past there retirement age, but I seriously doubt boomers will continue to work into their late 70s or early 80’s.
The fact that global interest rates have been stuck at near zero for over a decade should speak volumes. Once global Oil production peaks there its going to become impossible to prop up the global economy with low interest rates.
“Inability of batteries to power heavy equipment
So what? Many of the heaviest earthmoving equipment and mining equipment is powered by electricity supplied over cables or pickups”
Good luck with Ships, Airliners, Agriculture equipment. Most of the long distance rail freight tracks are no electricified, and you still need to invest 100’s of Trillions building all those PV & Wind farms to replace all of the fossil\Nuclear power plants. Oh, also most of the Grid workers are boomers that are now starting to retire.
At best we have about 15 years before the world goes berserk and nukes itself. But it could start at any moment: India\Pakastan, Israel\Iran, Russia\China\USA, NK\USA. US is now pouring military hardware into Romania on the Romania, Ukraine border, Gearing up to crush the separatists, perhaps beginning this summer or this fall. India is testing Pakastan defenses gearing up for a major conflict. Israel & Iran are gearing up for a direct conflict.
It won’t take much for a major regional war in these regions to scale up to a full scale world war, as the USA\China\Russia\EU all have interest on the outcome of these conflicts.
Sigh! Your points have been debunked a thousand times over!
The Gish Gallop (also known as proof by verbosity[1]) is the fallacious debate tactic of drowning your opponent in a flood of individually-weak arguments in order to prevent rebuttal of the whole argument collection without great effort!
You are just not worth the effort!
That’s OK Fred, I wouldn’t expect you to understand it. I’ve better luck discussing the topic with a fish.
Hint: if your going to reply it would help if you have some pointful arguments not a bunch of babble that does even make any sense. You fall in the category of the “know nothing” crowd. You lack even basic technical understanding of the problem and try to redirect a rebuttal attacking the person and not the points, because you cannot.
That’s OK Fred, I wouldn’t expect you to understand it. I’ve better luck discussing the topic with a fish.
You’re the one who doesn’t understand it and just keeps repeating canned talking points, Which is why I called it a Gish Gallop!
No self respecting fish would waste it’s time in your company!
I know, because I’ve spent a lot of time with fish! They are a lot more interesting and nuanced than you are!
Hi Tech Guy,
Have you actually even LOOKED at the news involving how many new models of electric cars will be on showroom floors within the next three years?
And consider this. You can’t even BUY a stripped down electric model. They all come with all the things that used to be extras, the stuff dealers used to actually advertise as being installed on the cars they were advertising, as “equipped, not stripped”, such as cruise control, power steering, power brakes, ant ilock brakes, air conditioning, automatic transmission, nice music system, carpet not floor mats, clear coat paint, etc.
I expect small vans and pickup trucks that are pure electrics to be selling to commercial customers like ice water in hell within five to ten years.
The hold up now is the lack of factories to build batteries in sufficient quantity to actually put electric cars and pickups on dealer lots.
I guess the US and other countries have similar committees examining their own governments’ policies.
As an aside, this shows politicians and governments in a better light than the usual cynicism.
Thanks Mike,
I’m collecting links, for research purposes, and appreciate all that are posted.
OTOH many councils are not planning to install charging points as they do not have the funds.
NAOM
Wot Fred said.
NAOM
> Most of the long distance rail freight tracks are no electricified
lol
I have not had a chance to watch the video suggested by Ron, just yet.
But I will agree in advance with him- neither nucs or renewable will ‘save the world’ as we know it.
We have been built up on cheap dense fuelaccumulated over 100 + million yrs, and without a big decline in world population and economy, there will be a drastic decline in energy/capita and gdp/capita.
It will happen in a messy, tragic and chaotic way.
The big winners will be the crows, rats, and flies.
I agree with the point made by OFM many times- the changes will be variable by place. Some more fortunate than others.
I would prefer to be in a region that has taken the opportunity to engage in a massive buildout of solar/ wind /hydro prior to fossil peak. It will help a little.
Which makes me wonder- should it also have a wall? Don’t get me wrong, I hate to think in those terms.
I hate to fathom all this stuff. Global mass extinction. Genocide. All of it.
Time out.
As we progress (grow in numbers and technology), the energy/material wheel we need to spin to just keep up will reach limits beyond our capabilities. Even without climate change, the limits are being reached and the lessons will be hard. Sadly, much of the problems, disasters and catastrophes will be blamed on global warming/climate change instead of our poor and dead-end ways.
We do need things to change, especially general human views of the world. Respect and love are hard lessons to learn, sometimes deadly ones.
I keep seeing references to renewables won’t save the world, EVs won’t save the world, nuclear won’t save the world, population control won’t save the world etc etc. I quite agree with this so what do we do? Abandon renewables, abandon EVs, abandon etc?
It is not the adoption of one with the exclusion of the others. It is the applying of all measures together. The problem is that this needs co-ordination at higher levels and this is the one part of the answer that is sorely lacking.
NAOM
we do what we can – until we can’t
forbin
PS: ok not the most satisfactory answer but true
Right, the idea that there is a silver bullet is flawed. Turns out you have to actually have to do something to get a good result.
Good one, alim…
If earth was a cancer patient.
“Yes, with outrageously expensive and painful methods we have cured 10 percent of your cancer. Meanwhile the other 90 percent doubled. So sorry. “
NAOM, the human race is highly cooperative and coordinated in burning fossil fuels, using and eradicating the natural world and in just plain making a mess of things. Could be the result of “intelligence”.
Blame evolution, making things better did not exclude making things that are better at screwing up.
NAOM- agree.
We do need to do all those things we can, absolutely. Co-ordination at higher levels as you say- certainly critical, like what the Chinese did in regard to population policy for a short time.
A point that Ron has made, and I agree, is that this all will not be enough to keep the big train rolling.
Our adjustments are too little too late.
I would certainly vote to put dollars into solar and wind rather than nuclear.
Unless perhaps if I lived in a country that was very cloudy, cold and calm, and had very good technical expertise along with a trusted government regulatory oversight culture. I don’t know, maybe Finland. [Do they drink like Russians?..] Maybe they can pioneer safer cheaper nuclear energy.
I sure don’t trust USA to get it right. I know Americans. I have seen their votes, I have seen their respect for government regulatory oversight. I have seen their profit motive (Kerr McGee, Phillip Morris, etc 100 times), I have seen their paper thin loyalty to the common good, I have seen the engineering and scientific knowhow become subservient to political maneuvering or the profit motive. I have seen the disdain for clean air, clean water, precious soil. And a profound lack of caring for poor people- ‘put it in their neighborhood’.
Not trustworthy with uranium, with plutonium, with spent fuel rods.
Same goes for much of the world.
Hi Niko,
You bring up a lot of points, each of which would take several pages to even adequately dent.
However, one should look at the kind of world and the timing for renewables to be the prime source of global energy. We are looking at 25 to 45 years ahead. That may not seem like much but with limits to growth and climate change right on top of us now the world’s needs may be much different and it’s human component much changed by then.
Let’s look at why we want renewable energy (wind and solar) at all.
1) have sources of energy to replace a depleting and dangerous fossil energy system
2) reduce global GHG emissions so that maybe the planet will be livable in a hundred years and more
3) move to low water usage power systems since we are already in water deficit in many places and headed for much more
4) lead healthier lives, less cancer, less lung problems, less brain problems, less negative impact on nature overall
5) more efficient use of materials and more efficient systems
Keep in mind we are heading into a very different world, one more similar to the past but possibly with high levels of automation and AI.
Intermittency, may not be that important in the future. There are lots of ways to store heat and keep freezers and refrigerators cold for periods of time as well as make them far more efficient.
As far as factories go, most will be very to fully automated, possibly monitored by humans at a distance. Many factories can be intermittent and operate at full capacity when the sun shines and wind blows, only need a buffer battery to level changes and run for a short time for shut down, start up. Hydrogen can be generated for those that need constant runs.
So batteries do not need to be as big as one thinks, they can be much smaller.
Think about the northern canals in the old days, they froze over and shipments stopped for a while, sometimes months. You just pre-shipped and built up stock for slack periods, unlike the right-on-time systems of today. The past handled most things with bulk storage of items, so winter slow downs and supply interruptions were not much of a problem.
Possibly manufacturing will move to areas that are windier and/or sunnier, solving much of that problem.
Resilience and adaptation are key ingredients in a changing world. Doesn’t mean it will be bad, just not as crazy and instantaneous as now (which causes a lot of problems and won’t last anyway).
Material requirements. Materials are evolving and changing now, we won’t be using much of many of the materials we use now, just as we do not use many of the materials of the past. The iron age will fade away to a large degree. Hard to get materials will be bypassed by new technologies and new methods. Possibly longevity of products will once again come to the forefront, reducing the need for massive manufacturing.
I have a question for you. Is the apparent problem coming from trying to fit renewables into the current mode of civilization (fossilization)? In other words trying to fit a new system into an old one instead of changing the old one?
Which makes me wonder- should it also have a wall? Don’t get me wrong, I hate to think in those terms.
I hate to fathom all this stuff. Global mass extinction. Genocide. All of it.
Time out.
Yep! then there are all those peace loving religious folk! Christchurch New Zealand in the news today.
As far as walls are concerned, a couple of cheap drones loaded with home made bioweapons kinda makes that a moot point, doesn’t it?
The GENE is out of the bottle! You can’t put it back.
What? You don’t think the village in the next valley over will have their own solar, wind and hydro powered biolab?
The Thought Emporium
Published on Nov 12, 2018 PCR or polymerase chain reaction, is one of the most useful tools in a biologists tool kit. It allows you to take a DNA sample, select a part of it and make millions of copies of that section, amplifying it millions of times over. These newly grown fragments can be used as a diagnostic tool, or to generate pieces that can be used in other processes.
Today we take a deep dive into the world of PCR and explore how it works, how you design the reactions, and how they’re run in the lab. In a future video we may also look at how to build the thermocycler that makes this process possible, but there are lots of great tutorials on building them already online.
We also take a step forward in the spider silk project and successfully isolate 1 of the 2 genes we’ll need for the project. We’re still trouble shooting the other so that will be the topic of a future video. The fragment we isolated is directly usable in our construction pathway and will be inserted to build a new new plasmid we’re calling pKlac2g418. This means we’re only a few more steps away from finishing our plasmid and making our first spider silks!
Might be better to form an alliance with that village in the other valley… Walls are pretty pointless.
I think I’ll bookmark this essay and post the link every time Fernando Leanme tries to post his ideological crap about communism and socialism.
(Why) Americans Don’t Understand What Capitalism Really Is
Or, How The Opposite of Capitalism Isn’t Socialism — It’s My Local Record Store
(The ancients drank wine and ate almonds, grown at vineyards and farms, which were businesses, trading things for money, trying to make a living as enterprises. But they weren’t “capitalist” in any sense of the word — they weren’t mindlessly maximizing profits, they weren’t trading “shares” of “profits”, and they weren’t “owned” solely by disconnected “shareholders” with no interest in the long-term survival of anything whatsoever. They were probably just trying to set a fair and decent price, they were usually loosely family owned to whatever extent was possible, and governed implicitly by social rules, values, and norms, which prized the coexistence and endurance and joint prosperity of all. Nobody in that world would believe that a hedge fund would burn down a beautiful vineyard just because it only earned $4 million of profit this week instead of $40. They’d probably be horrified at the idea that people with no interest in the long-term survival of anything now owned and governed those very things, solely to exploit them.
And that paragraph sums up what the essence of AOC’s Green New Deal is about. Also Douglas Rushkoff’s Team Human and what Greta Thunberg’s Climate Strike is for. It’s all about a new economic operating system that is just and equitable and incorporates an understanding of the value of our ecosystems over a suicidal system that is designed to maximize profits for the few, regardless of the costs to the vast majority!
“and governed implicitly by social rules, values, and norms, which prized the coexistence and endurance and joint prosperity of all”
I think that is what Aldo Leopold, Wendell Berry, John Muir, Edward Abbey and others were trying to tell us. We need to invest ourselves in, identify with and love the land, the oceans, the world in order to get along in it and do good rather than harm. Our happiness should come from growth of nature not from sterile mental and physical constructs. Nature cares for us each day, why do people not care for nature?
Speaking of which the first flowers and new green growth popped up here a few days ago. The birds are on the move, gathering together, chasing each other. The long winter sleep is over, I hope for more bugs, lots and lots of them.
Yep–
No extraction of wealth between user and exchange value.
The basis of capitalism.
If you have read your Marx.
Oh yeah, Marx. He had a lot of great philosophy
“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.”
“I must say I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go to the library and read a good book.”
“All people are born the same, except Democrats and Republicans.”
“I, not events, have the power to make me happy or unhappy today. I can choose which it shall be. Yesterday is dead, tomorrow hasn’t arrived yet. I have just one day, today, and I’m going to be happy in it.”
“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.”
Oh boy!!!!!!!!!!! Does that describe one particular head of state in a nutshell!
NAOM
Groucho was unique guy.
No Marx—
But, that was expected.
Not to mention:
They’d probably be horrified at the idea that people with no interest in the long-term survival of anything now owned and governed those very things, solely to exploit them.
I posted this last non petroleum , but it was getting stale by then.
California here in the States and Germany in Europe are leading the way, world wide.
Read this, it’s worth it just to improve your mood when it comes to a discussion about the stupidity of the human race such as we are having here today.
The whole goddamned argument against renewables is utterly and abysmally STUPID and based on ignorance, willful self delusion, or cynical calculations involving personal investments.
MAYBE we will succeed in transitioning to a renewable energy powered and sustainable civilization, maybe we won’t.
It’s a fucking academic question, because it’s about the long term, whereas there IS no long term, unless we survive the short term.
Wind and solar power have amply and obviously demonstrated that the return on the energy and materials invested in building and erecting such infrastructure are generous, not less than at least about five to one, according to any recent estimate I have seen, unless it was produced by employees of Koch brothers and company.Wind and solar power, in combination with conservation, will allow us to extend the life of our finite supplies of fossil fuels by generations, if we stay with it.
I personally know at least three or four old hillbillies in their late eighties or nineties who went to one room schools for only a little while and never learned anything beyond the simplest of arithmetic and reading.
But ignorance is NOT the same thing as stupidity. All of them GOT IT immediately, when discussing wind and solar power, as to the WHY, when I told them it’s because coal doesn’t grow back like potatoes or timber.
All of them you see knew men who once worked in the mines ( not far away at all) who lost their jobs because the mines played out.
You do what you HAVE to do, period, and that means preparing for the day when fossil fuels will be extremely scarce and expensive, or simply unavailable, because the enemy you have been financing by buying them from him suddenly refuses to sell them to you.
Does anybody here fail to understand that neither the Russians nor the Germans have forgotten WWII in general and the Siege of Stalingrad in particular? The dumbest of the dumb in Germany usually understand the implications of history as clearly as they can see the sun at high noon on a cloudless day, although they seldom discuss this matter in public forums. If I were a German living in Germany, I would gladly pay double whatever subsidies are in place to promote conservation and renewable energy.
The vast majority of all material goods are valuable in proportion to their scarcity. Water has virtually no value to me, in terms of money, because it costs me virtually nothing. I get it by way of infrastructure my old Daddy put into place with his own hands about seventy years ago, for the trivial expense of an occasional repair to a broken pipe or burned out pump, and maybe a dollar a month for electricity.People I know town pay close to a hundred bucks a month for water and sewer, with their rates going up every few years. People who get caught without water for some reason gladly pay a couple of bucks a gallon, and if they go a day without drinking, they will pay twenty bucks for a six pack of bottled water. Two or three days, they will pay whatever they have or can borrow or steal to swap.
Every dime we put into renewable energy today means another DAY later that we will still have some affordable fossil fuels, which we can use frugally for ESSENTIAL purposes, just as we use clean water frugally for drinking first and foremost when the supply is interrupted for some reason.
( Yes, I know I’m long winded, and all about TLDR, but occasionally a kid runs across and reads such a forum as this one, especially one that’s interested in the sciences. A kid I know, who is not aware that I’m OFM, asked me in unmistakable terms just yesterday about something I posted in this forum. FIRST TIME ever this has happened! Been hoping I would live to experience it! I don’t advertise my OFM identity, so as to not alienate the community . This one comment contains easily accessible lessons in physics, geology, economics, history and human nature, although a reasonably well educated adult won’t even notice them. The greatest value of such a forum as this is the EDUCATIONAL value it possesses for potential new readers. )
The springs, runs, and artesian wells have been running all winter here. The long slow drought of several years is over and wet times are back. Hooray!
Yes, I have run out of water while backpacking in the mountains, it focuses the mind.
Worth bookmarking
https://electrek.co/2019/03/15/egeb-wind-african-solar/
Was listening to NPR a while ago. When I was young, there were two Europeans for each African. In two more generations, maybe sooner, there will be five or six Africans for each European.
Does anybody here really believe that walls and fences won’t be built on the grand scale?
The news story was mostly about emigrants being rescued from drowning at sea.
The big question is not about walls but when the corporate state figures out it is far cheaper to feed machines than bother feeding and put up with humans. Then the internal reduction increases.
Isn’t that what the PV is for, feeding all the machines?
Europe has been getting immigrants from the South and East for tens of thousands of years.
I thought it was the southwest …….. since we all left the rift valley
Thousands of years ago, as best I can see, the usual way of dealing with migrants was to meet and greet them with sticks and stones, with clubs, spears, and arrows, and have it out like “real men” , winner take all, including territory and attractive women. Some of the older women who appeared to be useful as slaves were spared. Males were simply killed, unless maybe very young, so they could be raised as members of the tribe or clan.
It’s not that such methods won’t work these days, but rather that most of us tend to get our panties in a bunch about such crude behavior, having been taught by various philosophers such as Jesus that it’s better to love thine enemy, lol. In case anybody doesn’t get it, I’m TRYING to make a joke and express a little sarcasm.
Now let’s be serious for a minute. Maybe later Western European countries will be glad to admit a few million new citizens, so as to have more tax money to support the young folks of today who aren’t having kids enough to maintain the old age welfare system that supports the old folks today.
But there aren’t going to be very many Africans who speak the appropriate language, or that have been raised with the same cultural values, or that have the necessary skills, other than common labor skills, to be readily accepted into European society.
It’s one thing to talk about this sort of thing, sitting on one’s moral high horse, and it’s ANOTHER THING ALTOGETHER to get the agreement of one’s fellow citizens, who are walking in shoes with holes in the soles, citizens such as the countless millions here in the USA who ( rightly or wrongly ) believe that some or all of their economic and social problems are the result of immigration.
If anybody who knows shit from apple butter about Yankee politics is asked WHY Trump is prez, and is allowed to answer with only one issue, he will say immigration or border. If he is allowed two issues, he will say border or immigration and reluctance to accept the new social order ( imposed on them primarily by the Democrats of course via the courts and legislation) on the part of Trump voters, Trump voters being happier with “the way things used to be” here in the USA.
Europeans looking at immigration on the grand scale in the future are going to be in a position very similar to the one we Yankees are in these days, politically.
I’m not saying any particular country will elect a Trump, in any particular election, but I’m willing to bet the farm that quite a few Trumps WILL be elected.
There’s just no way this can end well.
But there aren’t going to be very many Africans who speak the appropriate language, or that have been raised with the same cultural values, or that have the necessary skills, other than common labor skills, to be readily accepted into European society.
OFM I think that is a very narrow perspective and my views on this are quite different from yours. I readily acknowledge that there is currently a resurgence of extreme nationalisn and populism in many places around the world and Europe is no exception. However, having spent time in Europe recently I know this to be a fringe minority, albeit a very dangerous one.
To be clear I’m an unabashed multicultural internationalist. How could I not be. I was born in Brazil to Hungarian parents and grew up on three continents immersed in multiple cultures speaking four languages.
I reject all forms of xenophbia and believe strongly in secure but open borders. I recommend spending time at truck stops along the autobahn and speaking to the truck drivers in a couple dozen languages who make trade possible from Turkey to Finland. Brexiteers notwithstanding!
Trade, trumps xenophobia!
There are millions of people all over the world who no longer fit into the traditional boxes of the past and Africans are no exception.
Watch this and put yourself in my shoes This is my world and my reality!
I admire your ethical positions, right across the board, and have huge respect for your broad based knowledge of the real world as well. I’m sure I have learned more from you than you have ever or will ever learn from me, by a substantial margin.
But I’m REALLY wondering whether your response is based on what you WANT to be true, on wishful thinking, or what you actually believe is going to happen.
You do come across as more optimistic than most of the scientifically well educated regulars here, in respect to the future as it relates to over population, resource depletion, and so forth. You seem to be considerably more optimistic than I am myself, in this respect.
But lets go back, and examine the context of my comment, which was initiated by my listening to an NPR program about drowning migrants in the sea, headed for Italy, IIRC, but I’m not sure about the precise country.
The program went on to discuss the relative populations of Africa and Western Europe, historically over the last three or four generations, with the ratio of Europeans to Africans being not only reversed, but reversed from two to one, Europe to Africa, to an expected three to one Africa to Europe within the lifetime of young adults, maybe even middle aged adults.
Africa is a relatively short and easy boat ride from Western Europe. It’s even possible to do the trip on foot, lol.
Asia is the only other place on Earth that is seriously overpopulated to the extent Western Europeans , or Yankees, etc, might have to worry about unwelcome migrants on the grand scale , and is FAR AWAY, by either land or sea.
I don’t even pretend to be able to GUESS at the extent to which African countries in general will prosper and educate their people over the next thirty or forty years, but such emigrants as are arriving today from Asia are mostly well educated, with welcome and valuable skills, and already speak English or maybe French or German, etc. I will say however that I don’t harbor any great hopes that African countries will be prosperous and well educated within a generation or two, as a general observation. My personal belief is that most of them will be in even deeper shit than they are today, especially in respect to food, decent farmland and irrigation water, over population, etc.
What is your personal opinion on the future of Africa in terms of the next fifty years or so?
And while I don’t think Asia will necessarily have turned the population problem corner within that time frame, I think the odds are good that populations in Asia will have at least stabilized, and very possibly, and in my own opinion, likely be declining by that point in time, considering that Asians by comparison, by and large, have a huge head start, in terms of education, prosperity, stable governments, etc.
What’s your personal opinion on the future population of Asia, out to about fifty years or so?
Some of the old hands here may remember that back in the dark ages, when I was about to graduate, and had a hot girl interested in going with me, I posted comments at the old TOD to the effect that I was seriously considering joining the Peace Corp, or doing something along that line, partly as an adventure, partly out of sense of duty, and partly as an educational experience.
One of my crusty and profane old ag professors took me aside, and asked me, in no uncertain terms, if I wanted to go and help the people in some backward country double their food production, so that twice as many of them could starve as the result of my misguided good intentions.
After giving it some thought, the girl and I decided to stay here in the states.
But now that I’m old, I wish we had went.
OFM, on good days I can do a head fake on myself and find something to be optimistic about, but more often than not, truth be told I’m not all that optimistic, perhaps I hide it well.
It is flattering that you should admire my ethics… I take that as a high compliment. But my response is not so much based on my ethics but rather a very rich multi cultural life experience.
I happen to agree with your old Ag professor:
When he took you aside, and asked you, in no uncertain terms, if You wanted to go and help the people in some backward country double their food production, so that twice as many of them could starve as the result of your misguided good intentions.
So in no uncertain terms I think that much if Africa and Asia and consequently the world is pretty much fucked.
However that doesn’t mean that I consider Africans or any other group of humans to be backward! No more so than I would consider your neighbors backwards just because they are ignorant and believe in some deity. I never hold that against people. Some of the best times and conversations I have ever had were over a couple of beers in some of the poorest corners of Brazil with people who still follow the Orixás!
Brazil’s African ancestors, the Yoruba from Nigeria and Benin, lived by a belief system that held nature as their high power, understanding the necessity to respect and honor the sacred relationship between nature’s elements and human beings.
In Brazil, this system developed into the spiritual practice of Candomblé where by orixás or deities, are recognized as divine forces of nature. In the city of Salvador, Bahia, the orixás have become religious and cultural symbols of the city’s rich African presence.
E FredM,
A-a-d-o-re Yemanja O Ya
Yemanja O Ya!
There are too many of us. Our access to free energy is being strangled. The pollution from our prior use of energy is converting our climate into a nightmare. Water is becoming a serious issue in many places. Climate-forced conflict and migration has become plainly visible. And on and on.——
Very few even have the ability to view this.
Well spoken.
Fred,
Here is an update on the Sion EV. Base price 29K, 158 mile range, 21 miles of the range can be had by just parking it in the sun.
And the design is open source. They are trying to spread the idea without necessarily making money on it. It’s a radical idea, that has a slight chance of working. It shows how fast the car industry is changing, even if it fails.
It also shows that a new generation sees things very differently than some of the old guard. They have priorities other than profits above all else. They understand that without a livable planet, profits don’t matter.
Yeah, Tks!
3-5°C temperature rise is now “locked-in” for the Arctic
We’ll have to wait and see. I don’t know how old you are, but I was around in the 1970’s when scientists were convinced a new ice age was “locked in” because the winters were so cold then. That prediction turned out wrong however.
Not scientists– https://www.skepticalscience.com/ice-age-predictions-in-1970s.htm
You need to follow the data.
I’m in my 70’s—
(The fact is that around 1970 there were 6 times as many scientists predicting a warming rather than a cooling planet. Today, with 30+years more data to analyse, we’ve reached a clear scientific consensus: 97% of working climate scientists agree with the view that human beings are causing global warming.)
Scientists routinely make predictions which don’t pan out. For the most part, I presume they aren’t proud of false predictions or make them on purpose, nor do they like drawing attention to them. But the facts are,being in the science business means you get some things wrong from time to time. To use a more recent example, it was mentioned on the news just the other day that the whole state of California is free from drought for the first time since 2011. Yet, it wasn’t but two or three years ago that the same news reports had climate scientists worried there would be no end to the drought because they were predicting drought would be a new permanent situation California would have to deal with.
but I was around in the 1970’s when scientists were convinced a new ice age was “locked in”
Nah, that’s actually bullshit! Before you spout nonsense you should really check the actual scientific literature on the topic and not old Time magazine covers! So welcome to another game of whack a mole with an ignorant anti science troll!
What were climate scientists predicting in the 1970s? The fact is that around 1970 there were 6 times as many scientists predicting a warming rather than a cooling planet. Today, with 30+years more data to analyse, we’ve reached a clear scientific consensus: 97% of working climate scientists agree with the view that human beings are causing global warming.
How the “Global Cooling” Story Came to Be Nine paragraphs written for Newsweek in 1975 continue to trump 40 years of climate science. It is a record that has its author amazed
This is a video overview of the history of climate science, with the goal of debunking the idea that in the 1970s, climate scientists were predicting global cooling.
So California had a wetter than normal year! What about long term?
You trolls are truly pathetic!
The wet to dry years is about 1:7 for California.
When multi-years of wet are delivered, in one go, it is a bitch.
NAOM
‘Nother troll alert, I think
Adam, you should’ve gone to AccuWeather, Joe Bastardi, or WattsUpWithThat to read how genuine atmospheric scientists debunked the California “permadrought” nonsense.
Troll alert
No worry concerning the Arctic, when the temps up there reach 5C to 10C above pre-industrial in 2030 the IPCC will cut back it’s time to reduce emissions to ten years instead of 12.
There are always more years to fix things. You just have to get used to the changes. 🙂
Interesting article in The Atlantic about how agriculture totally F’d the world.
WARNING THIS IS ONLY FOR PEOPLE WITH AN ATTENTION SPAN EXCEEDING SIXTY SECONDS
SIGH, wipes his brow, takes another swig of nerve medicine.
Old fart retired educator hillbilly farmer has a few things to say about climate science, textbooks, teachers, the media, climate scientists,the entire educational establishment, and anything else that crosses his near senile mind.
The scientific establishment was just really beginning to get a really good grip on the way climate varies over geological time, back in the sixties. That’s why, if you had asked an ACTUAL CLIMATE SCIENTIST, at that time, or a little later, that he wasn’t necessarily ready to predict a short term ( meaning in decades, generations of men, a century or so) warming trend due to greenhouse gas pollution. There wasn’t get enough data to be REALLY sure of it, the way the climate establishment is SURE of it NOW.
I was a student, myself, or a teacher, back in those days, and you can take what I say to the BANK, in this particular case.
The VAST majority of students back then, including future educators, did NOT take a CLIMATE course, or a geology course or a REAL chemistry course, or a REAL biology course or even a REAL math course. ( The non science major students did often take a so called SURVEY course in one of the fields I mention here as real, in order to graduate, wherein you memorized some shit, but generally learned nothing, and forgot that nothing within the semester. )
My own transcripts are heavily tilted to biology, chemistry, and so forth, with courses labeled as ag courses actually being straight up the same exact course as the one biology or chemistry majors took, in numerous cases. But I never took a climate course. I doubt that more than one percent, if that many, of the students at my university took a climate course. Hell, there may not even have BEEN a climate course offered back then. This is not to say I didn’t learn a lot about the present day( back then) climate, incidentally to my course work. Ag is applied biology, and climate MATTERS in ag.
But since it was considered, correctly, to be beyond our control, we just learned what was applicable to our own field, rather than climate theory.
NEVERTHELESS, we were assigned reading that included articles and books that were about or touched on climate, and climate was mentioned incidentally in LOTS of classes, including history, economics, political science, business administration, and so forth.
A REASONABLY INFORMED under grad was expected to know about solar system geometry, the past and future expected history of the sun ( expansion and growing output) , volcanic influences, climate variations associated with orbital mechanics, and such in very general terms, but not much if anything more than enough to discuss the subject casually over a beer. Tectonics and continental drift were just along about then showing up on the radar in technically oriented classes, and hardly even mentioned in other classes, except as an example of scientific progress perhaps.
THE ONE THING THAT GENERALLY STUCK was that the most recent history of climate, expressed in thousands of years and tens of thousands of years, was that ICE AGES were the NORM, long lived, and INTERGLACIALS were the exception, short lived, and that therefore, since interglacials are short, and that the pattern had repeated several times, WE SHOULD EXPECT ANOTHER ICE AGE WITHIN A RELATIVELY SHORT TIME FRAME, maybe a hundred years, maybe a few hundred or at the most a thousand or a couple of thousand.
THIS IS WHAT EVERYBODY WAS TAUGHT, across the board, incidental to his own field, if the topic of climate was even MENTIONED in his coursework, excepting only a few classes such as math or physics or chemistry, wherein it’s usually taught that you need more data to come to conclusions than just a past sequence of events that might be the result of chance, or some factor than no longer applies, etc.
THIS is what a couple of generations of TEACHERS learned, and repeated all their working lives, it’s what a couple of generations of lawyers, accountants, doctors, engineers and yes AG guys too, heard, if they heard anything at all about climate. THERE WERE DAMNED FEW EXCEPTIONS to this observation.
It’s also what the future JOURNALISTS heard, and it’s what they put in the papers and magazines back in those days as well.
I’m not bullshitting, everything I’ve posted up above is a bedrock solid hard FACT.
So given that people believe only what they WANT to believe, there’s NO doubt in my mind that the vast majority of people who believe, as Trump tells them to believe, that global warming is a hoax and a scam, are doing ONLY and PRECISELY what is to be expected of them by any student of human nature.
The biggest single failing of the liberalish scientifically oriented establishment is that it catastrophically OVERESTMATES the educational achievements of about two thirds of the people of this country, and then, having become frustrated in trying to explain things to them, takes out that frustration by making fun of them.
The stereotypical young woman I speak to these days believes implicitly in global warming, even though the odds are rather high that she has never taken a single REAL science course, BECAUSE and SOLELY BECAUSE she is a member in good standing of the liberal tribe. She is NOT entitled to judge this issue personally , lacking any relevant training or experience, she is only going with the flow.
When I talk to an equally ignorant young man who identifies with the Trump camp, he believes global warming is a hoax…. because that’s what his TRIBE believes. PERIOD.
As I have often said, a little knowledge can be more dangerous than outright ignorance, and in this case, a limited ABC kindergarden level of climate knowledge is just enough, just right, to allow a person who wants to believe global warming is a hoax to easily be convinced that warming IS indeed a hoax.
I have also often said here that demographics is destiny, and that the core of the R establishment is fast departing this old world, and that barring bad luck, the USA will look more or less like today’s Western Europe within the lifetime of today’s youngsters.
I’ve been having some issues with my internet connection and have not been able to read or post at leisure from the convenience of my apartment so, I’m getting into this discussion rather late.
While Shellenberger does acknowledge that cats are the leading cause of bird deaths, I don’t hear him or anybody else railing against cats or any of the other leading causes of bird deaths listed at: 9 leading causes of bird deaths in Canada. There are things like plastic in the oceans affecting marine life as well. I guess one has to pick their battles.
In addition, alimbiquated and Fred have both covered the scale of CSP vs PV adequately but, I might add, the economics of CSP have not been working out favorably as the costs of PV plus storage have plummeted. The last plant built in the US was at Crescent Dunes, near Toonpah in Nevada, which has been having some issues. Another similar plant proposed for South Australia is yet to materialise as PV plus storage is making it look like a financial non-starter. CSP is a small and shrinking slice of the solar energy pie.
Alimbiquated has also covered the land use aspect quite well further down. I am curious about the situation with the Navajo Generating Station (NGS) near Lake Powell and the Glen Canyon Dam. I wonder why the powers that be are not expediting the construction of PV farms to use NGS shuts down later this year? The solar resource in the near desert conditions is excellent and there is lots of flat or nearly flat land. The synergies of the nearby Glen Canyon Dam hydro electric facility with large solar farms should be a no brainer. In addition, the shutting down of the NGS will free up large amounts of water as the NGS apparently uses 50,000 acre-feet (over 16 billion gallons!) of water annually.
It gets even more bizarre when one considers this:
For more than a century, Dawson Singletary’s family has grown tobacco, peanuts and cotton on a 530-acre farm amid the coastal flatlands of North Carolina. Now he’s making money from a different crop: solar panels.
Singletary has leased 34 acres of his Bladen County farm to Strata Solar LLC for a 7-MW array, part of a growing wave of solar deals that are transforming U.S. farmland and boosting income for farmers.
Farmland has become fertile territory for clean energy, as solar and wind developers in North America, Europe and Asia seek more flat, treeless expanses to build. That’s also been a boon for struggling U.S. family farms that must contend with floundering commodity prices.
“There is not a single crop that we could have grown on that land that would generate the income that we get from the solar farm,” said Singletary, 65.
The Hambacher Forest comment is hardly an argument against renewable or for nuclear. It is an argument against clearing the forest to facilitate a coal mine. A story covered in the last non-petroleum thread was Renewables made up almost 65% of net power production in Germany last week. I expect that at some point in the future, barring any serious black swan events, we will see a headline about Germany getting 100% of it’s electricity from renewables for a day, then eventually days and weeks on end. Hopefully one day it will be news, when Germany has to resort to fossil fuel power.
The argument about the cost of electricity from nuclear vs renewables is dated. He is comparing the cost of electricity from depreciated nuclear plants that were built decades ago with renewables built in in effort to scale up manufacturing of renewable energy technology in an era when it was still more expensive. How about comparing new renewables with new nuclear. The experience with the cost of new nuclear is not looking too good with the following three plants yet to be commissioned, having experienced extensive delays:
Vogtle, US ($25 billion)
Olkiluoto-3, Finland (€8.5 billion)
Flamanville 3, France (€10.9 billion)
Since the above projects are not yet complete, there is still a chance the costs could rise even further. In the UK the Hinkley Point C project is underway and projected to cost £19.6 billion, one of the most expensive man made structures ever built!
In the mean time the reduced cost of solar have resulted in a 50 MW PV plant covering 200 acres in my neck of the woods, scheduled for completion by the end of June, with a ppa at US 8 cents/kWh. The only other source in the island that might cost less would be wind. Globally, in other jurisdictions there are ppas being floated at 3c/kWh and costs are still falling, as capacity for the manufacture of raw silicon and finished modules continues to grow.(See. Poly maker Daqo presents a blockbusting set of figures)
I have concerns about the extremely long life of hazardous nuclear waste. The worst case I have heard is that the waste will be hazardous long after the containers it is stored in have disintegrated due to age. I have visions of hundreds or maybe thousands of years into the future when some intelligent species wonders into a contaminated area, oblivious to the meaning of any warning signs that still exist on any structures that still exist. They will encounter a hazard that they cannot sense unless they have evolved the means of sensing gamma radiation, thus exposing themselves to potentially lethal doses of radiation. AFAIK mankind has never built anything that has lasted or is projected to last as long as this material will remain hazardous.
Videos of the area around Fukishima post the incident are scary. Ditto for Chernobyl.
As stated by alimbiquated, the statement that “There is no plan to deal with solar panels at the end of their 20 year life” is demonstrably false on two fronts. First the lifespan is unknown and secondly, I am pretty sure I posted a link at this very site, to a story about a European outfit doing promising research on recycling technology for end of life PV modules. As far as his concerns about the export of used panel to third world countries, as long as they are still able to produce power, it is likely that they will be used to generate electricity for useful purposes. By the time panels made since the beginning of the latest boom in PV installation are well and truly dead, procedures for recycling them and reclaiming the useful materials should be well established, assuming civilization does not collapse in the interim!
Elsewhere in this thread, TechGuy brought up the issue of PV and strong hurricanes. Living in “hurricane alley” as I do, I have taken a keen interest in this and fortunately the two strong huriccanes that swept through the Caribbean in 2017 provided lots of data. Rocky mountain Institute produced a report “Solar Under Storm”, based on evalution of systems affected by the two (strong) hurricanes. It can be dowloaded from the following page, Solar Under Storm: Designing Hurricane-Resilient PV Systems. I downloaded it for future reference and forwarded the information about this report to some relevant bodies in my neck of the woods
In general, Shellenberger falls in the category of “experts” that do not get the implications of exponentially growing technologies. Anyone that regularly visits insideevs.com, pvmagazine.com and reneweconomy.com.au, as I do, can attest to the fact that the pace of developments is dizzying.
Case in point, this past Wednesday (March 13), Elon Musk unveiled Tesla’s latest product, due for first deliveries in late 2020. During his presentation he brought up some interesting information.
Eleven years ago as of February, Tesla had produced one car, serial number 1, which was driven onto the stage. Currently Tesla has produced about 550,000 vehicles with a target of producing one million by the end of this year.
Tesla’s Gigafactory in Nevada produces more lithium ion battery capacity than the rest of the world combined,including batteries for all purposes (including laptop computers and other mobile devices)
Since 2012, Tesla has built their own proprietary network of 1,400 high power charging stations, with more than 12,000 individual charging points in 36 countries.
He also showed pictures of the site of the company’s new Gigafactory in China when the land had been cleared and the fence built, what it looks like now and a rendering of what it will look like when completed later this year. This new factory will combine the capbailities of the existing battery gigafactory in Nevada and the California vehicle manufacturing plant and should almost double their manufacturing capacity.
When the world’s second biggest “Big Oil” company, Royal Dutch Shell, announced the purchase of German battery maker Sonnen last month, the talk from inside the company was that Shell is preparing for a significant and rapid shift to electric – perhaps within a decade.
Such forecasts, including by those like Stanford University futurist Tony Seba, are generally downplayed, by incumbents whose business models will be destroyed by the scale and speed of such a transition, by the nay-sayers still clinging to last century technologies, and by the regulators and policy makers who know they have already been left behind.
But Shell has all but confirmed that this scenario is exactly what they are planning for. By the early 2030s, it says, it expects to be the biggest power company in the world, as just about everything – including transport and heating – turns electric.
Seba gets it, Shellenberger does not.
Navajo GS
about 1 sq mile of land that will be difficult to reclaim, think contamination from coal and chimney fallout. That can hold a LOT of solar. No farmland involved. Heck, they are even building solar out at Chernobyl and that is not exactly affecting prime farmland.
Hinkley C
If you include the cost of production subsidies, the total cost to the consumer is likely to be well north of £30 billion and the government is trying to keep the true costs quiet.
Why even use farmland, I did a recent calculation on how much solar could have been generated by using the roofs of our local Walmart. Mandate all large commercial and industrial developments to be covered in solar including parking. That will put a huge capacity right where it is needed instead of needing miles of connections to bring it into town. We have some good examples here, 2 large fruit and veg wholesalers have installed LARGE solar setups on their roofs – think of all the refrigeration and lighting needs covered. An ice-cream maker and distributer, right in the middle of the town and in the block next to the town square, has put up a LARGE array – think freezing all that ice-cream, oh, and nightfall is not an issue as no-one is making ice-cream then 😉 A local butcher has a large system – refrigeration needs. A restaurant pumps solar juice into the local grid while it does not need much, providing power to local day time businesses then draws from the grid at night as it needs power thus providing a local load leveling service.
And if anyone is replacing 20 year old panels because they believe that is their end of life, please send them to me and I will find good use – er – I mean dispose of them and only charge a small fee over costs.
And hurricanes! It seems solar installations are responsible for holding many roofs on, how irresponsible of the. Looking at the photos of the large arrays that were damaged I would say that the cause was very poor construction of the support system, inadequate steel structures with no cross bracing or anti-torsion. Local solar can provide rapid power resupply whereas large scale distribution can take a very long time and huge costs, financially as well as manpower and materials. How different would things have been in Puerto Rico?
NAOM
Seba gets it, Shellenberger does not.
Michael Shellenberger is a nuclear lobbyist.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something if his salary depends on his not understanding it.
Just sayin!
Exposing the misinformation of Michael Shellenberger and ‘Environmental Progress’
Olkiluoto has now permission to start operations, they are planning to start the commercial use in the start of the next year. When Olkiluoto important person was interviewed in radio, there was sort of question ’should the electricity price now drop’ the answer was somewhat evasive so I wouldn’t bet that the price doesn’t rise…
Islandboy, I really like your posts. Keep up the good work.
According to the EIA projections, onshore wind additions in the US reduces dramatically after 2021. Most of the additions out to 2050 are combined cycle natural gas and solar PV, It looks like coal and nuclear are held about steady at the 2021 point with a slight decline by 2050.
Of course the basis for this projection is purely economic and has little to do with planetary realities or the decline in available resource. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=38612
If this course is followed, the planetary climate emergency will continue to escalate rapidly.
Yeah, as Greta Thunberg said: Our house is on fire!
Would you like sugar with your tea?
Maybe one could explain why the EIA thinks coal and nuclear stay constant for the next thirty years when the infrastructure is old already and will have to be shut down. That would imply new additions of coal and nuclear.
Myself, I do not trust their analysis.
Gonefishing,
The chart shows only additions to capacity, there is one addition of nuclear and no additions to coal after 2018, my guess is that they have underestimated the falling costs of solar and the likely rising costs of natural gas after 2030, at that point there will likely be no additions to natural gas generating capacity it will all be solar and wind, in addition capacity utilization of coal and natural gas generating units will fall dramatically and many will be retired as they will no longer be able to compete with cheaper wind and solar power.
I too do not think these EIA estimates are very realistic.
Hi Dennis,
As you can see from the reference case below coal levels out in the early 2020’s and only slightly falls in amount of generation through 2050. Makes no sense to me that all those old coal generators keep going that long since most were installed pre 1990’s. Implies that new ones were added.
Same with nuclear power, most are old now and will shut down long before 2050. Current average age is 37 years. How then does the power from them keep fairly steady after 2030?
The answer to that one might be that many have already had their licenses extended from the original 40 years to 60 years, But even then, almost all existing nuclear would have been shut down prior to 2050. Oddly I found a couple that had been extended to 90 years operation.
Still, to keep up power output to 2050 implies new generation added or many extensions beyond 60 years operation. Good luck to everyone with that. https://www.eia.gov/nuclear/spent_fuel/ussnftab2.php
Of course with natural gas growing as in the reference case the climate is in overdrive and the economy is in far overshoot.
Coal barely reduces in real output over 30 years.
Gone fishing,
I agree the EIA’s scenario does not look very realistic. Wind and solar power will fall in price and drive coal to 5% or less by 2050. Natural gas will also not be able to compete after 2025 and is likely to drop to 10% or less of US electric power output by 2050, likewise heat pumps (both air and ground source depending upon climate) will replace at least 50 % of natural gas use for heat and hot water by 2050 (perhaps more), better insulation levels, sealing of air leaks in homes and building standards for new homes and commercial buildings to passivehaus standards will also help cut natural gas use by perhaps an additional 25% (of current use for building heat). I believe these estimates are conservative, we could do much better with good government policy to address climate change.
Can anybody explain to me WHY solar farms and wind farms are being built on leased land? Farmland is simply NOT THAT VALUABLE, not so valuable as to justify the lease rates I read about. The developers should be buying the land outright.
Of course if there’s only ONE farm that’s suitable in a given locality, due to local political opposition, local roads, local access to the grid via a main line, and so forth, the farmer might be in the driver’s seat, and most farmers would rather eat shit with a splinter anyway than to sell out the home place, unless they are at death’s door.
Does anybody here have links to sites that have PROFESSIONALLY prepared data on the reduction in peak electrical demand, and on the reduction in need for off peak ( such as night and weekend) electricity, as the result of mandating the adoption of appliances designed to perform without a steady supply of electricity, and tightening up building codes ?
I know of a lot of things that can help, such as going to double or triple sized and super insulated hot water heaters that will last out two or three days of low solar or wind power production, etc, but any kind of comprehensive hard or estimated data is hard to find. Hard for me, anyway. I’m a computer nit wit.
Public Fear Of Nuclear Isn’t Why Nuclear Energy Is Fading
What is apparent is that prior to 2005 most people charged with developing electrical generation in countries around the world realized it was too expensive, too slow to build, too inflexible, and that other alternatives, mostly gas at the time sadly, were cheaper. And that in 2016 to now, most people realize that nuclear is still too expensive, too slow to build, and too expensive, and that wind and solar are radically cheaper and faster to build. And that wind and solar can be built in any country in the world, unlike nuclear.
Fear of nuclear power is vastly overrated as an issue among pro-nuclear advocates. Like conservatives in the USA up to the Secretary of the Interior blaming non-existent eco-terrorists for west coast wildfires, it’s a strawman, a convenient fiction that the nuclear advocates share among themselves to avoid the harsh truth.
The harsh truth being: It Is The Economy Stupid!
I would love to hear anyone’s comment on this article! 😉
If nuclear energy were cheap and easy to build, it would be the prime source of electric power on the planet. If the advanced nuclear systems touted by Gates had ever come to fruition we would have a lot more than we do now.
Since neither condition is a reality, nuclear power will reduce except in places like China where money is no object. Certainly logical and sane thinking about safety and the environment would never limit the growth of nuclear, that is not how the planet is run by humans. Not in general at least.
Quick, rip down all the towers! I have actually witnessed this! Oh yeah, all wires in the sky have to go.
Guy wires pose a fatal threat to birds, who often circle the tower lights at night.
Towerkill is a phenomenon in which birds are killed by collisions with antenna towers. In the United States, the US Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that between 5 and 50 million birds are killed each year by tower kill
The effect on overall bird populations by towerkill may be small, but the phenomenon is of considerable concern to ornithologists, because many endangered bird species are being killed, and because so many birds are killed in such a small area of land. In at least one instance, several thousand birds were killed at a single tower in one night. Additionally, the unnatural lights on communication towers disrupt bird migration patterns in ways that are still not fully understood. At least 231 species have been affected, with neotropical migrants making up a large proportion of all species killed.
Towerkill is a phenomenon in which birds are killed by collisions with antenna towers. In the United States, the US Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that between 5 and 50 million birds are killed each year by tower kill
The real problem is, renewables frying too many birds… /SARC!
This year, above-average spring rainfall and streamflow is transporting nitrogen to tidal waters in amounts slightly above the long-term average, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, which provides the nitrogen-loading estimates used to generate the annual hypoxia forecast.
In spring 2018, the Susquehanna River delivered 85.7 million pounds of nitrogen into the Chesapeake Bay. The Potomac River, as measured near Washington, D.C., supplied an additional 30 million pounds of nitrogen, according to USGS.
My guess is that the Tesla pickup will look clean and classy, but pretty much like other pickups, rather than cyber punk or any other outrageous ( to the typical new truck buyer) style.
The three models out already are basically clean classic and conventional in the styling. Tesla has not yet made the mistake of producing a vehicle that will look strange and outlandish to the buying customer.
A recent survey asked Republicans and Democrats whether they agreed with the statement that members of the opposition party “are not just worse for politics — they are downright evil.”
The answers, published in January in a paper, “Lethal Mass Partisanship,” were startling, but maybe they shouldn’t have been.
Just over 42 percent of the people in each party view the opposition as “downright evil.” In real numbers, this suggests that 48.8 million voters out of the 136.7 million who cast ballots in 2016 believe that members of opposition party are in league with the devil.
The mass partisanship paper was written by Nathan P. Kalmoe and Lilliana Mason, political scientists at Louisiana State University and the University of Maryland.
How long have I been saying it’s all about us versus them, our community /family/ religion/ culture / national identity as opposed to the OTHER’s community/family? religion/culture/ national identity ?
A number of obviously reasonably well educated, even superbly educated liberals ( who by and large dominate any political discussions, as opposed to purely technical discussions here) who post here have made it perfectly clear over time, reading between the lines, that they see the socially conservative and or religious people of this country as more or less only semi human, to be despised rather than accepted as fellow citizens with the right to their own ethics and way of life.
Now it’s certainly true that the socially conservative element is even MORE prone to this failing….. but then, as the liberal element is so extraordinarily fond of pointing out…… the conservative camp includes the large majority of voters who truly are ignorant.
Ignorance is actually a pretty goddamned good excuse for a lot of mistaken beliefs and thinking, unless you happen to be a hard core right winger, one of the kind that thinks all the problems experienced by poor, ignorant, uneducated people happen to be THEIR OWN FAULT, for not working hard enough to succeed and get rich, lol.
There’s nothing quite so satisfying as advertising one’s superior beauty, muscles, wealth, etchics, or education, because it’s STILL all about us versus them, and worth bragging about , any time your “us” has the advantage of “them”.
People possessed of the modest amount of intellectual horsepower needed to understand the link about lethal mass partisanship and what I’m saying will hopefully give some thought to the way they talk about the opposition political camp, and thus win over some fence sitting voters, while at the same time avoiding the error of motivating the “mind’s made up” opposition on election day.
Elections in the USA are often won or lost by as little as one percent of the electorate shifting from one side to the other. If you live in a competitive district or state, you can do your part by motivating just one or two stay at homes or fence sitters to vote your way in 2020.
I agree that none of this is surprising! The underlying causes of which are deeply rooted in our primate ancestor’s evolution. This is deeply primal. The real danger is that when these base instincts are manipulated by deliberate propaganda, we get Nazi Germany and a Holocaust!
One of the great contradictions of human psychology is our notorious double-standard with respect to how we treat others, as a rule. If a person is viewed as being one of “us” – a member of our group, or our religious faith, or our nation – we are predisposed to cooperate with them, to empathize with their hardships, come to their assistance if needed, and sometimes even sacrifice our lives for them. Because they are members of our “tribe”, we view them as sharing a common fate.
Yet, paradoxically, our sense of solidarity and “patriotism” comes to an abrupt halt at the “waters’ edge” – to re-use an old expression about our foreign policy. People who we identify as “they”, or “them” are, by definition, outsiders – not one of “us”. They are likely to be perceived as “different” from us and even undeserving. Our attitude toward them can range from indifference to fear and even hatred. We may see them as strangers, aliens, parasites, competitors, a mortal threat, or maybe even sub-human. In the extreme, we may be willing to maim or kill them without remorse. Think of the Rohingya in Myanmar, or the Jews in Nazi Germany, or the many other historical examples of genocide and “ethnic cleansing.”
From the NY Times article I linked above.
Just over 42 percent of the people in each party view the opposition as “downright evil.” In real numbers, this suggests that 48.8 million voters out of the 136.7 million who cast ballots in 2016 believe that members of opposition party are in league with the devil.
Just let that sink in for a moment.
And this is a Pepsi, and Pepsi Lite situation.
On a macro level, there is not much difference.
More like this:
Once I saw this guy on a bridge about to jump. I said, “Don’t do it!”
He said, “Nobody loves me.” I said, “God loves you. Do you believe in God?”
He said, “Yes.” I said, “Are you a Christian or a Jew?”
He said, “A Christian.” I said, “Me too! Protestant or Catholic?”
He said, “Protestant.” I said, “Me too! What denomination?”
He said, “Baptist.” I said, “Me too! Northern Baptist or Southern Baptist?”
He said, “Northern Baptist.” I said, “Me too! Northern Conservative Baptist or Northern Liberal Baptist?”
He said, “Northern Conservative Baptist.” I said, “Me too! Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region or Northern Conservative Baptist Eastern Region?”
He said, “Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region.” I said, “Me too!”
“Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879 or Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912?”
He said, “Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912” I said, “Die heretic!” And I pushed him over.
This tale of pushing the heretic over is supposed to be taken as a parable, and exaggeration, an example of artistic license.
But I actually know some people who have switched churches, up to the point of giving up spaces, in the church cemetery where generations of their parents and grandparents are buried, to go elsewhere, as the result of a dispute on a point of little more consequence.
And sometimes Jesus’s most devoted followers expel some members from their church as the result of disputes about such minor points. It’s easier to operate on the us versus them principle than it is the love thy neighbor and brother and sister human being principle.
BUT nevertheless, it’s possible, by being sneaky and devious, to quietly tunnel under the mental walls of the enemy camp, and plant the seeds of heresy and rebellion within the walls.
One way that has worked twice for me is to simply never mention republicans or democrats, and just focus on the cruelty and injustice of our health care system, wherein a poor person can’t get treatment for a serious injury or illness without likely being bankrupted…… if he or she gets care at all.
Once my chronically ill voter to be has gotten thoroughly pissed off and aroused, having escaped the clutches of hopelessness and apathy, I mention doing something… such as voting for the same politicians that put in Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, free school lunches, and the county health department…….. the Democrats.
It’s worked twice.
It’s worked a third time by helping a shotgun and fishing rod packing young nephew, born into a hard core R type family, come to understand who REALLY gives a damn about the environment…. because you see , he loves nature, and hunting and fishing, above everything else excepting getting laid, and he has that covered too, because he takes his girl with him on such outings. He’s now majoring in biology, a decision made with a great deal of encouragement on my part, and hopes to enjoy a career working in the field as a researcher, law enforcement officer, or park ranger, etc.
He will vote D in 2020 because he has already finished his freshman level but REAL chemistry and biology classes, and now KNOWS enough, because the chemistry included the basic physics of gases, to know that forced warming aka climate change is real and that it threatens to destroy most of what he holds most dear.
BTW,
The post has zero to do with religion, it was about tribalism!
Us vs. Them!
The religion part was just the backdrop to the story. I could rewrite it as say two members of different motorcycle gangs or any other group for that matter!
Cheers!
The country once split apart in the past. It is now splitting apart again, this time over energy slaves instead of actual human slaves. Whatever unity we had is being eroded away by both major parties.
I’ve seen the same story told in the form of patriotism, sports fandom, and even scientific debate, except that the supposed heretic was only doused in ice water in a public forum. That one was a comic take off on that very thing happening to EO Wilson.
Lots of junior but real and competent scientists have been silenced, over the years and centuries, by powerful older guys in their field, by the equivalent but less violent technique of ridicule and preventing them from getting good positions.
This has happened so often it has lead to the saying that science often advances one generation at a time, as the old guys die.
If religion isn’t, among many other things that it is, both good and bad, just ONE MORE FORM or manifestation of tribalism, I’m even dumber than some people think, lol.
“The more things change, the more they stay the same.” I don’t have any idea who said THIS first, but he she or maybe even IT was an astute student of ape nature, lol.
Now here’s evidence that the establishment has been wrong once again. It may not hold up, but it’s worth some thought.
IF this holds, it would explain the fact that two or three people I have known, and many I have read about in old books seem to have an innate sense of direction. My old Daddy was/ is one of them. You could spin him around in the dark in the middle of the woods on a pitch black foggy night, and he invariably knew which way to go to home. He might start in the wrong direction, but he always corrected his mistake within a minute or so. But he’s bedridden now, for all practical purposes, and can’t demonstrate it ever again. Ditto the dogs, but tried it without the dogs along.
And even though he never got past what was the equivalent of junior high in a the backwoods one room school, he taught himself to tell time to within about five to ten minutes looking at the stars. He has never been able to explain how he does it, but he does say he learned just by looking, while using a watch, over a period of years. I suspect he subconsciously noted the rise and set of certain stars, given our location in the mid latitudes.
One thing that’s known to memory experts but few laymen that men and women who have little or no formal education sometimes have simply amazing memories, and can and do learn long stretches of poems, scripture, family history, etc, by heart, with the ability to repeat them word for word years later.
These people are not the same as the ones who can memorize anything, but lack in ordinary intelligence. They are usually in the middle of the curve in terms of everyday intellectual abilities and personality.
“Each year, the world consumes more than 92b tonnes of materials – biomass (mostly food), metals, fossil fuels and minerals – and this figure is growing at the rate of 3.2% per year.
Since 1970, extraction of of fossil fuels (coal, oil and gas) has increased from 6bn tonnes to 15bn tonnes, metals have risen by 2.7% a year, other minerals (particularly sand and gravel for concrete) have surged nearly fivefold from 9bn to 44bn tonnes, and biomass harvests have gone up from 9bn to 24bn tonnes.”
To picture the amount of extraction going on in the world think of it as Mount Everest being removed every 1.9 years.
Also think that as we expand our systems, more energy and material is needed just to maintain the system. Soon we will cross the point where the amount of energy and material needed to maintain is equal to our ability to extract that energy and material. What then?
Off to nowhere.
I think this says a lot about where civilization is putting it’s efforts and where it wants to be in the future.
Meanwhile, if you watch the entire video of the event you realize the entire thing was made up to get CNN views and clicks.
I’m anything but a Trump supporter, but this whole episode has been ridiculous. CNN deserves to lose the 275 million dollar defamation suit now brought against them.
Naw, I think you are a typical lying Trump supporter.
I’m a registered Democrat and voted for Hillary in the last election.
You’ve also seen me (and agreed with me at times) talking in depth about environmental issues and risks on this forum. If you looked into my post history here you would see that I am very concerned about the current degradation to the environment, the current state of US politics, and the energy issues facing society.
Does any of this scream “lying Trump supporter” to you?
I can examine an incident with my own eyes and figure out when one side or the other has blown things out of proportion (or in this case simply made them up) and come to personal conclusions about what occurred.
But I guess this just makes me a “lying Trump supporter”.
I was replying to this line: the entire thing was made up to get CNN views and clicks.
Anyone with an ounce of brains will realize CNN did not make up the entire thing. The entire thing is exactly what it looks like, a bunch of smart ass kids, with MAGA caps, harrassing and old man. Only a Trump supporter would try to justify it. I hope they, that is the parents of the smart ass kids, lose their ass in the lawsuit.
If you watch the longer video of the event, you will see that
1. The children were harassed by a religious group.
2. In response, the children started performing school spirit chants with words like “CCH” (the name of their highschool)
3. A native American man inserts himself into the middle of their group, and locks eyes with a student while banging a drum. The students never did anything directly too him nor did they block his exit. They did not invite him in. He chose to insert himself. It was clearly an older and presumably wiser man attempting to provoke some sort of response from school age children.
Now, are those kids smartass, disrespectful, and uneducated? Yes, probably. Are they brainwashed by their communities and religious school? Definitely yes. Are they going to grow up and change their ways and become more respectful, helpful members of society? The odds are against them, but some surely will.
But since when have kids NOT been disrespectful little twerps? Should the punishment for being an idiot as a child really be to have your 16 year old face plastered across the entire country above the words “racist instigator”?
And in this instant, the kid was CLEARLY not the instigator, if you watch more than the 30 second clip that went viral.
I watched the whole thing, several times. CNN did not make it up as you stated. And the old man did not insert himself in the picture. He was just marching along and they surrounded him. CNN did nothing wrong, they just recorded the event. If those idiot parents sue them they will definitely lose.
You watched the entire 1.5 hour long video multiple times? Sorry if I find that hard to believe. The video cnn originally showed does not show the entire event. There is another, longer video, from a different angle, which shows the man walking into the middle of their (stationary) group, banging a drum.
Oh fuck no, I watchet the entire video shown on other channels several times, much longer but not an hour and a half. That was enough. CNN just pointed their camera and recorded the event, that’s all.
And you think the MAGA kids should be paid millions of dollars for having their public antics recorded? Bullshit! Only a rabid Trump supporter could believe such bullshit.
1.5 hours? You are just making that shit up.
Ron,
Here is a link to the full video. It is actually 1.75 hours long. Look at the 1 hour 12 minute mark to watch the native american man walk into the group of teenagers, banging a drum.
Within 1 day (or so) of first airing the initial report, CNN got more video and showed the whole thing, explaining that the initial report was an incomplete view. They didn’t fabricate it. Better if they had the whole thing from the start.
Still, ugly from many angles.
Stoic smile, or disrespectful smirk? One could view it as an indicator of social progress that this is what we are now debating from our tribal perches.
Whale Ate 88 Pounds Of Plastic Before Washing Up Dead In Philippines
A whale that washed up dead on the shores of the Philippines last week had a staggering 88 pounds of plastic inside its stomach before succumbing to starvation and dehydration.
It has been a year since China jammed the works of recycling programs around the world by essentially shutting down what had been the industry’s biggest market. China’s National Sword policy, enacted in January 2018, banned the import of most plastics and other materials headed for that nation’s recycling processors, which had handled nearly half of the world’s recyclable waste for the past quarter century. The move was an effort to halt a deluge of soiled and contaminated materials that was overwhelming Chinese processing facilities and leaving the country with yet another environmental problem—and this one not of its own making.
In the year since, China’s plastic imports have plummeted by 99 percent, leading to a major global shift in where and how materials tossed in the recycling bin are being processed. While the glut of plastics is the main concern, China’s imports of mixed paper have also dropped by a third. Recycled aluminum and glass are less affected by the ban.
Even before China’s ban, only 9 percent of discarded plastic was being recycled, while 12 percent was burned. The rest was buried in landfills or simply dumped and left to wash into rivers and oceans. Without China to process plastic bottles, packaging, and food containers—not to mention industrial and other plastic waste—the already massive waste problem posed by our throwaway culture will be exacerbated, experts say. The planet’s load of nearly indestructible plastics—more than 8 billion tons have been produced worldwide over the past six decades—continues to grow.
Over the coming decade, as many as 111 million tons of plastics will have to find a new place to be processed or otherwise disposed of as a result of China’s ban, according to Brooks and University of Georgia engineering professor Jenna Jambeck. However, the places trying to take up some of the slack in 2018 tended to be lower-income countries, primarily in Southeast Asia, many of which lack the infrastructure to properly handle recyclables. Many of those countries were quickly overwhelmed by the volume and have also now cut back on imports.
As Costs Skyrocket, More U.S. Cities Stop Recycling
By Michael Corkery
Recycling, for decades an almost reflexive effort by American households and businesses to reduce waste and help the environment, is collapsing in many parts of the country.
Philadelphia is now burning about half of its 1.5 million residents’ recycling material in an incinerator that converts waste to energy. In Memphis, the international airport still has recycling bins around the terminals, but every collected can, bottle and newspaper is sent to a landfill. And last month, officials in the central Florida city of Deltona faced the reality that, despite their best efforts to recycle, their curbside program was not working and suspended it.
Those are just three of the hundreds of towns and cities across the country that have canceled recycling programs, limited the types of material they accepted or agreed to huge price increases.
“Recycling has been dysfunctional for a long time,” said Mitch Hedlund, executive director of Recycle Across America, a nonprofit organization that pushes for more standardized labels on recycling bins to help people better sort material. “But not many people really noticed when China was our dumping ground.”
Living as I do in the tropics, it has struck me that one of the counter-intuitive things about plastic recycling is that it uses fossil fuel energy. I once took a load of PET bottles to a local recycling depot where they were using a giant shredder to shred the plastic before bagging it for export. No doubt when it reaches it’s destination further processing involves melting, again using fossil fuel energy.
There is an entrepreneur I saw at a solar trade show that had built a concentrating solar rig to do rotational molding of plastics. It consisted of a small field of mirrors, focused on a converted 20 foot shipping container. I wonder how long it will be before someone decides to use that kind of setup so that plastic can just be washed and then tossed into a solar heated vat with other plastic of the same type for a largely solar powered recycling process?
Over the coming decade, as many as 111 million tons of plastics will have to find a new place to be processed or otherwise disposed of as a result of China’s ban, according to Brooks and University of Georgia engineering professor Jenna Jambeck.
What a stupid statement! Demonstrates a total lack of knowledge and lack of vision!
I’m willing to go out on a limb and bet those 111 million tons of plastic products will never even be produced. They will be substituted by natural fully recyclable natural polymers and local 3D printing methods. Google Chitin and the 3D revolution. I’ve posted that link at least a dozen times already so I’m not doing it again.
But that is just the tip of the iceberg. I’m personally working with a young Brazilian entrepreneur who is being funded by Silicon Valley VC to produce and market products made from natural plant based materials for packaging, fast food plates, utensils, cups, straws, etc… I can’t reveal details at this time. This is not some vaporware pie in the sky idea. There are thousands of new ideas such as this one being developed the world over!
The usual disclaimer has to be made: This kind of development is NOT a silver bullet. None of this is going to save us! It may all be too little too late but those that continue to think the the future is going to look anything like the past by hanging on to fossil fuels and petrochemicals in general are going to be in for a rather rude awakening!
The fossil fuel and oil age are already over. Most people just don’t know it yet!
Cheers!
Fred
Keep me posted on that natural packaging. There is a LOT of that sort of stuff used around here but the market is very price sensitive. If the price is right I may be interested in supplying the product locally.
NAOM
OK,will keep that in mind!
Heh, after writing that I did some washing up. Last Saturday I bought some sprouts at the market and was washing out the container to re-use for mayonnaise. It felt a bit different so I took a look on the base –
Made in USA
Cold drinks only
GREENWARE
Made from plants
triangle 7 with pla under
syncronicity?
NAOM
Trump Parrots Anti-Science Misinformation As He Readies Climate Change Panel
President Donald Trump on Tuesday once again used his Twitter platform to share misinformation about climate change to his 59 million followers, quoting a “Fox & Friends” guest who falsely claimed global warming isn’t caused by man and could actually benefit many people.
Former Greenpeace Canada President Patrick Moore, a longtime nuclear energy industry shill, denied that human activity fuels climate change and claimed the phenomenon doesn’t pose an imminent danger to life on earth, despite the mountains of scientific evidence that suggest otherwise.
He dubbed the climate crisis as “fake news” and chalked up the catastrophic rise in global warming over the last few decades as simply “weather.”
The drama and tears we’re going to see from liberals because of this panel are going to be epic! ?
I did not mean that Conservatives are generally stupid; I meant, that stupid persons are generally Conservative. I believe that to be so obvious and undeniable a fact that I hardly think any hon. Gentleman will question it.
[John Stuart Mill, in a Parliamentary debate with the Conservative MP, John Pakington, May 31, 1866.]
I guess TheKrell proves John Stuart Mill’s point…. in spades.
I thought about responding to his comment and actually composed a lengthy response. But decided to delete it and put him on ignore instead! It is past time to stop wasting our time with stupid trolls. Especially those, whose sole purpose it is to foment discord just for the sake of discord!
This site needs a troll warning button!
Well, I think it important to note that, as a general rule, as this conservative admits, it’s the liberals who believe in science and conservatives who don’t.
I think that confirms John Stuart Mill’s opinion about which side of the political spectrum you find most stupid people.
Hard to disagree with that! But I think there is a difference between Trolls and stupid people. Or should we just lump all of them under the ‘Deliberately Ignorant’ label?
Guys, my point was a climate change panel/debate isn’t going to change anyone’s opinion on climate theories, but will be entertaining to watch and will get Fox good ratings, which is what they want.
Your point is on the top of your head
Europe is using wood from U.S forests to replace fossil fuels
It’s enough to make a grown man cry,even an old farmer, to see what happens on a logging job these days. I live in an area where large landholdings in one tract are rare. The biggest single continuous tract of land in my immediate neighborhood, about three hundred acres, is in the process of being clear cut, with NOTHING left but stumps. Even the limbs and brush are being chipped, and sent someplace to be burnt, or sold as mulch.
At least local regs require leaving a narrow screen of trees alongside public roads, but it’s not enough you can’t see right thru it. And the land will either be cleared of stumps for farming, or it will be replanted, plantation style, probably with pine.
There are places further south where not even a sapling is left standing on square miles at a time.
This is an awesome politically driven boondoogle.
The Europeans would be many times better off, and the world would be better off, to spend the money spent on harvesting and transporting this wood sometimes hundreds of miles overland,an then across the Atlantic, and then to power plants, spending it on conservation measures, such as retrofitting older buildings and installing more electric car charging points and so forth.
The Europeans would be many times better off, and the world would be better off, to spend the money spent on harvesting and transporting this wood sometimes hundreds of miles overland,an then across the Atlantic, and then to power plants, spending it on conservation measures, such as retrofitting older buildings and installing more electric car charging points and so forth.
Oh, fer FUCK’s Sake !!!
Trust me on this! The Europeans are light years ahead of Americans on all of the above!
How do I know? Because I’ve been to Europe and seen it with my own eyes. I’ve seen the their old building retrofits, I’ve even worked on a few. I’ve been on their farms, I’ve talked to their farmers and helped plant fruit orchards. I know what they are doing with agricultural waste to biomass conversion and I’ve seen their solar farms, wind turbines and EV charging stations! I also see what is happening in the US.
Hey maybe we can find a way to burn wood pellets to run our AC units!
“The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.”
― Antonio Gramsci
See Europe for using wood to generate electricity. Also Vermont.
Wood is the lowest hanging fruit when oil, gas and coal run short.
Cherish those forests you see still standing. In 30-40 yrs they will be rare in many parts of the world, from Poland to Pennsylvania, Michigan to Ireland. Korea to Tuscany.
Cherish those forests you see still standing. In 30-40 yrs they will be rare in many parts of the world…
And there is a very high likelihood that at the point those few remaining stands will be wiped out by climate change, drought, pests and disease.
Stupid humans, that know the costs of everything but the value of nothing!
Europe is using wood from U.S forests to replace fossil fuels
That’s probably not a good idea nor is it sustainable and wood pellet burning may not even be carbon neutral even if it is obtained locally. Having said that…
First of all, wood pellets are not the full story behind biomass energy production in Europe. But even if it were, pellet imports are but a tiny fraction even of that.
Nearly 22 million tonnes (Mt) of wood pellets were used in the European Union in 2015, making the region the leading wood pellet consumer in the world. It is also the world’s leading producer, creating roughly half of the world’s global output – largely from European trees.
A report from the Standing Forestry Committee, set up to represent the forestry industries in EU countries, found that just 4% of the woody biomass used in the EU was imported.
Of the 22Mt used across Europe, 10.5Mt was used for heating, while 11.5Mt was used for industrial uses like fueling power plants. But in the UK, the level of wood used for fuel falls some way behind EU averages. Thanks in large part to Drax and its transition from coal to renewable wood pellet-powered electricity generation, that’s changing, but the UK still has a way to go to catch the continental average.
What the entire world needs is more implementation of wind, solar, hydro, battery and other forms of energy storage and less and less use of fossil fuels. Period!
Set the sails, I feel the winds a’stirring
Towards the bright horizon set the way
Cast your reckless dreams upon our Mayflower
The haven from the world and her decay
Who could heed the words of Charlie Darwin
Fighting for a system built to fail
Spooning water from the broken vessels
As far as I can see, there is no land
Oh my god
The water’s all around us
Oh my god, it’s all around
Invest $200 in wood, it lasts a short time, part of a season. Then it is gone.
Invest $200 in insulation, it lasts a lifetime and keeps working silently reducing heat and cooling demand with no effort. No trees need be cut down. It can prevent up to 70 million BTU loss over it’s lifetime. That’s 45 times the effective heat energy of the wood. In already insulated areas it’s only about 10 to 15 times the wood energy. With no further effort or cost. In fact it saves money.
Invest $200 in a PV panel, it lasts 30 to 50 years and quietly produces power that can be used for heating or many other uses. Instead of just 15 to 20 million BTU from a cord of wood it produces up to 75 million BTU over it’s lifetime.
Combine insulation and PV or thermal solar and never have to burn again.
Yep, invest in what works rather than stay on the hamster wheel of civilization. It reduces the GHG and pollution load too.
Yep, invest in what works rather than stay on the hamster wheel of civilization.
Especially if your hamster wheel is still powered by fossils fuels!
Great idea, a hamster driving it’s car on a hamster wheel.
Wood burning in whatever form has also a serious drawback: the smoke contains lots of nanoparticles etc that cause actual deaths from related lung diseases. Also those particles can get into bloodstream and cause other issues, especially for very young, old and persons already weakened by some unrelated disease…
Come tell that to my pyromaniac neighbor who needs to have a bonfire for a couple hours each day (no matter the weather) to stop himself from beating up his wife and kids. According to him, and the local city council, my concerns over the health effects of unregulated wood burning in my city is all scientific gobbledygook and a probable hoax anyway, since wood is an organic material and therefore cannot be dangerous.
I hope you are not downwind of him.
Perhaps you could discuss with him if there is real difference between smoking and inhaling wood smoke… or perhaps better not…
Despite some very cold weather in mid winter in the USA,
globally the last 3 months have very warm (hot) by historical standards.
I agree with you that Europe, at least Western Europe, is decades ahead of the USA, overall, in terms of energy efficiency and conservation.
But as GF has rightly posted in this thread, it’s still better by a mile to invest the money in solar panels or wind farms plus efficiency measures such as more insulation.
One of my neighbors has a tight well constructed and well insulated little house, by current Yankee standards anyway, about a thousand square feet, and he burns about two hundred fifty bucks worth of pellets annually in a four thousand dollar pellet stove. He could install a new heat pump for that much,locally, and within five or ten more years, he could be running in mostly on solar, wind, and or water power even here in Virginia, which is sort of slow on the uptake of wind and solar power.
But in his case at least, the wood is harvested and processed within a hundred mile radius of our immediate community.
I have no doubt that even in West Germany there are still some houses and buildings that are in dire need of either being torn down altogether, if they are old and rotten, or else retrofitted.
But I haven’t had the good fortune to travel extensively, as you have, and I might be wrong on this last point, lol. It won’t be the first nor the last time, but I’m here as much to advance my own knowledge as to spread the farmer’s perspective.
And I must admit that I’m still using from fifty to a hundred gallons of kerosene annually in a high efficiency mini furnace that ducts the exhaust right thru an outside wall, thru an exhaust vent that’s only two inches in diameter, as backup, for my wood stove. I’ll keep on doing so until it becomes obvious I should install a heat pump, which won’t be too much longer, because I won’t be able to harvest firewood more than a few more years.
Delaying the purchase means having a BETTER quality heat pump, plus it will be under warranty longer, with the warranty maybe even outlasting me, if I can delay the installation a few more years.
It’s my firm belief that a lot of hard core Trump types I know will install their own solar panels within the next few years……. just as soon as it becomes obvious to them that they can save enough on their electricity bill to justify the investment.
For now, and for the same reason, I’m delaying putting in five to ten thousand watts worth myself, because the cost of them is falling faster, annually, than the avoided cost of purchased electricity is, here, locally, on that same annual basis.
But as GF has rightly posted in this thread, it’s still better by a mile to invest the money in solar panels or wind farms plus efficiency measures such as more insulation.
Which is exactly what they are doing!
I have no doubt that even in West Germany there are still some houses and buildings that are in dire need of either being torn down altogether, if they are old and rotten, or else retrofitted.
But I haven’t had the good fortune to travel extensively, as you have, and I might be wrong on this last point, lol.
Sure, you might find some buildings in West Germany, here and there that could use a good retrofit. Though that would be the exception and not the rule. So I’d say that on this point, you are mostly wrong! I’m not holding that against you, just stating the facts as I have seen them!
Cheers!
Back atcha one more time Fred,
How well are they coming along in the old East German sector?
I imagine they are mostly caught up, because it’s been quite some time since the Wall came down, but I don’t see much if anything in the news about the former commie dominated part of Germany.
I never get mad about finding out I’m wrong. You and the rest of the guys here are helping me make sure I’ll have my facts straight when I go live with my own site, hopefully sometime this year.
How well are they coming along in the old East German sector?
Admittedly I have much less firsthand experience in what used to be East Germany. I’ll have to look into that! But I have a hunch that they are not all that far behind.
Cheers!
Photographer Captures Last Images of Majestic Super Tusker Elephant
The Limey’s ( I’m fond of them, and don’t mind being called a Yankee at all, even though I’m from Virginia.) got thirty five percent of their electricity from wind this past week.
That’s thirty five percent’s worth of money for fuel they didn’t have to send to other countries, some of them the more or less declared enemies of their country and ours, and more of them the sort that aren’t exactly our FRIENDS.
The anti renewables crowd will as usual go out of their way to overlook such news.
OFM, over on the oil thread, Hugo points out that Germany only gets 5% of its electricity from solar. He forgets to point out that one of his links shows Germany at 45% renewables for 2019 (up 13% from 2018). Cognitive dissonance?
Hugo might find the following news deeply upsetting then:
A year ago, Germany set itself a target of securing 65 per cent of its electricity needs from renewable energy sources by 2030 – one of the more ambitious renewable energy targets anywhere in the world, but one that is still well short of the 100 per cent many experts believe is not only necessary, but possible in Germany.
Possible may be underselling it, however, if the last few weeks of electricity generation in Germany are anything to go by.
A week ago, RenewEconomy editor Giles Parkinson reported that Germany had sourced nearly 65 per cent of its electricity generation from renewables for the week finishing March 3 – “week 10”, according to the parlance of the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems (Fraunhofer ISE), from whom the data has been sourced.
Weeks 11 and 12 have seen Germany’s renewable electricity generation continue to increase, with week 11 (the week ending March 10) securing 67.6 per cent of its electricity from renewable energy sources while week 12 (the week ending March 17) increasing that percentage to 72.4 per cent.
Hugo might find the following news deeply upsetting then:
Yeah, I imagine that he and others like him, might have their heads actually explode if they visit Germany and other parts of Europe in person!
WOW! Awesome creature. Cause of death, old age. Contributing factors, drought and not enough food.
About 20 individuals like her left on the planet! Most people on this planet will never even get to see these incredible photographs, let alone a living breathing creature like her.
Meanwhile Donald Trump Jr. got to kill an elephant and cut it’s tail 0ff. What a despicable piece of shit!
.
Like father, like son.
As stated, “What a despicable piece of shit!”
.
Bullying McCain, Trump shows his fights don’t stop at the graveyard’s edge
WASHINGTON — Picking on a dead man seems like the ultimate bully move.
But president Donald Trump continues to trash the late Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., all the same.
“I was never a fan of John McCain, and I never will be,” Trump said at the White House Tuesday, showing that his grudges don’t stop at the graveyard’s edge.
The bigger they are, the harder they fall. The clock is ticking.
These people are fucking sick.
Republicans like them. Are proud of them. Will vote for them again.
Most of the christian fundamentalists voted for them, approving of their ethics.
A majority of every christian sect voted for trump (except for maybe Quakers- I haven’t seen the numbers).
Obviously, they don’t see Joshua of Nazareth as a role model in their daily life (as if we needed more proof).
Is that a wild elephant or a situation where it was raised specially for harvest?
Wow! Just fucking wow!
Yeah, I thought that question was hilarious. That guy just has to be the typical Trump supporter, dumb as a rock.
Super moon tonight and tomorrow for those of us lucky enough to have clear skies.
Vernal equinox at 5:58 EDT.
Last night it was easy to walk around without a headlamp with the bright moon.
Wonderful nuclear, the answer to all our problems.
To be fair, this was a random gang shooting and the convoy transporting unprocessed uranium just happened to get caught in the crossfire. There was zero risk to anyone from the uranium. Now, as for the risk of acute lead poisoning… that would have been a whole nuther matter!
BTW, I used to dive Ilha Grande island near Angra. It is still beautiful even today.
I could do without a nuclear reactor nearby! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilha_Grande
Cheers!
Ilha Grande = Big Island ?
I have only visited one beach, one that was popular with Sao Paulo, didn’t want to swim – too many floaters, very contaminated. Scenery on the beach was very worthwhile 😉
NAOM
Yes, Ilha Grande means big island. There are still lot’s of nice beaches in São Paulo State. I like some of the beaches north of Ubatuba, The Surf Capital of São Paulo State! BTW, its about 165 Km from Ilha Grande to Ubatuba heading south on The Rio Santos highway! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubatuba
E FredM,
What is the unprocessed uranium? Yellowcake? Ore?
Enquiring minds want to know.
From the articles I read some said natural uranium others seemed to imply it was fuel rods. Processing seems to be done at Resende with enrichment in the UK so I would guess they were fuel rods.
O comboio saiu da sede da Indústrias Nucleares do Brasil (INB), em Resende, no sul do estado do Rio, em direção de Angra dos Reis por volta das 6h20m. Dois caminhões com pastilhas de urânio enriquecido estavam sendo escoltados pela Polícia Rodoviária Federal e veículos do Instituto Estadual do Ambiente (Inea).
A empresa revelou que a carga correu risco: “Se um tiro de arma de fogo conseguisse atravessar a proteção do contêiner, poderia danificar o combustível nuclear. No entanto, isso não colocaria em risco a população nem o meio ambiente. O urânio contido em um elemento combustível está em estado natural, tendo o mesmo nível de radioatividade encontrado na natureza”.
Translation:
The convy had left the headquarters of Indústrias Nucleares do Brasil (INB) in Resende, in the south of the state of Rio, towards Angra dos Reis at around 6:20 am. Two trucks with enriched uranium pellets were being escorted by the Federal Highway Police and vehicles from the State Environmental Institute (Inea).
The company revealed that the cargo was at risk: “If a gunshot had been able to penetrate the protective container, it could have damaged the nuclear fuel, but this would not have endangered the public or the environment. The fuel was in a natural state, having the same level of radioactivity as that found in nature.
“Two trucks with enriched uranium pellets”
“The fuel was in a natural state”
Not a contradiction, surely? 🙂 I think that moving from the processing plant to a power plant would suggest fuel rods. A few bullets shouldn’t cause a great hazard with uranium but the rods would need to go back for rework.
NAOM
BTW, the word ‘pastilha’ can also be translated as ‘cake’.
I think that moving from the processing plant to a power plant would suggest fuel rods.
Agree!
Someone should take it upon themselves to write a course teaching wannabe journalists, how to use internet search engines…
Interesting cake, does it have chocolate on top? 🙂 In Spanish they would be different but uranium yellowcake is purified but unenriched.
NAOM
Exxon’s Climate Denial Set To Face First Public Scrutiny As Legal Woes Mount
It’s been nearly four years since leaked documents revealed Exxon Mobil Corp. understood that fossil fuel emissions caused the planet to warm before it began funding a Big Tobacco-style misinformation campaign to discredit climate science.
Now the world’s largest publicly traded oil company will face public questions for the first time over its role in creating a climate crisis that threatens to upend human civilization and render dozens of major cities uninhabitable before the end of the century.
Chart below uses data from link above. Not likely to be a problem until World Debt to GDP is above 300%. The author of that piece seems to be a political scientist (his knowledge of economics seems to be a t an introductory level based on his analysis). An undergraduate student would get a C at best for that essay.
Methinks this may be the kick in the butt that Tesla needs to get one more price reduction into effect on the Model3.
I’m not sure just how this price is calculated, but according to the link, Tesla would have to reduce the price of the 3 a couple of thousand. I presume this means it must also be readily available for delivery at that price.
I wonder who took who to lunch while choosing the cut off price, lol.
Perhaps its time for me to move permanently to Europe?! At least people there seem to get it! WTF is wrong with the USA?!
The European Commission (EC) has outlined a new approach to moving to a net-zero greenhouse gas emissions economy by 2050. It says this would cost perhaps €1.42 trillion per annum. Much of that would have to be spent anyway, however, to replace existing capital items, including power plants and vehicles. And, if geared to a net-zero emission target, that investment would reduce and avoid some costs, using energy more efficiently and phasing out the use of increasingly expensive fossil fuels.
Keeping in mind, as we have previously discussed on this site, that the amount that the world spends on the fashion industry alone, tops 2.4 trillion annually.
Personally, I don’t see why the transistion to renewable energy and efficient buildings will actually cost anything at all over the long run. All the measures I take actually save me money, more money saved each year. If the change costs money it is generally not better, but is just hooked into a stupid wasteful system and should not be pursued. The whole idea is to short circuit the system, not build another complicated stupid one.
Sure the governments can supply initial interest free capital loans to get the ball rolling but the payback time is just a few years and the money gets rolled over. Eventually everyone is richer, healthier and the system runs better. Plenty of money left over for healthcare, education and increasing nature preserves.
The current system of energy and infrastructure is a lot like driving with a foot pressing the brake pedal.
Increasing the size of government by allowing it to spend more is rarely a good idea unless you happen to enjoy higher taxes and fewer personal freedoms.
Here in the US we could stop being such an empire, cut back on military, cut some of the legacy subsidies and pay for about anything we want to do. However, the problems is getting more than a few politicians agreeing on anything without big payouts to the dissenter’s pet projects.
Dan, are you a conservative by any chance? If taxes are for the public good (most of them are), bring them on!
Yup, before moving to Florida, I used to live in the Northeast, so big government, high tax, heavy regulation states left quite an unsavory taste in my mouth. Of course it goes without saying that significantly more people are moving out of states like New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, etc. than moving in.
You know what Danny Boy?! It is brainwashed morons like you, with the intellectual capabilities of a mentally deficient sea slug. and who are totally ignorant even of their own basic American history, that are usually the proudest wearers of those red MAGA hats!
You want to MAGA then let’s go back to the good old days of the 1950s and up until about the 70s or so, when the marginal tax rate on the super rich was 70% and the top marginal tax rate even hit 91%.
Maybe you should take a clue from Rutger Bergman, the Dutch Historian who told the billionaires at Davos point blank to their faces, that they were full of shit, for the simple reason, that they were not paying their fair share in taxes. And you, by mindlessly supporting their ideology, are a huge part of the problem.
Renewable generation provided a new record of 742 million megawatthours (MWh) of electricity in 2018, nearly double the 382 million MWh produced in 2008. Renewables provided 17.6% of electricity generation in the United States in 2018.
Nearly 90% of the increase in U.S. renewable electricity between 2008 and 2018 came from wind and solar generation. Wind generation rose from 55 million MWh in 2008 to 275 million MWh in 2018 (6.5% of total electricity generation), exceeded only by conventional hydroelectric at 292 million MWh (6.9% of total generation).
U.S. solar generation has increased from 2 million MWh in 2008 to 96 million MWh in 2018. Solar generation accounted for 2.3% of electricity generation in 2018. Solar generation is generally categorized as small-scale (customer-sited or rooftop) solar installations or utility-scale installations. In 2018, 69% of solar generation, or 67 million MWh, was utility-scale solar.
Carbon dioxide emissions from U.S. energy consumption will remain near current levels through 2050, according to projections in EIA’s Annual Energy Outlook 2019. The AEO2019 Reference case, which reflects no changes to current laws and regulations and extends current trends in technology, projects that U.S. energy-related carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions will be 5,019 million metric tons in 2050, or 4% below their 2018 value, as emissions associated with coal and petroleum consumption fall and emissions from natural gas consumption rise.
Whatever!
I am tempted to email them and ask how they arrive at the projections, when juxtaposed with the facts presented in the March 19 article. I guess they must think that, as the costs of electricity from renewable sources continue to fall, consumers will just forego the available savings and utilities will forego the opportunity to compete or generate higher profits? Also I’m guessing that the likes of Tesla are just flukes and there is no chance that a substantial portion of the US vehicle fleet will be electric by 2050? Going by the most recent projections from Tony Seba, any vehicles powered by ICEs in 2050 will be at least 25 years old, since he projects that ICE sales will have ended by 2025!
Go figure!
Where we see trends, EIA see upstarts about to quench. So take the most optimistic view and blend it with the EIA view to get a probable reality.
Renewable energy should be really taking over the total energy in the 2030’s to 2040’s, only 50 years late but better late than never(if we can still function).
On Saturday afternoon, utility-scale solar output on California’s grid peaked at 10,745 MW – its highest level since last summer. More importantly, California is wringing greater flexibility out of its imports, meaning more renewables with less curtailment.
From pv magazine USA.
California continues to break new ground in terms of integrating solar, and sometimes the records come when least expected. Data from the California Independent System Operator (CAISO) showed, on Saturday solar output peaked at 10,765 megawatts, at around 2.45pm local time.
According to several sources, that was the highest level since California set its record of 10.74 GW in June – despite Saturday’s achievement arriving ahead of tomorrow’s spring equinox.
Those two figures only included solar connected to the transmission grid, leaving out behind-the-meter consumption. Based on previous estimates, rooftop and other smaller solar installations connected to the grid probably produced around 50% more energy, meaning total output may have been around 16 GW.
Nor does this include all of California, as the cities of Los Angeles and Sacramento are among the areas that are not part of the CAISO grid.
Deployment and demand
It should be no surprise that California is setting new records as the state continues to lead the U.S. According to analyst Wood Mackenzie Power & Renewables and industry body the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA), California deployed 3.4 GW of solar last year – more than three times as much as any other state.
Just to give some perspective on energy and in particular electric consumption in the USA. Industry and heating/air conditioning are big factors.
Spotted an electric Nissan Leaf, for the first time, today. Also the Hyundai showroom has a new window sticker up for the IONIQ Electric. Maybe it is the start of a surge here though there is no charging infrastructure. One thing that bothers me is what will be the reaction of the ratacobres, will they start cutting off the charger cable?
NAOM
PS On the subject of theft – err, it might be termed as recycling – thieves are stealing razor wire fron the border fence and reselling it to locals!
One thing that bothers me is what will be the reaction of the ratacobres, will they start cutting off the charger cable?
Chinese electric buses making biggest dent in worldwide oil demand
Phil Dzikiy- Mar. 20th 2019 11:05 am ET
Thanks Fred,
From the piece you linked:
The report estimates that “for every 1,000 electric buses on the road, 500 barrels of diesel are displaced each day.” The same number of battery-powered electric vehicles only displaces 15 barrels of oil a day, by comparison.
Interesting indeed, and encouraging. Commercial Trucks, especially short haul should be next, probably a much bigger bang than personal vehicles and might be quicker to turn over as there are far fewer large commercial vehicles (GVW>4 metric tonnes) than smaller vehicles to replace.
The stop and go plus slower run of city buses is the forte’ of electric vehicles and the worst way to run an ICE.
Some info on taxi driving.
“According to the PBS program “Taxi Dreams,” the average number of miles driven by a taxi driver in New York City in a 12-hour shift is 180. If you do the simple math, a cab running five days a week would rack up 46,800 miles in 52 weeks. Because some cabs are used for double shifts, meaning that two drivers share the same vehicle in two 12-hour shifts, an average cab being used to pull double shifts could rack up 93,600 miles in a year or more.”
“Reported by Metro Taxi (metrotaxidenver.com), Denver’s largest taxicab company has 492 cabs on the road, and the company’s cabs average 70,000 miles per year. In an effort to reduce fuel costs and CO2 emissions, Metro Taxi has converted 15 percent of their vehicles to hybrid taxis. The hybrids get 50 to 55 miles per gallon, and Metro Taxi estimates that converting one taxi to a hybrid is the equivalent to converting five non-commercial vehicles into hybrids.”
Of course the drives are often done in stop and go conditions, the cars sit idling half the time and I probably many are lead footed with not much thought for efficiency. Probably 15 to 20 mpg at best in many cases.
Modeling a fleet of electric taxis:
“Using models they built and data from more than 10 million taxi trips in New York City, they found that shared automated electric vehicles, or SAEVs, could get the job done at a lower cost – by an order of magnitude – than present-day taxis while also reducing greenhouse gas emissions and energy consumption. What’s more, they found that “range anxiety” is moot because smaller cars with a smaller battery range were sufficient to complete the trips, although more charging stations would be needed.”
Thats good to see. “Standard Industries, the largest roofing company in the world, has created a new division known as GAF Energy “
WARNING 1969
I guess he was an alarmist before the term was even coined. /SARC!
In any case, we currently seem to be headed in the wrong direction in geopolitical terms!
There was a lot known about the causes of climate change and the effects of industrial pollution by the 1950s. The US Air Force had funded extensive atmospheric electromagnetic transmission studies to find windows in the atmosphere for their infrared guided missile programs.
So it is not surprising that when Limits to Growth came out people got a bit excited and since the major global dimming of the 1950s and 60’s caused temps to level out, the anti-warmers started their campaign of “the next ice age is coming”.
Of course when the air was cleaned up somewhat the temperature rose quickly and now the GHG’s are at such a level even global dimming (mostly from Asia now) cannot stop the warming.
Now after almost 70 years, efforts to conserve, make more efficient and produce new sustainable energy systems have only dented the progress of mankind in it’s redistribution of life, material and energy on this planet.
The global future of air quality doesn’t look so good. As humanity continues to make little progress fighting climate change, fires are expected to get more frequent.
But what is the average person supposed to do when the air around them is no longer safe to breathe?
Enter the face mask, an accessory ripe for the market in these dystopian times. People who live in desert areas have long known to cover their mouths and protect their lungs from dust. But in the past few years, a handful of companies have started making air filtration masks engineered specifically for both fashion and function. In California, a company called Vogmask has all but cornered the market with its brightly colored designs. And abroad, companies like Airpop and Respro are entering the fold, hoping to provide an attractive alternative to the standard white painter’s mask. But how does a new accessory category take off — especially one that covers a good portion of a wearer’s face?
Some parts of the world already have a huge head start here. People in Korea, Japan, and parts of China regularly wear what are often called “courtesy masks” — surgical masks worn to prevent their germs from infecting others. “It’s considered a polite thing to wear if you’re sick,” says Christina Xu, a researcher who studies cultural trends in the US and China.
Taking sunglasses as precedent could also reveal how the adoption of masks might play out. “Designer sunglasses went from being something that was very luxury menswear to luxury womenswear,” Xu says. Eventually, sunglasses branched out into all kinds of forms: sleek, bedazzled, futuristic, bright, athletic. “All of those are still sunglasses and still fashionable, just in very different ways of expressing who the wearer is.” And, like sunglasses, some masks will be cheap and not really work to protect you, while others will be expensive, luxurious items that you keep for years.
The near-future of this accessory could depend on who picks up the object first. Xu says she could see it going a few ways: It could be adopted by streetwear fans (Supreme already sells a face mask, although it doesn’t seem to actually do much in the way of safety or filtration) or by users who prefer the Burning Man aesthetic. Or perhaps the wellness world adopts these masks, in which case the product design would look quite different. “The other direction might be the sort of Lululemon-ification of the masks, if they’re treated as these essential wellness objects and they enter the world of performance fabrics and athleisure and athletic wear,” Xu says. Think Goop or Fabletics, but for face masks.
This is an issue that’s putting the steel toed boot to the Republican asses who still resist it in any competitive district. Old folks may just want to get drunk, instead of smoking, but they have way to many kids and grandkids in legal hot water, unable to get good jobs, etc, due to idiotic pot laws, to continue to support prohibition, as a voting block, as of 2020. If they’re fence sitters, so called independents, this one issue is enough to make Democrats out of them in 2020 in at least a couple of million cases.
I would love to hear anyone’s comment on the Ted Talk video linked below. That is only if you are willing to take seventeen minutes and thirty-three seconds out of your life to watch and listen to it.
Why renewables can’t save the planet
Shellenberger is a nuke lobbyist. Expect him to carefully select his “facts” to be in favour of nuke plants and ignoring anything that would be in favour of renewables.
I’ve already wasted enough of my time on his writings, so I will not waste time hearing him speak the crap I’ve most probably already heard.
Hey butthead, you are attacking the man, not his message. I want arguments against his message, not him personally.
If a man is too goddamn lazy to listen to a man’s argument, then he is a hypocrite when he comments on it.
I am not criticizing or praising his message. I want to hear valid arguments against his message, not ad hominem attacks.
Also, I have googled this man and nowhere does it even suggest that he is a lobbyist. He is a Democrat environmentalist who once ran for Governor of California.
Michael Shellenberger is an American author, environmental policy writer, cofounder of Breakthrough Institute and founder of Environmental Progress. He was named a Time magazine Heroes of the Environment (2008), winner of the 2008 Green Book Award, co-editor of Love Your Monsters (2011) and co-author of Break Through (Houghton Mifflin 2007) and The Death of Environmentalism (2004). He and his co-author Ted Nordhaus have been described as “ecological modernists” and “eco-pragmatists.” In 2015, Shellenberger joined with 18 other self-described ecomodernists to coauthor An Ecomodernist Manifesto. On November 30, 2017, he announced during a New York Times conference that he would run for Governor of California in 2018.
I agree Gerry, the man is about as biased as they get against solar and wind with lots of cherry picked arguments that never even touch on the extreme downsides of nuclear power.
He starts with a claim that 6,000 birds are killed every year by catching fire over Ivanpah. First, as far as I know this has never been filmed. Second, almost no solar is concentrating solar. He’s really stuck on Ivanpah and comes back to it over and over, but that is not the future of solar.
His arguments about taking up too much land are just garbage. See my recent comment on ethanol vs solar to see why. His implication that you have to build solar on undisturbed desert land is a lie, almost all plants are built on previously used land and all could be. It makes sense to build where the power lines are anyway.
His claim that RWE was going to cut down Hambacher Forest “in an attempt to expand solar and wind” is a lie.
He simply dismisses batteries as a solution.
His argument about the costs of solar in Germany are irrelevant, because panel prices have fallen 98% since the big boom.
The whole “nuclear is cheaper” argument ignores the fact that nuclear is almost unbuildable, and that the prices for both solar and wind are collapsing. For example, solar panel prices fell by about 35% in 2018 alone. The fact is that nuclear is almost dead in the West, because nobody can get a grip on the construction costs.
The safety issue ignores the downside risk of nuclear. For example, should Singapore build a nuclear plant? Well, in the unlikely case of a meltdown, the entire country might have to be evacuated. Where would they go? Also, the threat to life stemming from nuclear power will last for tens of thousands of years after the plants have stopped producing power, so looking back over the last 40 isn’t significant.
He also pretends that no construction workers or miners were ever killed in activities associated with nuclear, which seems unlikely. Studies like these are often dubious.
The energy density arguments are meaningless. It made sense in the 50s when arguing about coal, but it simply doesn’t matter. He ignores the water and waste heat issues giant thermal plants bring with them. As I recently posted, traditional thermal is dying. Sadly for them, the nuclear industry is stuck with it.
“There is no plan to deal with solar panels at the end of their 20 year life” is two lies. They will be recycled, and they will last more than 20 years.
His claim that renewables are a plot on the part of fossil fuel companies to sell more fossil fuels is a lie.
His anecdotes about nuclear getting more popular are sad little delusions. He doesn’t have any idea about the way forward. He doesn’t even mention the environmentalist idea of reducing unnecessary consumption, because that would reduce demand for nuclear power. He just pretends to give a shit about the environment to shill for the nuclear energy.
He attacks renewables instead of showing how nuclear is a solution because nuclear isn’t a solution. If it were, the talk would be called “Why nuclear can save the planet.”
He’s just tedious and mendacious.
Following is a 47 minute video but you can watch it on high speed.
It underscores why nuclear can’t compete on economic terms with wind and solar.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONEm1ph3MP4
Exploring an Abandoned Nuclear Power Plant
Second, almost no solar is concentrating solar.
Baloney. Go here and see a photos of a few hundred concentrated solar plants:
concentrated solar power
And from Wikipedia
CSP had a world’s total installed capacity of 4,815 MW in 2016, up from 354 MW in 2005. As of 2017, Spain accounted for almost half of the world’s capacity, at 2,300 MW, making this country the world leader in CSP. The United States follows with 1,740 MW. Interest is also notable in North Africa and the Middle East, as well as India and China. The global market has been dominated by parabolic-trough plants, which accounted for 90% of CSP plants at one point.[7] The largest CSP projects in the world are the Ivanpah Solar Power Facility (392 MW) in the United States (which uses solar power tower technology) and the Mojave Solar Project (354 MW) in the United States (which uses parabolic troughs).
The global market has been dominated by parabolic-trough plants, which accounted for 90% of CSP plants at one point.
Right! And those CSP plants do not fry birds in flight! So implying that CSP plants, let alone most PV plants, are a major cause of bird deaths by frying is disingenous to say the least! It is a calculated appeal to emotion! It is blatant psychological manipulation. Especially when compared to the one billion birds that die every year when they fly into human-made objects such as buildings with reflective windows. BTW most of those towers of glass require massive amounts of energy to heat and cool. If one truly cares about birds then they should be up in arms about those buildings.
Right, total install capacity is 5 GW. Meanwhile about 104 GW of PV was installed in 2018, and strong growth is expected in 2019.
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/global-solar-pv-installations-to-surpass-104-gw-in-2018
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2018/12/19/2019-pv-installations-to-hit-123-gw-global-balance-shifting-says-ihs/
Total installed PV now stands at half a terawatt. 5GW is about 1% of this. In four years PV will hit a terawatt, a CSP will be down to a half percent.
So I stand by my statement. Look at the numbers.
https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/de/documents/publications/studies/Photovoltaics-Report.pdf
I don’t claim PV will save the world. But it will crush the existing energy business. That includes a significant percentage of agriculture, which is being used for ethanol palm oil etc.
Shellenberg clickbait headline is just a strawman. Boiling vast amounts of water to generate electricity is on its way out. Gas is switching to much lower footprint combined cycle, which is twice as efficient, but nuclear and (probably) coal can’t escape traditional thermal. Expect to see many fewer cooling towers when you’re 90.
With demand flat and efficiency going through the roof, it’s no wonder the mining business is feeling the heat.
But even those improvements won’t stop renewables. You can’t sell fuel when the guy down the street is harvesting ambient energy for free.
He simply dismisses batteries as a solution.
Well, we are still lithium ion dependent.
The Japanese first commercialized them in the early 1990’s.
It has been a while—–
I have seen that video. It was like being fed a sugar coated turd.
400 nuclear plants currently, going to 15,000 to provide world energy. Might take a few hundred years.
Wouldn’t matter anyway, not enough fuel for more than a few decades, we would never reach 15,000 number. Then what? All energy to be used for deomssioning, cleanup and storage?
Need a major nuclear accident every day?
Want to decommission one per day and build a new one every day(takes 10 years or more just to build one).
Want to use lots of cooling water we don’t have and 120,000 square miles of land just for the facilities?
No mention of the horrors involved with uranium mining.
Read this for a deeper view into the nuclear power scenario. https://phys.org/news/2011-05-nuclear-power-world-energy.html
Nuclear energy is non-scalable, expensive (rising costs) and extremely dangerous since a high tech civilization with plenty of excess energy has not figuted out what to do with it. What would
We have discussed this subject thoroughly in the past at this site.
Yes, yes, yes, I know nuclear energy is bad. It’s horriable. No argument from me on that point. And yes we have discussed this many times in the past. But what we have not discussed is the problems this Ted Talk points out concerning renewable energy.
The argument is seldom, if ever, between good and evil. The argument is almost always between the greater and lesser evil.
Read the article Ron.
Choose a specific point and I will discuss it.
GF, I have no problem with the article. I agree with it. I agree that nuclear power will never power the world.
Nuclear power will never save the world.
Renewables will never save the world.
Both statements are equally true.
Nothing will save the world. Renewables are not the panaceas you guys believe them to be, that’s my argument.
I know, your next question is: Then what the hell are we supposed to do? Well, there will be survivors. Try your damn best to be among them.
Renewables are not the panaceas you guys believe them to be, that’s my argument.
Ron that is a patently false statement! I can’t speak for GF, though I’m pretty sure he is on the same page but at least in my case, I almost always state in unequivocal terms that I do not think that there are any magic bullets that will save us!
I still think we should be doing everything in our power to continue implementing them and transitioning off of fossil fuels!
No question, I know exactly how to deal with the problems.
As far as surviving, no one survives. Life is terminal, so do your best to be valuable and helpful.
I thought you wanted to discuss problems with renewables or nuclear, but you just went off the mental cliff. Ta, ta.
This is so damn frustrating. The video brought up so many problems with renewables and you wouldn’t touch one of them. That was the mental cliff. Ta, ta.
I said “Choose a specific point and I will discuss it.”
I was not about to shotgun that presentation, it was mostly BS.
Again, if you have a specific question or point to discuss about renewable energy, bring it up. I am sure myself or others will discuss it.
Of course it’s frustrating, Ron, that’s what trolls live on.
Schellenberg doesn’t give a shit about saving the planet, and the claim that renewables are the solution to all problems is a strawman argument.
There’s no question that you are super smart, but in this case you’ve simply been taken in by a troll, and need to sharpen your critical media consumption skills.
Renewables are not flawless, and they are not zero impact. No reasonable person claims they will solve all the planet’s problems.
Trolls like Schellenberg want you to feel angry and frustrated, because it clouds your judgement. His arguments have about as much substance as Trump’s claims that The Wall is a national emergency. They go out of their way to avoid substance.
Or as the Big Lebowski might have said to him, “You’re not wrong, you’re just an asshole.”
There’s no question that you are super smart, but in this case you’ve simply been taken in by a troll, …
Wrong on both counts. I am not super smart and I was not taken by a troll. I simply asked for opinions on this video. Mainly I wanted opinions on the problems with renewables. I got none. All anyone could come up with was they did not believe that concentrated solar burns burds. It does. Other than that I got almost nothing. That was what was frustrating.
Ron,
Other than that I got almost nothing. That was what was frustrating.
That is simply not true!
A number of people did rebut his points! alimbiquated certainly did.
http://peakoilbarrel.com/open-thread-non-petroleum-march-14-2019/#comment-669579
While you say it is frustrating I say it is beyond tiring to have to rebut the same bullshit over and over again.
I have to agree with GF on this one if you have a specific point of Shellenberger’s that you want to address, then by all means please cite it and I’m sure there are people here who will be willing to address it!
Also see Islandboy’s most recent comment downthread!
http://peakoilbarrel.com/open-thread-non-petroleum-march-14-2019/#comment-669912
It is not fair for you to say you got nothing!
BTW anyone who goes to Hungary, the country that produced the group known as the Martians, many of whom worked on the Manhattan project, Paul Erdős, Paul Halmos, Theodore von Kármán, John G. Kemeny, John von Neumann, George Pólya, Leó Szilárd, Edward Teller, and Eugene Wigner. Not to mention the Inventor of the Rubik’s cube and then holds up a Rubik’s cube to illustrate his point about nuclear energy is someone I personally want to just punch in the nose!
Ron,
yes, you were taken in by a troll. That doesn’t mean you actually believe his bullshit. It means you propagated it. Look at this thread. It’s all about Shellenberg. He won. The fact that he’s full of shit doesn’t matter.
Guys like him are like measles, they don’t have any goal other than self propagation. If they manage that they win. You have to immunize yourself.
Okay Fred, some did post rebuttals. But I am still frustrated. I still don’t see it as the bullshit almost everyone on this list see it as. There are some very serious problems with renewables just as there are very serious problems with fossil fuel and nuclear power.
And everyone who criticizes renewables is a troll or a lobbyist. I will leave it at that.
There are some very serious problems with renewables
Absolutely! IMHO, many of them are really systemic. So they are shared with nuclear and fossil fuels at the root level.
But why don’t you pick a specific point from Shellenberger’s presentation and let’s look at the pros and cons in a rational methodical way.
While we may not be experts, many of us have looked at these issues in great detail over a considerable time scale. We are aware of our own biases and I don’t think it is all that easy to pull the wool over our eyes. Especially not collectively as a group. My own views have certainly changed since back in the days of TOD. Not to mention that technology has been changing with exponentially increasing speed in many parallel fields.
2012 wasn’t all that long ago yet it is almost prehistoric times compared to where technology is today.
Go listen to this TED talk
https://www.ted.com/talks/david_mackay_a_reality_check_on_renewables?language=en
Reality Check on Renewables.
Many of those points may have been valid back then but are like a horse and buggy compared to a new Tesla now. Yet often times we still hear them touted as reasons why renewables won’t work today! But trolls have an easy job because very few people take the time to even try to keep up with all the changes!
That doesn’t in any way mean that I think we are saved. Personally I’ve been looking at ecosystems and the news is grim and getting grimmer by the day!
But neither nuclear, fossil fuels or renewables will solve any of that because it is a systemic problem and caused by how our entire industrial civilization is structured.
Cheers!
I really love Budapest! 😉
Seriously though, aside from any other objection, economics is the main reason that nuclear is not now nor will it be, barring some some serious technological upgrades, competitive with wind or solar.
While natural gas may still be an economically viable competitor at the moment it won’t be for long as it is still an emitter of CO2 and a finite resource to boot.
https://climatenexus.org/climate-news-archive/nuclear-energy-us-expensive-source-competing-cheap-gas-renewables/
Lot’s of good embedded links in that linked article such as this one:
http://deepdecarbonization.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/US_Deep_Decarbonization_Technical_Report_Exec_Summary.pdf
I was not familiar with Shellenberger prior to this talk but was not impressed by his arguments and found him to be a propagator of many half truths and myths, Not to mention that frying birds in mid flight is definitely not a major issue at most solar farms… Perhaps I’m biased, but in my view, his overall body language made him come across as someone who is insincere.
After my recent trip to Europe I am now personally more convinced than ever that solar and wind will be the long term winners. Nuclear is being phased out and natural gas is still a finite fossil fuel that is sold as clean energy, but it is anything but that!
Cheers!
Maybe we need to expand this problem. Our new dependency upon electricity for just about everything now should be questioned. Machines need electricity, people don’t. I propose we need to start looking at new ways to live that are less dependent upon electricity and large external energies. Start the weaning process and head in other directions, ones that fit the planet we live upon.
But that is a little further down the road, if the road still exists in the future.
Not to mention that frying birds in mid flight is definitely not a major issue at most solar farms…
You haven’t looked very hard.
This Mojave Desert solar plant kills 6,000 birds a year.
A macabre fireworks show unfolds each day along I-15 west of Las Vegas, as birds fly into concentrated beams of sunlight and are instantly incinerated, leaving wisps of white smoke against the blue desert sky.
Workers at the Ivanpah Solar Plant have a name for the spectacle: “Streamers.”
And the image-conscious owners of the 390-megawatt plant say they are trying everything they can think of to stop the slaughter.
Federal biologists say about 6,000 birds die from collisions or immolation annually while chasing flying insects around the facility’s three 40-story towers, which catch sunlight from five square miles of garage-door-size mirrors to drive the plant’s power-producing turbines.
In addition, coyotes eat dozens of road runners trapped along the outside of a perimeter fence that was designed to prevent federally threatened desert tortoises from wandering onto the property.
Federal biologists say about 6,000 birds die from collisions or immolation annually while chasing flying insects around the facility’s three 40-story towers, which catch sunlight from five square miles of garage-door-size mirrors to drive the plant’s power-producing turbines.
OK! So how many birds are actually incinerated vs collisions? How many concentrating solar plants like this one in California are there. I suspect not many!
And yes. birds that collide with tall man made structures do indeed often succumb as a consequence of these collisions. However this is most definitely not a problem unique to solar farms. Buildings are much more dangerous to birds. Are we going to start tearing down all our glass towers?!
https://www.futurity.org/buildings-kill-birds-1495692/
About one billion birds die every year when they unwittingly fly into human-made objects such as buildings with reflective windows. Such collisions are the largest unintended human cause of bird deaths worldwide—and they are a serious concern for conservationists.
All I’m saying is let’s keep things in a bit of perspective.
There are environmentalists and then there are people concerned about the natural world.
https://www.utne.com/environment/big-business-of-conservation-corruption-environmental-groups
Hi Folks,
How many birds are killed in collisions with windows in office buildings and other smaller buildings annually?
How many are killed by domestic cats?
How many are killed by pesticides ?
How many are killed by little boys with bb guns?
How many concentrating solar power plants have been built in the USA, and how many are on the drawing boards?
Here’s a link to a reputable site with answers to most of these questions.
https://www.sibleyguides.com/conservation/causes-of-bird-mortality/
Sometimes the answer to a problem is simple as falling off a log, except that nut case holier than thou types prevent viable solutions from being implemented.
If that six thousand birds are flying in and around the facility because there are tons of flying insects there, then getting rid of the insects wouldn’t be all that big a problem.
That’s what insecticides are FOR.
Sure they’re less than environmentally ideal as insect control measures, but life is ALL about trade offs.
In terms of the BIG PICTURE, six thousand birds don’t amount to a silent sweet smelling fart, never mind serious shit.
Almost all solar farms consist of PV panels which operate at low temperature and do not fry any birds. Mirror collector systems are rare and are unnecessary. If one needs to produce steam directly parabolic troughs should do.
PV has the huge advantage of using both direct and diffuse radiation. It also can be placed in built environments (no need to remove animals and plants).
Agriculture uses 30 percent of US land area. PV could supply all electrical power needs with 0.4 percent land area and a lot of that could be in areas that are already developed.
Exactly! Which is just one of many reasons why I think Michael Shellenberger’s TED talk is mostly cherry picked BS! Furthermore his body language creeps me out. He strikes me as a phony!
The man doth protest too much, methinks!
And using a Rubik’s cube in Hungary to illustrate his point was pretty pathetic!
>Dead insects and possibly birds
In other words, nobody can show me a picture of this happening to a bird.
And again, almost no solar is built this way.
Darn: You beat me to it, Ron I was going to post the same video.
alimbiquated Wrote:
“He’s really stuck on Ivanpah and comes back to it over and over, but that is not the future of solar.”
Solar panels are worse. They create a lot of waste to refine Sillcon, and you still need to clear the land of any wildlife and vegetation. Plus a solar farm is one tornado or strong hurricane away from getting trashed.
GoneFishing Wrote:
“Wouldn’t matter anyway, not enough fuel for more than a few decades, we would never reach 15,000 number. Then what? All energy to be used for deomssioning, cleanup and storage?”
Totally agree. As Einstein put it, you cannot solve a problem using the same level of thinking that created it.
Ron Wrote:
“Nothing will save the world. Renewables are not the panaceas you guys believe them to be, that’s my argument.”
Yup. Most people here are worried about future energy production or the environment, I am worried about a full scale nuclear war that will absolute trash the planet and make Permian–Triassic extinction look like a drop in the bucket.
GoneFishing Wrote:
“Almost all solar farms consist of PV panels which operate at low temperature and do not fry any birds.”
But the Lead, Cadmium and other toxic metals used in PV probably will kill them by contaminating the ground water. Most people don’t have a clue on how much waste and contaminated water is created during PV construction.
”
“But the Lead, Cadmium and other toxic metals used in PV probably will kill them by contaminating the ground water. Most people don’t have a clue on how much waste and contaminated water is created during PV construction.”
We need to see the actual weight figures for lead, cadmium and other toxic metals in poly crystalline silicon panels. References if you want to be believed.
Most people don’t have a clue on how much waste and contaminated water is created during PV construction.”
Perhaps whoever came up with statement meant to say PV manufacture, because as someone who actually worked on rooftop PV installations I can assure the reading audience that there is zero contamination that occurs in the construction process.
BTW, at least in South Florida, permits for rooftop solar installations need to be certified by a civil engineer to withstand Cat 5 hurricane wind speeds! I know, because I actually did the drawings that were signed off on and personally took them to the permitting offices on multiple occasions.
Of course no response, because the cadmium types are thin film representing 5% of the wattage production and since they are thin film far less than that in actual weight construction compared to the non-toxic silicon based systems.
In other words for silicon, beyond the factory, where things can and should be controlled, there is no problem at all. Although I am sure the anti-renewable mole people are fast cooking up more fake stories about how nuclear and fossil fuel is great and renewables are dangerous or don’t work.
Yeah, but the republicans don’t want pollution control, cuts the bottom line.
NAOM
That’s why industry is moving to civilized countries, like China.
I watched the video.
Some of the points raised about solar and wind are valid. They are dilute, compared to what we are used to anyway. The material/waste involved in manufacture and lifecycle is surely of concern.
Other points are nearly ridiculous- birds, safety, cost (compared to nucs particularly).
Overall, I’d say the guys message is delivered in such a heavily bias (cherry-picked) way, that he severely discredits himself.
If nuclear energy was fail safe from human and mechanical imperfections, and radiation wasn’t involved, and it could be deployed in a de-centralized manner, and it was a hell of lot more affordable, I’d be intrigued to consider it.
My inclination is to not trust human beings to get that whole thing right. Talk about playing with fire!
I do think that relying on renewables will require a massive downsizing in the human footprint on the planet. The sooner we focus on managing the contraction, the better. I’m not sure it can be managed. The best attempt yet was China 1 child per family, but they have abandoned that effort 100 yrs too early.
>I do think that relying on renewables will require a massive downsizing in the human footprint on the planet.
You’ve got that backwards. It will allow a reduced footprint. For example I calculated in a recent thread that you would need a tenth of the land in the US currently planted in corn for ethanol to replace the output of the entire electricity industry, and maybe another tenth to generate all energy for transportation. This would reduce the agriculture footprint by tens of millions of acres, and shut down nearly all of the coal, oil and gas industry as well.
I have also done similar calculations about water here. Check out this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aQrZtG-LVg
Notice the remark he makes in passing: Tuscon gets more rainwater than it consumes, so importing water from the Colorado River, which is the largest cause energy consumption in the state, is pure waste.
Alim-
“You’ve got that backwards. It will allow a reduced footprint.”
Well, good. I was fearing that 8-9 Billion people would be prone to cutting down most of the forests when they have no more fossil fuel to burn. etc.
Either way, we will eventually arrive at smaller footprint. You believe it will through well-implemented renewable deployment [?], and I believe it will be via a harsh downsizing. I hope you are right.
This is a predicament, not a problem.
There is a question of survival—
https://www.rt.com/shows/on-contact/452283-alaska-extinction-climate-disruption/
7.6+ billion homo sapiens?
Not a chance—
Tuscon gets more rainwater than it consumes, so importing water from the Colorado River, which is the largest cause energy consumption in the state, is pure waste.
Yeah, that’s typical socialist communist thinking! We can’t have ideas like this being propagated . Think of all the corporations, bankers, politicians who won’t be getting their cuts due to an ending of the infinite growth fossil fuel based system! Good heavens can you imagine a community getting its water supply for free from the sky?! You can’t even tax that, It needs to be made illegal! /SARC!
Ironically, since Tuscon gets it’s water from the Colorado River in Colorado it is literally illegal to harvest rain water that falls on your own roof!
https://bestlifeonline.com/illegal-collect-rainwater/
Exactly how much rainwater you’re allowed to collect and use varies across the U.S.—for example, under a Colorado law passed in 2016, homeowners are now allowed to catch and use two rain barrels (a total of 110 gallons) from their rooftops, but no more. (For the full list of rules state by state, check this resource guide, courtesy of the Natural Conference of State Legislatures.)
Fuck that!
Ron , I don’t often post as both you and OFM cover most of what I agree with ( thanks for that )
but to lighten the mood , and to put the question this way ,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7W33HRc1A6c&t=200s
Renewable s will not save the planet – people , well that’s the $64,000 question
my only other advice for any who cares to read what I type
use sunscreen
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTJ7AzBIJoI
have a nice weekend , all
ttfn
forbin
I think most people are familiar with the dramatic loss of insect life across much of the planet.
If you want to actually hear one of the important researchers speak on the subject of insect loss and trophic cascade, here is Brad Lister speaking about his research in the forests of Puerto Rico.
Biologist Brad Lister: “We Are At a Crossroads. Our Planet Is Dying. She is on Life Support.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T05BA2hsrT0
I wonder when the information about particular species will be revealed, if ever.
It’s a huge job and the interest is apparently minimal considering it’s importance.
As I told OFM on the previous thread, no house will stand if it’s foundation crumbles.
I think most people are familiar with the dramatic loss of insect life across much of the planet.
MOST PEOPLE?! Surely you jest? Even on this site I suspect if you did a poll on the petroleum side you’d find most people are unaware!
Quite right Fred, I did not say exactly what I meant.
I am sure a lot of people at least know about the problem, since it has been across MSM several times. Now as to grasping the problem or caring, that narrows the number to probably a few million.
But if that is your biggest concern, well…
Happy Pi day everyone.
It’s 3-14. Just like pi.
I thought that was two years ago? 🙂
31416
More like four 😉
31415
Depends if you are a rounder or truncater. 😉
NAOM
Hi Fred,
I tend to round so 3.14159=3.1416 when rounded (at least the way I do it.)
Jeepers creepers, Dennis! Don’t you think I knew that?!
Not to mention that march 14th is pi day, every year but only in cultures that write the date as month followed by day! In Brazil for example we would write 14/3. Since there are only twelve months in a year they don’t have a pi day in Brazil!
Rhubarb.
Sure! You can even calculate the diagonal with Pythagoras 😉
.
I prefer that in a crumble, for pie I prefer gooseberry.
NAOM
Hi Fred,
So 4 years ago in Brazil. 🙂
Global Resources Outlook
2019: Natural Resources for the Future We Want
http://www.resourcepanel.org/reports/global-resources-outlook
Following Ron’s inquiry regarding thoughts on problems with renewable implementation, I would like to list those problems, as I understand them, in hopes of sparking discussion here. Not all of these problems are killers, and for every problem I will list I know there are some proposed solutions. Those solutions are of course unproven, since the current scale of renewable deployment is far too small to have run into these problems to significant degree.
Anyway, the problems as I understand them, for your discussion:
1. Intermittency
Imagining a fully renewable grid requires managing intermittency at a massive scale. Even over vast geographic areas (I know one study in particular that examined much of Northern Europe), there can be extended periods of time when renewable production from both solar and wind is drastically reduced. Dealing with this intermittency in order to keep the grid powered on will require massive amounts of energy storage, and even with the massively reduced costs of batteries over the last few decades, batteries are still inconceivably expensive for covering this intermittency. To understand this, compute say 24 hours worth of storage of Britain’s electricity use, then figure out the cost of the batteries required to store that. Then compare to Britain’s GDP.
2. Primacy of fossil fuels
As of now, no solar panel and no wind turbine has ever been built without fossil fuel inputs at some stage of the production. Until this has been done in practice, renewables are not “renewable”, they are “rebuildable with fossil fuels”. And, while this is true, if the cost of fossil fuels increases then so too will the cost of renewables, removing decreases in renewable price over the preceding decades.
3. Material requirements
Some have proposed and calculated that many of the materials required for renewable deployment are in short supply and will become limiting factors if renewable deployment becomes large. This is hotly contested. I have personally done calculations of this manner, and tend to agree that materials will be a limiting factor, especially in regards to batteries.
4. Inability of batteries to power heavy equipment
Large ships, tractors, large machines, all cannot be conceivably powered by battery tech anywhere near the battery tech of today. So they need liquid fuel.
These are the biggest issues with renewables I know of. If anyone else (looking at you Iron Mike) would like to add, please do.
SIGH! Most of the issues you list are non issues!
I’ll just post one example to counter your point 4.
Inability of batteries to power heavy equipment
http://www.thedrive.com/tech/26234/this-electric-caterpillar-excavator-is-the-tesla-of-heavy-construction-equipment
Who says electric powertrains are just for cars? Netherlands-based Pon Equipment converted a Caterpillar excavator to battery power. The company hopes this one-off project will serve as a template for future zero-emission construction equipment.
The electric excavator, dubbed Z-Line (for zero-emission), is based on a Caterpillar 323F. Pon replaced the diesel engine with a massive 300-kilowatt-hour battery pack. The pack weighs 3.4 tons, compared to the one-ton weight of the original engine (the entire machine weighs about 26 tons). At least the battery pack provides enough juice for five to seven hours of operation, while a full charge takes one to two hours, according to Pon.
As I stated, not all the issues are killers, and there are proposed solutions to all of them in one way or another. Whether those solutions will end up working is what is up for debate. I am of the opinion they will not, and your dramatic sighs and declarations to the contrary will not convince me, nor will individual solutions to very small parts of the problem that have not yet been deployed at scale.
But as is often said here, we will see.
Whether those solutions will end up working is what is up for debate. I am of the opinion they will not,
These are your choices: You can lead, follow or get out of the way!
Those solutions are working and are being scaled up but that takes time. The process could be speeded up, a lot, but those who have the power to do that are still living in the 1800s. See my point to Hickory, below, that it needs a ‘tick all the boxes’ approach not a ‘tick one box’. No, I am not confident that we can escape our fate but I know, with 100% certainty, that if we do nothing that is the end. If we are to make a change we had better do it damn fast.
NAOM
There is probably a ready market for such excavators today, because it’s necessary to do construction work right outside hospitals and other places where it’s critical that there be no loud noise, especially long continued loud noise.
Putting such a big battery in an excavator is relatively easy, because they swing around,on a pivot, and need a lot of dead weight anyway. The battery can double as part of the counterweight.
Fitting such a big battery into a dozer or truck is going to be a tougher problem, and may require a new layout.
For a digger, adding supercaps to a battery system makes sense. Recover electricity when lowering loads and supplying bursts of power when needed.
NAOM
1. Intermittency
UK is developing tidal power which can offset this. Much electricity is simply wasted, at night while solar is not available. Demand can be varied to cope (demand side management). Batteries are a growing potential. V2G will provide huge amounts of available storage. New types of batteries are coming to fulfillment and many are well suited to stationary use. There are many other energy storage strategies (note: energy storage not electricity storage) such as heat, cold, liquids, gases.
2. Primacy of fossil fuels
As renewables grow more renewables will use renewable electricity in their production. Many plants are re-utilising their non-saleable production to self power. Fossil fuels are sooo 19th century and, in case you didn’t noice, we are in the 21st!
3. Material requirements
No material shortfalls are expected. There are plenty of choices out there.
4. Inability of batteries to power heavy equipment
So what? Many of the heaviest earthmoving equipment and mining equipment is powered by electricity supplied over cables or pickups, typically overhead but don’t forget live rails. There are electric tractors, now, and tractors could also be replaced with electric traction engines (see previous sentence). Trains can be electric (see above). Ships can use sail or synthetic fuels.
Now, where is the problem? There are lots of solutions out there just to knock it down.
NAOM
“Batteries are a growing potential. V2G will provide huge amounts of available storage.”
Unlikely since people aren’t buying them. Only a tiny fraction of vehicles sold are EV. Also all solid state batteries degrade and fail. This is because the chemical reactions occur on the battery terminals, (Anode, Cathode) you get dendrites and thining over time.
“As renewables grow more renewables will use renewable electricity in their production”
All commercial PV\Wind Farms use NatGas turbines for backup and regulation. They run 24/7. When the Sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing NatGas supplies 100% of the power.
Really this is all pointless. In the 2020’s the global economic system is going to collapse as debt & demographics crush it. World Debt will top $250 Trillion, and will take off as boomers move into retirement. We would have been in worse shape if the Boomers didn’t continue to work well past there retirement age, but I seriously doubt boomers will continue to work into their late 70s or early 80’s.
The fact that global interest rates have been stuck at near zero for over a decade should speak volumes. Once global Oil production peaks there its going to become impossible to prop up the global economy with low interest rates.
“Inability of batteries to power heavy equipment
So what? Many of the heaviest earthmoving equipment and mining equipment is powered by electricity supplied over cables or pickups”
Good luck with Ships, Airliners, Agriculture equipment. Most of the long distance rail freight tracks are no electricified, and you still need to invest 100’s of Trillions building all those PV & Wind farms to replace all of the fossil\Nuclear power plants. Oh, also most of the Grid workers are boomers that are now starting to retire.
At best we have about 15 years before the world goes berserk and nukes itself. But it could start at any moment: India\Pakastan, Israel\Iran, Russia\China\USA, NK\USA. US is now pouring military hardware into Romania on the Romania, Ukraine border, Gearing up to crush the separatists, perhaps beginning this summer or this fall. India is testing Pakastan defenses gearing up for a major conflict. Israel & Iran are gearing up for a direct conflict.
It won’t take much for a major regional war in these regions to scale up to a full scale world war, as the USA\China\Russia\EU all have interest on the outcome of these conflicts.
Sigh! Your points have been debunked a thousand times over!
The Gish Gallop (also known as proof by verbosity[1]) is the fallacious debate tactic of drowning your opponent in a flood of individually-weak arguments in order to prevent rebuttal of the whole argument collection without great effort!
You are just not worth the effort!
That’s OK Fred, I wouldn’t expect you to understand it. I’ve better luck discussing the topic with a fish.
Hint: if your going to reply it would help if you have some pointful arguments not a bunch of babble that does even make any sense. You fall in the category of the “know nothing” crowd. You lack even basic technical understanding of the problem and try to redirect a rebuttal attacking the person and not the points, because you cannot.
That’s OK Fred, I wouldn’t expect you to understand it. I’ve better luck discussing the topic with a fish.
You’re the one who doesn’t understand it and just keeps repeating canned talking points, Which is why I called it a Gish Gallop!
No self respecting fish would waste it’s time in your company!
I know, because I’ve spent a lot of time with fish! They are a lot more interesting and nuanced than you are!
Hi Tech Guy,
Have you actually even LOOKED at the news involving how many new models of electric cars will be on showroom floors within the next three years?
And consider this. You can’t even BUY a stripped down electric model. They all come with all the things that used to be extras, the stuff dealers used to actually advertise as being installed on the cars they were advertising, as “equipped, not stripped”, such as cruise control, power steering, power brakes, ant ilock brakes, air conditioning, automatic transmission, nice music system, carpet not floor mats, clear coat paint, etc.
I expect small vans and pickup trucks that are pure electrics to be selling to commercial customers like ice water in hell within five to ten years.
The hold up now is the lack of factories to build batteries in sufficient quantity to actually put electric cars and pickups on dealer lots.
For OFM and the kids,
A Parliamentary Select Committee examination of U.K. Government policy on Electric Vehicles
https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201719/cmselect/cmbeis/1881/188102.htm
I guess the US and other countries have similar committees examining their own governments’ policies.
As an aside, this shows politicians and governments in a better light than the usual cynicism.
Thanks Mike,
I’m collecting links, for research purposes, and appreciate all that are posted.
OTOH many councils are not planning to install charging points as they do not have the funds.
NAOM
Wot Fred said.
NAOM
> Most of the long distance rail freight tracks are no electricified
lol
I have not had a chance to watch the video suggested by Ron, just yet.
But I will agree in advance with him- neither nucs or renewable will ‘save the world’ as we know it.
We have been built up on cheap dense fuelaccumulated over 100 + million yrs, and without a big decline in world population and economy, there will be a drastic decline in energy/capita and gdp/capita.
It will happen in a messy, tragic and chaotic way.
The big winners will be the crows, rats, and flies.
I agree with the point made by OFM many times- the changes will be variable by place. Some more fortunate than others.
I would prefer to be in a region that has taken the opportunity to engage in a massive buildout of solar/ wind /hydro prior to fossil peak. It will help a little.
Which makes me wonder- should it also have a wall? Don’t get me wrong, I hate to think in those terms.
I hate to fathom all this stuff. Global mass extinction. Genocide. All of it.
Time out.
As we progress (grow in numbers and technology), the energy/material wheel we need to spin to just keep up will reach limits beyond our capabilities. Even without climate change, the limits are being reached and the lessons will be hard. Sadly, much of the problems, disasters and catastrophes will be blamed on global warming/climate change instead of our poor and dead-end ways.
We do need things to change, especially general human views of the world. Respect and love are hard lessons to learn, sometimes deadly ones.
I keep seeing references to renewables won’t save the world, EVs won’t save the world, nuclear won’t save the world, population control won’t save the world etc etc. I quite agree with this so what do we do? Abandon renewables, abandon EVs, abandon etc?
It is not the adoption of one with the exclusion of the others. It is the applying of all measures together. The problem is that this needs co-ordination at higher levels and this is the one part of the answer that is sorely lacking.
NAOM
we do what we can – until we can’t
forbin
PS: ok not the most satisfactory answer but true
Right, the idea that there is a silver bullet is flawed. Turns out you have to actually have to do something to get a good result.
Good one, alim…
If earth was a cancer patient.
“Yes, with outrageously expensive and painful methods we have cured 10 percent of your cancer. Meanwhile the other 90 percent doubled. So sorry. “
NAOM, the human race is highly cooperative and coordinated in burning fossil fuels, using and eradicating the natural world and in just plain making a mess of things. Could be the result of “intelligence”.
Blame evolution, making things better did not exclude making things that are better at screwing up.
NAOM- agree.
We do need to do all those things we can, absolutely. Co-ordination at higher levels as you say- certainly critical, like what the Chinese did in regard to population policy for a short time.
A point that Ron has made, and I agree, is that this all will not be enough to keep the big train rolling.
Our adjustments are too little too late.
I would certainly vote to put dollars into solar and wind rather than nuclear.
Unless perhaps if I lived in a country that was very cloudy, cold and calm, and had very good technical expertise along with a trusted government regulatory oversight culture. I don’t know, maybe Finland. [Do they drink like Russians?..] Maybe they can pioneer safer cheaper nuclear energy.
I sure don’t trust USA to get it right. I know Americans. I have seen their votes, I have seen their respect for government regulatory oversight. I have seen their profit motive (Kerr McGee, Phillip Morris, etc 100 times), I have seen their paper thin loyalty to the common good, I have seen the engineering and scientific knowhow become subservient to political maneuvering or the profit motive. I have seen the disdain for clean air, clean water, precious soil. And a profound lack of caring for poor people- ‘put it in their neighborhood’.
Not trustworthy with uranium, with plutonium, with spent fuel rods.
Same goes for much of the world.
Hi Niko,
You bring up a lot of points, each of which would take several pages to even adequately dent.
However, one should look at the kind of world and the timing for renewables to be the prime source of global energy. We are looking at 25 to 45 years ahead. That may not seem like much but with limits to growth and climate change right on top of us now the world’s needs may be much different and it’s human component much changed by then.
Let’s look at why we want renewable energy (wind and solar) at all.
1) have sources of energy to replace a depleting and dangerous fossil energy system
2) reduce global GHG emissions so that maybe the planet will be livable in a hundred years and more
3) move to low water usage power systems since we are already in water deficit in many places and headed for much more
4) lead healthier lives, less cancer, less lung problems, less brain problems, less negative impact on nature overall
5) more efficient use of materials and more efficient systems
Keep in mind we are heading into a very different world, one more similar to the past but possibly with high levels of automation and AI.
Intermittency, may not be that important in the future. There are lots of ways to store heat and keep freezers and refrigerators cold for periods of time as well as make them far more efficient.
As far as factories go, most will be very to fully automated, possibly monitored by humans at a distance. Many factories can be intermittent and operate at full capacity when the sun shines and wind blows, only need a buffer battery to level changes and run for a short time for shut down, start up. Hydrogen can be generated for those that need constant runs.
So batteries do not need to be as big as one thinks, they can be much smaller.
Think about the northern canals in the old days, they froze over and shipments stopped for a while, sometimes months. You just pre-shipped and built up stock for slack periods, unlike the right-on-time systems of today. The past handled most things with bulk storage of items, so winter slow downs and supply interruptions were not much of a problem.
Possibly manufacturing will move to areas that are windier and/or sunnier, solving much of that problem.
Resilience and adaptation are key ingredients in a changing world. Doesn’t mean it will be bad, just not as crazy and instantaneous as now (which causes a lot of problems and won’t last anyway).
Material requirements. Materials are evolving and changing now, we won’t be using much of many of the materials we use now, just as we do not use many of the materials of the past. The iron age will fade away to a large degree. Hard to get materials will be bypassed by new technologies and new methods. Possibly longevity of products will once again come to the forefront, reducing the need for massive manufacturing.
I have a question for you. Is the apparent problem coming from trying to fit renewables into the current mode of civilization (fossilization)? In other words trying to fit a new system into an old one instead of changing the old one?
Which makes me wonder- should it also have a wall? Don’t get me wrong, I hate to think in those terms.
I hate to fathom all this stuff. Global mass extinction. Genocide. All of it.
Time out.
Yep! then there are all those peace loving religious folk! Christchurch New Zealand in the news today.
As far as walls are concerned, a couple of cheap drones loaded with home made bioweapons kinda makes that a moot point, doesn’t it?
The GENE is out of the bottle! You can’t put it back.
What? You don’t think the village in the next valley over will have their own solar, wind and hydro powered biolab?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kJ2o7P8D00
The Complete Guide to PCR (How it Works, Primer Design, and Running Reactions) | Spider Silk Step 2
The Thought Emporium
Published on Nov 12, 2018
PCR or polymerase chain reaction, is one of the most useful tools in a biologists tool kit. It allows you to take a DNA sample, select a part of it and make millions of copies of that section, amplifying it millions of times over. These newly grown fragments can be used as a diagnostic tool, or to generate pieces that can be used in other processes.
Today we take a deep dive into the world of PCR and explore how it works, how you design the reactions, and how they’re run in the lab. In a future video we may also look at how to build the thermocycler that makes this process possible, but there are lots of great tutorials on building them already online.
We also take a step forward in the spider silk project and successfully isolate 1 of the 2 genes we’ll need for the project. We’re still trouble shooting the other so that will be the topic of a future video. The fragment we isolated is directly usable in our construction pathway and will be inserted to build a new new plasmid we’re calling pKlac2g418. This means we’re only a few more steps away from finishing our plasmid and making our first spider silks!
Might be better to form an alliance with that village in the other valley… Walls are pretty pointless.
I think I’ll bookmark this essay and post the link every time Fernando Leanme tries to post his ideological crap about communism and socialism.
https://eand.co/why-americans-dont-understand-what-capitalism-really-is-155ab92203d8
(Why) Americans Don’t Understand What Capitalism Really Is
Or, How The Opposite of Capitalism Isn’t Socialism — It’s My Local Record Store
(The ancients drank wine and ate almonds, grown at vineyards and farms, which were businesses, trading things for money, trying to make a living as enterprises. But they weren’t “capitalist” in any sense of the word — they weren’t mindlessly maximizing profits, they weren’t trading “shares” of “profits”, and they weren’t “owned” solely by disconnected “shareholders” with no interest in the long-term survival of anything whatsoever. They were probably just trying to set a fair and decent price, they were usually loosely family owned to whatever extent was possible, and governed implicitly by social rules, values, and norms, which prized the coexistence and endurance and joint prosperity of all. Nobody in that world would believe that a hedge fund would burn down a beautiful vineyard just because it only earned $4 million of profit this week instead of $40. They’d probably be horrified at the idea that people with no interest in the long-term survival of anything now owned and governed those very things, solely to exploit them.
And that paragraph sums up what the essence of AOC’s Green New Deal is about. Also Douglas Rushkoff’s Team Human and what Greta Thunberg’s Climate Strike is for. It’s all about a new economic operating system that is just and equitable and incorporates an understanding of the value of our ecosystems over a suicidal system that is designed to maximize profits for the few, regardless of the costs to the vast majority!
“and governed implicitly by social rules, values, and norms, which prized the coexistence and endurance and joint prosperity of all”
I think that is what Aldo Leopold, Wendell Berry, John Muir, Edward Abbey and others were trying to tell us. We need to invest ourselves in, identify with and love the land, the oceans, the world in order to get along in it and do good rather than harm. Our happiness should come from growth of nature not from sterile mental and physical constructs. Nature cares for us each day, why do people not care for nature?
Speaking of which the first flowers and new green growth popped up here a few days ago. The birds are on the move, gathering together, chasing each other. The long winter sleep is over, I hope for more bugs, lots and lots of them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJGzYJCD7KU
Yep–
No extraction of wealth between user and exchange value.
The basis of capitalism.
If you have read your Marx.
Oh yeah, Marx. He had a lot of great philosophy
“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.”
“I must say I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go to the library and read a good book.”
“All people are born the same, except Democrats and Republicans.”
“I, not events, have the power to make me happy or unhappy today. I can choose which it shall be. Yesterday is dead, tomorrow hasn’t arrived yet. I have just one day, today, and I’m going to be happy in it.”
“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.”
Oh boy!!!!!!!!!!! Does that describe one particular head of state in a nutshell!
NAOM
Groucho was unique guy.
No Marx—
But, that was expected.
Not to mention:
They’d probably be horrified at the idea that people with no interest in the long-term survival of anything now owned and governed those very things, solely to exploit them.
I posted this last non petroleum , but it was getting stale by then.
https://cleantechnica.com/2019/03/13/building-integrated-photovoltaics-emerging-thanks-to-nzeb-goals/
California here in the States and Germany in Europe are leading the way, world wide.
Read this, it’s worth it just to improve your mood when it comes to a discussion about the stupidity of the human race such as we are having here today.
The whole goddamned argument against renewables is utterly and abysmally STUPID and based on ignorance, willful self delusion, or cynical calculations involving personal investments.
MAYBE we will succeed in transitioning to a renewable energy powered and sustainable civilization, maybe we won’t.
It’s a fucking academic question, because it’s about the long term, whereas there IS no long term, unless we survive the short term.
Wind and solar power have amply and obviously demonstrated that the return on the energy and materials invested in building and erecting such infrastructure are generous, not less than at least about five to one, according to any recent estimate I have seen, unless it was produced by employees of Koch brothers and company.Wind and solar power, in combination with conservation, will allow us to extend the life of our finite supplies of fossil fuels by generations, if we stay with it.
I personally know at least three or four old hillbillies in their late eighties or nineties who went to one room schools for only a little while and never learned anything beyond the simplest of arithmetic and reading.
But ignorance is NOT the same thing as stupidity. All of them GOT IT immediately, when discussing wind and solar power, as to the WHY, when I told them it’s because coal doesn’t grow back like potatoes or timber.
All of them you see knew men who once worked in the mines ( not far away at all) who lost their jobs because the mines played out.
You do what you HAVE to do, period, and that means preparing for the day when fossil fuels will be extremely scarce and expensive, or simply unavailable, because the enemy you have been financing by buying them from him suddenly refuses to sell them to you.
Does anybody here fail to understand that neither the Russians nor the Germans have forgotten WWII in general and the Siege of Stalingrad in particular? The dumbest of the dumb in Germany usually understand the implications of history as clearly as they can see the sun at high noon on a cloudless day, although they seldom discuss this matter in public forums. If I were a German living in Germany, I would gladly pay double whatever subsidies are in place to promote conservation and renewable energy.
The vast majority of all material goods are valuable in proportion to their scarcity. Water has virtually no value to me, in terms of money, because it costs me virtually nothing. I get it by way of infrastructure my old Daddy put into place with his own hands about seventy years ago, for the trivial expense of an occasional repair to a broken pipe or burned out pump, and maybe a dollar a month for electricity.People I know town pay close to a hundred bucks a month for water and sewer, with their rates going up every few years. People who get caught without water for some reason gladly pay a couple of bucks a gallon, and if they go a day without drinking, they will pay twenty bucks for a six pack of bottled water. Two or three days, they will pay whatever they have or can borrow or steal to swap.
Every dime we put into renewable energy today means another DAY later that we will still have some affordable fossil fuels, which we can use frugally for ESSENTIAL purposes, just as we use clean water frugally for drinking first and foremost when the supply is interrupted for some reason.
( Yes, I know I’m long winded, and all about TLDR, but occasionally a kid runs across and reads such a forum as this one, especially one that’s interested in the sciences. A kid I know, who is not aware that I’m OFM, asked me in unmistakable terms just yesterday about something I posted in this forum. FIRST TIME ever this has happened! Been hoping I would live to experience it! I don’t advertise my OFM identity, so as to not alienate the community . This one comment contains easily accessible lessons in physics, geology, economics, history and human nature, although a reasonably well educated adult won’t even notice them. The greatest value of such a forum as this is the EDUCATIONAL value it possesses for potential new readers. )
The springs, runs, and artesian wells have been running all winter here. The long slow drought of several years is over and wet times are back. Hooray!
Yes, I have run out of water while backpacking in the mountains, it focuses the mind.
Worth bookmarking
https://electrek.co/2019/03/15/egeb-wind-african-solar/
Was listening to NPR a while ago. When I was young, there were two Europeans for each African. In two more generations, maybe sooner, there will be five or six Africans for each European.
Does anybody here really believe that walls and fences won’t be built on the grand scale?
The news story was mostly about emigrants being rescued from drowning at sea.
The big question is not about walls but when the corporate state figures out it is far cheaper to feed machines than bother feeding and put up with humans. Then the internal reduction increases.
Isn’t that what the PV is for, feeding all the machines?
Europe has been getting immigrants from the South and East for tens of thousands of years.
I thought it was the southwest …….. since we all left the rift valley
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjD_cpFc69E
Forbin
Thousands of years ago, as best I can see, the usual way of dealing with migrants was to meet and greet them with sticks and stones, with clubs, spears, and arrows, and have it out like “real men” , winner take all, including territory and attractive women. Some of the older women who appeared to be useful as slaves were spared. Males were simply killed, unless maybe very young, so they could be raised as members of the tribe or clan.
It’s not that such methods won’t work these days, but rather that most of us tend to get our panties in a bunch about such crude behavior, having been taught by various philosophers such as Jesus that it’s better to love thine enemy, lol. In case anybody doesn’t get it, I’m TRYING to make a joke and express a little sarcasm.
Now let’s be serious for a minute. Maybe later Western European countries will be glad to admit a few million new citizens, so as to have more tax money to support the young folks of today who aren’t having kids enough to maintain the old age welfare system that supports the old folks today.
But there aren’t going to be very many Africans who speak the appropriate language, or that have been raised with the same cultural values, or that have the necessary skills, other than common labor skills, to be readily accepted into European society.
It’s one thing to talk about this sort of thing, sitting on one’s moral high horse, and it’s ANOTHER THING ALTOGETHER to get the agreement of one’s fellow citizens, who are walking in shoes with holes in the soles, citizens such as the countless millions here in the USA who ( rightly or wrongly ) believe that some or all of their economic and social problems are the result of immigration.
If anybody who knows shit from apple butter about Yankee politics is asked WHY Trump is prez, and is allowed to answer with only one issue, he will say immigration or border. If he is allowed two issues, he will say border or immigration and reluctance to accept the new social order ( imposed on them primarily by the Democrats of course via the courts and legislation) on the part of Trump voters, Trump voters being happier with “the way things used to be” here in the USA.
Europeans looking at immigration on the grand scale in the future are going to be in a position very similar to the one we Yankees are in these days, politically.
I’m not saying any particular country will elect a Trump, in any particular election, but I’m willing to bet the farm that quite a few Trumps WILL be elected.
There’s just no way this can end well.
But there aren’t going to be very many Africans who speak the appropriate language, or that have been raised with the same cultural values, or that have the necessary skills, other than common labor skills, to be readily accepted into European society.
OFM I think that is a very narrow perspective and my views on this are quite different from yours. I readily acknowledge that there is currently a resurgence of extreme nationalisn and populism in many places around the world and Europe is no exception. However, having spent time in Europe recently I know this to be a fringe minority, albeit a very dangerous one.
To be clear I’m an unabashed multicultural internationalist. How could I not be. I was born in Brazil to Hungarian parents and grew up on three continents immersed in multiple cultures speaking four languages.
I reject all forms of xenophbia and believe strongly in secure but open borders. I recommend spending time at truck stops along the autobahn and speaking to the truck drivers in a couple dozen languages who make trade possible from Turkey to Finland. Brexiteers notwithstanding!
Trade, trumps xenophobia!
There are millions of people all over the world who no longer fit into the traditional boxes of the past and Africans are no exception.
Watch this and put yourself in my shoes This is my world and my reality!
Don’t ask where I’m from, ask where I’m a local – TED.com
https://www.ted.com/talks/taiye_selasi_don_t_ask_where_i_m_from_ask_where_i_m_a_local/discussion
Hi Fred,
I admire your ethical positions, right across the board, and have huge respect for your broad based knowledge of the real world as well. I’m sure I have learned more from you than you have ever or will ever learn from me, by a substantial margin.
But I’m REALLY wondering whether your response is based on what you WANT to be true, on wishful thinking, or what you actually believe is going to happen.
You do come across as more optimistic than most of the scientifically well educated regulars here, in respect to the future as it relates to over population, resource depletion, and so forth. You seem to be considerably more optimistic than I am myself, in this respect.
But lets go back, and examine the context of my comment, which was initiated by my listening to an NPR program about drowning migrants in the sea, headed for Italy, IIRC, but I’m not sure about the precise country.
The program went on to discuss the relative populations of Africa and Western Europe, historically over the last three or four generations, with the ratio of Europeans to Africans being not only reversed, but reversed from two to one, Europe to Africa, to an expected three to one Africa to Europe within the lifetime of young adults, maybe even middle aged adults.
Africa is a relatively short and easy boat ride from Western Europe. It’s even possible to do the trip on foot, lol.
Asia is the only other place on Earth that is seriously overpopulated to the extent Western Europeans , or Yankees, etc, might have to worry about unwelcome migrants on the grand scale , and is FAR AWAY, by either land or sea.
I don’t even pretend to be able to GUESS at the extent to which African countries in general will prosper and educate their people over the next thirty or forty years, but such emigrants as are arriving today from Asia are mostly well educated, with welcome and valuable skills, and already speak English or maybe French or German, etc. I will say however that I don’t harbor any great hopes that African countries will be prosperous and well educated within a generation or two, as a general observation. My personal belief is that most of them will be in even deeper shit than they are today, especially in respect to food, decent farmland and irrigation water, over population, etc.
What is your personal opinion on the future of Africa in terms of the next fifty years or so?
And while I don’t think Asia will necessarily have turned the population problem corner within that time frame, I think the odds are good that populations in Asia will have at least stabilized, and very possibly, and in my own opinion, likely be declining by that point in time, considering that Asians by comparison, by and large, have a huge head start, in terms of education, prosperity, stable governments, etc.
What’s your personal opinion on the future population of Asia, out to about fifty years or so?
Some of the old hands here may remember that back in the dark ages, when I was about to graduate, and had a hot girl interested in going with me, I posted comments at the old TOD to the effect that I was seriously considering joining the Peace Corp, or doing something along that line, partly as an adventure, partly out of sense of duty, and partly as an educational experience.
One of my crusty and profane old ag professors took me aside, and asked me, in no uncertain terms, if I wanted to go and help the people in some backward country double their food production, so that twice as many of them could starve as the result of my misguided good intentions.
After giving it some thought, the girl and I decided to stay here in the states.
But now that I’m old, I wish we had went.
OFM, on good days I can do a head fake on myself and find something to be optimistic about, but more often than not, truth be told I’m not all that optimistic, perhaps I hide it well.
It is flattering that you should admire my ethics… I take that as a high compliment. But my response is not so much based on my ethics but rather a very rich multi cultural life experience.
I happen to agree with your old Ag professor:
When he took you aside, and asked you, in no uncertain terms, if You wanted to go and help the people in some backward country double their food production, so that twice as many of them could starve as the result of your misguided good intentions.
So in no uncertain terms I think that much if Africa and Asia and consequently the world is pretty much fucked.
However that doesn’t mean that I consider Africans or any other group of humans to be backward! No more so than I would consider your neighbors backwards just because they are ignorant and believe in some deity. I never hold that against people. Some of the best times and conversations I have ever had were over a couple of beers in some of the poorest corners of Brazil with people who still follow the Orixás!
Orixás: The Divine Forces of Nature
http://www.soulbrasil.com/home/orixas-the-divine-forces-of-nature/
Brazil’s African ancestors, the Yoruba from Nigeria and Benin, lived by a belief system that held nature as their high power, understanding the necessity to respect and honor the sacred relationship between nature’s elements and human beings.
In Brazil, this system developed into the spiritual practice of Candomblé where by orixás or deities, are recognized as divine forces of nature. In the city of Salvador, Bahia, the orixás have become religious and cultural symbols of the city’s rich African presence.
E FredM,
A-a-d-o-re Yemanja O Ya
Yemanja O Ya!
There are too many of us. Our access to free energy is being strangled. The pollution from our prior use of energy is converting our climate into a nightmare. Water is becoming a serious issue in many places. Climate-forced conflict and migration has become plainly visible. And on and on.——
Very few even have the ability to view this.
Well spoken.
Fred,
Here is an update on the Sion EV. Base price 29K, 158 mile range, 21 miles of the range can be had by just parking it in the sun.
https://www.inverse.com/article/53782-solar-powered-electric-car-gets-a-sleek-redesign-ahead-of-launch?link_uid=8&utm_campaign=musk-reads-2019-03-15&utm_medium=musk-reads&utm_source=newsletter
And the design is open source. They are trying to spread the idea without necessarily making money on it. It’s a radical idea, that has a slight chance of working. It shows how fast the car industry is changing, even if it fails.
It also shows that a new generation sees things very differently than some of the old guard. They have priorities other than profits above all else. They understand that without a livable planet, profits don’t matter.
Yeah, Tks!
3-5°C temperature rise is now “locked-in” for the Arctic
https://desdemonadespair.net/2019/03/3-5c-temperature-rise-is-now-locked-in-for-the-arctic.html
We’ll have to wait and see. I don’t know how old you are, but I was around in the 1970’s when scientists were convinced a new ice age was “locked in” because the winters were so cold then. That prediction turned out wrong however.
Not scientists–
https://www.skepticalscience.com/ice-age-predictions-in-1970s.htm
You need to follow the data.
I’m in my 70’s—
(The fact is that around 1970 there were 6 times as many scientists predicting a warming rather than a cooling planet. Today, with 30+years more data to analyse, we’ve reached a clear scientific consensus: 97% of working climate scientists agree with the view that human beings are causing global warming.)
Scientists routinely make predictions which don’t pan out. For the most part, I presume they aren’t proud of false predictions or make them on purpose, nor do they like drawing attention to them. But the facts are,being in the science business means you get some things wrong from time to time. To use a more recent example, it was mentioned on the news just the other day that the whole state of California is free from drought for the first time since 2011. Yet, it wasn’t but two or three years ago that the same news reports had climate scientists worried there would be no end to the drought because they were predicting drought would be a new permanent situation California would have to deal with.
but I was around in the 1970’s when scientists were convinced a new ice age was “locked in”
Nah, that’s actually bullshit! Before you spout nonsense you should really check the actual scientific literature on the topic and not old Time magazine covers! So welcome to another game of whack a mole with an ignorant anti science troll!
https://www.skepticalscience.com/ice-age-predictions-in-1970s.htm
What were climate scientists predicting in the 1970s?
The fact is that around 1970 there were 6 times as many scientists predicting a warming rather than a cooling planet. Today, with 30+years more data to analyse, we’ve reached a clear scientific consensus: 97% of working climate scientists agree with the view that human beings are causing global warming.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-the-global-cooling-story-came-to-be/
How the “Global Cooling” Story Came to Be
Nine paragraphs written for Newsweek in 1975 continue to trump 40 years of climate science. It is a record that has its author amazed
https://www.climate.gov/teaching/resources/70s-they-said-thered-be-ice-age
In the 70s, they said there’d be an Ice Age
This is a video overview of the history of climate science, with the goal of debunking the idea that in the 1970s, climate scientists were predicting global cooling.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XB3S0fnOr0M&feature=BFa&list=PL029130BFDC78FA33&i…
https://xkcd.com/54/
Science. It Works, Bitches.
So California had a wetter than normal year! What about long term?
You trolls are truly pathetic!
The wet to dry years is about 1:7 for California.
When multi-years of wet are delivered, in one go, it is a bitch.
NAOM
‘Nother troll alert, I think
Adam, you should’ve gone to AccuWeather, Joe Bastardi, or WattsUpWithThat to read how genuine atmospheric scientists debunked the California “permadrought” nonsense.
Troll alert
No worry concerning the Arctic, when the temps up there reach 5C to 10C above pre-industrial in 2030 the IPCC will cut back it’s time to reduce emissions to ten years instead of 12.
There are always more years to fix things. You just have to get used to the changes. 🙂
Interesting article in The Atlantic about how agriculture totally F’d the world.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/03/farming-hunter-gatherers-labiodentals-linguistics/584950/
It is obvious–
But most can’t go there–
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2019/03/15/smart-meters-set-to-disrupt-the-arch-disrupter-solar/
Worth some discussion.
WARNING THIS IS ONLY FOR PEOPLE WITH AN ATTENTION SPAN EXCEEDING SIXTY SECONDS
SIGH, wipes his brow, takes another swig of nerve medicine.
Old fart retired educator hillbilly farmer has a few things to say about climate science, textbooks, teachers, the media, climate scientists,the entire educational establishment, and anything else that crosses his near senile mind.
The scientific establishment was just really beginning to get a really good grip on the way climate varies over geological time, back in the sixties. That’s why, if you had asked an ACTUAL CLIMATE SCIENTIST, at that time, or a little later, that he wasn’t necessarily ready to predict a short term ( meaning in decades, generations of men, a century or so) warming trend due to greenhouse gas pollution. There wasn’t get enough data to be REALLY sure of it, the way the climate establishment is SURE of it NOW.
I was a student, myself, or a teacher, back in those days, and you can take what I say to the BANK, in this particular case.
The VAST majority of students back then, including future educators, did NOT take a CLIMATE course, or a geology course or a REAL chemistry course, or a REAL biology course or even a REAL math course. ( The non science major students did often take a so called SURVEY course in one of the fields I mention here as real, in order to graduate, wherein you memorized some shit, but generally learned nothing, and forgot that nothing within the semester. )
My own transcripts are heavily tilted to biology, chemistry, and so forth, with courses labeled as ag courses actually being straight up the same exact course as the one biology or chemistry majors took, in numerous cases. But I never took a climate course. I doubt that more than one percent, if that many, of the students at my university took a climate course. Hell, there may not even have BEEN a climate course offered back then. This is not to say I didn’t learn a lot about the present day( back then) climate, incidentally to my course work. Ag is applied biology, and climate MATTERS in ag.
But since it was considered, correctly, to be beyond our control, we just learned what was applicable to our own field, rather than climate theory.
NEVERTHELESS, we were assigned reading that included articles and books that were about or touched on climate, and climate was mentioned incidentally in LOTS of classes, including history, economics, political science, business administration, and so forth.
A REASONABLY INFORMED under grad was expected to know about solar system geometry, the past and future expected history of the sun ( expansion and growing output) , volcanic influences, climate variations associated with orbital mechanics, and such in very general terms, but not much if anything more than enough to discuss the subject casually over a beer. Tectonics and continental drift were just along about then showing up on the radar in technically oriented classes, and hardly even mentioned in other classes, except as an example of scientific progress perhaps.
THE ONE THING THAT GENERALLY STUCK was that the most recent history of climate, expressed in thousands of years and tens of thousands of years, was that ICE AGES were the NORM, long lived, and INTERGLACIALS were the exception, short lived, and that therefore, since interglacials are short, and that the pattern had repeated several times, WE SHOULD EXPECT ANOTHER ICE AGE WITHIN A RELATIVELY SHORT TIME FRAME, maybe a hundred years, maybe a few hundred or at the most a thousand or a couple of thousand.
THIS IS WHAT EVERYBODY WAS TAUGHT, across the board, incidental to his own field, if the topic of climate was even MENTIONED in his coursework, excepting only a few classes such as math or physics or chemistry, wherein it’s usually taught that you need more data to come to conclusions than just a past sequence of events that might be the result of chance, or some factor than no longer applies, etc.
THIS is what a couple of generations of TEACHERS learned, and repeated all their working lives, it’s what a couple of generations of lawyers, accountants, doctors, engineers and yes AG guys too, heard, if they heard anything at all about climate. THERE WERE DAMNED FEW EXCEPTIONS to this observation.
It’s also what the future JOURNALISTS heard, and it’s what they put in the papers and magazines back in those days as well.
I’m not bullshitting, everything I’ve posted up above is a bedrock solid hard FACT.
So given that people believe only what they WANT to believe, there’s NO doubt in my mind that the vast majority of people who believe, as Trump tells them to believe, that global warming is a hoax and a scam, are doing ONLY and PRECISELY what is to be expected of them by any student of human nature.
The biggest single failing of the liberalish scientifically oriented establishment is that it catastrophically OVERESTMATES the educational achievements of about two thirds of the people of this country, and then, having become frustrated in trying to explain things to them, takes out that frustration by making fun of them.
The stereotypical young woman I speak to these days believes implicitly in global warming, even though the odds are rather high that she has never taken a single REAL science course, BECAUSE and SOLELY BECAUSE she is a member in good standing of the liberal tribe. She is NOT entitled to judge this issue personally , lacking any relevant training or experience, she is only going with the flow.
When I talk to an equally ignorant young man who identifies with the Trump camp, he believes global warming is a hoax…. because that’s what his TRIBE believes. PERIOD.
As I have often said, a little knowledge can be more dangerous than outright ignorance, and in this case, a limited ABC kindergarden level of climate knowledge is just enough, just right, to allow a person who wants to believe global warming is a hoax to easily be convinced that warming IS indeed a hoax.
I have also often said here that demographics is destiny, and that the core of the R establishment is fast departing this old world, and that barring bad luck, the USA will look more or less like today’s Western Europe within the lifetime of today’s youngsters.
I’ve been having some issues with my internet connection and have not been able to read or post at leisure from the convenience of my apartment so, I’m getting into this discussion rather late.
While Shellenberger does acknowledge that cats are the leading cause of bird deaths, I don’t hear him or anybody else railing against cats or any of the other leading causes of bird deaths listed at: 9 leading causes of bird deaths in Canada. There are things like plastic in the oceans affecting marine life as well. I guess one has to pick their battles.
In addition, alimbiquated and Fred have both covered the scale of CSP vs PV adequately but, I might add, the economics of CSP have not been working out favorably as the costs of PV plus storage have plummeted. The last plant built in the US was at Crescent Dunes, near Toonpah in Nevada, which has been having some issues. Another similar plant proposed for South Australia is yet to materialise as PV plus storage is making it look like a financial non-starter. CSP is a small and shrinking slice of the solar energy pie.
Alimbiquated has also covered the land use aspect quite well further down. I am curious about the situation with the Navajo Generating Station (NGS) near Lake Powell and the Glen Canyon Dam. I wonder why the powers that be are not expediting the construction of PV farms to use NGS shuts down later this year? The solar resource in the near desert conditions is excellent and there is lots of flat or nearly flat land. The synergies of the nearby Glen Canyon Dam hydro electric facility with large solar farms should be a no brainer. In addition, the shutting down of the NGS will free up large amounts of water as the NGS apparently uses 50,000 acre-feet (over 16 billion gallons!) of water annually.
It gets even more bizarre when one considers this:
Solar Power More Lucrative Than Crops at Some US Farms
For more than a century, Dawson Singletary’s family has grown tobacco, peanuts and cotton on a 530-acre farm amid the coastal flatlands of North Carolina. Now he’s making money from a different crop: solar panels.
Singletary has leased 34 acres of his Bladen County farm to Strata Solar LLC for a 7-MW array, part of a growing wave of solar deals that are transforming U.S. farmland and boosting income for farmers.
Farmland has become fertile territory for clean energy, as solar and wind developers in North America, Europe and Asia seek more flat, treeless expanses to build. That’s also been a boon for struggling U.S. family farms that must contend with floundering commodity prices.
“There is not a single crop that we could have grown on that land that would generate the income that we get from the solar farm,” said Singletary, 65.
The Hambacher Forest comment is hardly an argument against renewable or for nuclear. It is an argument against clearing the forest to facilitate a coal mine. A story covered in the last non-petroleum thread was Renewables made up almost 65% of net power production in Germany last week. I expect that at some point in the future, barring any serious black swan events, we will see a headline about Germany getting 100% of it’s electricity from renewables for a day, then eventually days and weeks on end. Hopefully one day it will be news, when Germany has to resort to fossil fuel power.
The argument about the cost of electricity from nuclear vs renewables is dated. He is comparing the cost of electricity from depreciated nuclear plants that were built decades ago with renewables built in in effort to scale up manufacturing of renewable energy technology in an era when it was still more expensive. How about comparing new renewables with new nuclear. The experience with the cost of new nuclear is not looking too good with the following three plants yet to be commissioned, having experienced extensive delays:
Vogtle, US ($25 billion)
Olkiluoto-3, Finland (€8.5 billion)
Flamanville 3, France (€10.9 billion)
Since the above projects are not yet complete, there is still a chance the costs could rise even further. In the UK the Hinkley Point C project is underway and projected to cost £19.6 billion, one of the most expensive man made structures ever built!
In the mean time the reduced cost of solar have resulted in a 50 MW PV plant covering 200 acres in my neck of the woods, scheduled for completion by the end of June, with a ppa at US 8 cents/kWh. The only other source in the island that might cost less would be wind. Globally, in other jurisdictions there are ppas being floated at 3c/kWh and costs are still falling, as capacity for the manufacture of raw silicon and finished modules continues to grow.(See. Poly maker Daqo presents a blockbusting set of figures)
I have concerns about the extremely long life of hazardous nuclear waste. The worst case I have heard is that the waste will be hazardous long after the containers it is stored in have disintegrated due to age. I have visions of hundreds or maybe thousands of years into the future when some intelligent species wonders into a contaminated area, oblivious to the meaning of any warning signs that still exist on any structures that still exist. They will encounter a hazard that they cannot sense unless they have evolved the means of sensing gamma radiation, thus exposing themselves to potentially lethal doses of radiation. AFAIK mankind has never built anything that has lasted or is projected to last as long as this material will remain hazardous.
Videos of the area around Fukishima post the incident are scary. Ditto for Chernobyl.
As stated by alimbiquated, the statement that “There is no plan to deal with solar panels at the end of their 20 year life” is demonstrably false on two fronts. First the lifespan is unknown and secondly, I am pretty sure I posted a link at this very site, to a story about a European outfit doing promising research on recycling technology for end of life PV modules. As far as his concerns about the export of used panel to third world countries, as long as they are still able to produce power, it is likely that they will be used to generate electricity for useful purposes. By the time panels made since the beginning of the latest boom in PV installation are well and truly dead, procedures for recycling them and reclaiming the useful materials should be well established, assuming civilization does not collapse in the interim!
Elsewhere in this thread, TechGuy brought up the issue of PV and strong hurricanes. Living in “hurricane alley” as I do, I have taken a keen interest in this and fortunately the two strong huriccanes that swept through the Caribbean in 2017 provided lots of data. Rocky mountain Institute produced a report “Solar Under Storm”, based on evalution of systems affected by the two (strong) hurricanes. It can be dowloaded from the following page, Solar Under Storm: Designing Hurricane-Resilient PV Systems. I downloaded it for future reference and forwarded the information about this report to some relevant bodies in my neck of the woods
In general, Shellenberger falls in the category of “experts” that do not get the implications of exponentially growing technologies. Anyone that regularly visits insideevs.com, pvmagazine.com and reneweconomy.com.au, as I do, can attest to the fact that the pace of developments is dizzying.
Case in point, this past Wednesday (March 13), Elon Musk unveiled Tesla’s latest product, due for first deliveries in late 2020. During his presentation he brought up some interesting information.
Eleven years ago as of February, Tesla had produced one car, serial number 1, which was driven onto the stage. Currently Tesla has produced about 550,000 vehicles with a target of producing one million by the end of this year.
Tesla’s Gigafactory in Nevada produces more lithium ion battery capacity than the rest of the world combined,including batteries for all purposes (including laptop computers and other mobile devices)
Since 2012, Tesla has built their own proprietary network of 1,400 high power charging stations, with more than 12,000 individual charging points in 36 countries.
He also showed pictures of the site of the company’s new Gigafactory in China when the land had been cleared and the fence built, what it looks like now and a rendering of what it will look like when completed later this year. This new factory will combine the capbailities of the existing battery gigafactory in Nevada and the California vehicle manufacturing plant and should almost double their manufacturing capacity.
I watched the video at UPDATE: Tesla Model Y Reveal: Watch Livestream Replay Here. A treat, if you like to watch a real, hoinest to goodness geek give a presentation!
Then there’s this:
Shell’s big power plans point to rapid shift to electric, and scale of disruption
When the world’s second biggest “Big Oil” company, Royal Dutch Shell, announced the purchase of German battery maker Sonnen last month, the talk from inside the company was that Shell is preparing for a significant and rapid shift to electric – perhaps within a decade.
Such forecasts, including by those like Stanford University futurist Tony Seba, are generally downplayed, by incumbents whose business models will be destroyed by the scale and speed of such a transition, by the nay-sayers still clinging to last century technologies, and by the regulators and policy makers who know they have already been left behind.
But Shell has all but confirmed that this scenario is exactly what they are planning for. By the early 2030s, it says, it expects to be the biggest power company in the world, as just about everything – including transport and heating – turns electric.
Seba gets it, Shellenberger does not.
Navajo GS
about 1 sq mile of land that will be difficult to reclaim, think contamination from coal and chimney fallout. That can hold a LOT of solar. No farmland involved. Heck, they are even building solar out at Chernobyl and that is not exactly affecting prime farmland.
Hinkley C
If you include the cost of production subsidies, the total cost to the consumer is likely to be well north of £30 billion and the government is trying to keep the true costs quiet.
Why even use farmland, I did a recent calculation on how much solar could have been generated by using the roofs of our local Walmart. Mandate all large commercial and industrial developments to be covered in solar including parking. That will put a huge capacity right where it is needed instead of needing miles of connections to bring it into town. We have some good examples here, 2 large fruit and veg wholesalers have installed LARGE solar setups on their roofs – think of all the refrigeration and lighting needs covered. An ice-cream maker and distributer, right in the middle of the town and in the block next to the town square, has put up a LARGE array – think freezing all that ice-cream, oh, and nightfall is not an issue as no-one is making ice-cream then 😉 A local butcher has a large system – refrigeration needs. A restaurant pumps solar juice into the local grid while it does not need much, providing power to local day time businesses then draws from the grid at night as it needs power thus providing a local load leveling service.
And if anyone is replacing 20 year old panels because they believe that is their end of life, please send them to me and I will find good use – er – I mean dispose of them and only charge a small fee over costs.
And hurricanes! It seems solar installations are responsible for holding many roofs on, how irresponsible of the. Looking at the photos of the large arrays that were damaged I would say that the cause was very poor construction of the support system, inadequate steel structures with no cross bracing or anti-torsion. Local solar can provide rapid power resupply whereas large scale distribution can take a very long time and huge costs, financially as well as manpower and materials. How different would things have been in Puerto Rico?
NAOM
Seba gets it, Shellenberger does not.
Michael Shellenberger is a nuclear lobbyist.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something if his salary depends on his not understanding it.
Just sayin!
https://www.wiseinternational.org/nuclear-monitor/853/exposing-misinformation-michael-shellenberger-and-environmental-progress
Exposing the misinformation of Michael Shellenberger and ‘Environmental Progress’
Olkiluoto has now permission to start operations, they are planning to start the commercial use in the start of the next year. When Olkiluoto important person was interviewed in radio, there was sort of question ’should the electricity price now drop’ the answer was somewhat evasive so I wouldn’t bet that the price doesn’t rise…
Islandboy, I really like your posts. Keep up the good work.
According to the EIA projections, onshore wind additions in the US reduces dramatically after 2021. Most of the additions out to 2050 are combined cycle natural gas and solar PV, It looks like coal and nuclear are held about steady at the 2021 point with a slight decline by 2050.
Of course the basis for this projection is purely economic and has little to do with planetary realities or the decline in available resource.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=38612
If this course is followed, the planetary climate emergency will continue to escalate rapidly.
Yeah, as Greta Thunberg said: Our house is on fire!
Would you like sugar with your tea?
Maybe one could explain why the EIA thinks coal and nuclear stay constant for the next thirty years when the infrastructure is old already and will have to be shut down. That would imply new additions of coal and nuclear.
Myself, I do not trust their analysis.
Gonefishing,
The chart shows only additions to capacity, there is one addition of nuclear and no additions to coal after 2018, my guess is that they have underestimated the falling costs of solar and the likely rising costs of natural gas after 2030, at that point there will likely be no additions to natural gas generating capacity it will all be solar and wind, in addition capacity utilization of coal and natural gas generating units will fall dramatically and many will be retired as they will no longer be able to compete with cheaper wind and solar power.
I too do not think these EIA estimates are very realistic.
Hi Dennis,
As you can see from the reference case below coal levels out in the early 2020’s and only slightly falls in amount of generation through 2050. Makes no sense to me that all those old coal generators keep going that long since most were installed pre 1990’s. Implies that new ones were added.
Same with nuclear power, most are old now and will shut down long before 2050. Current average age is 37 years. How then does the power from them keep fairly steady after 2030?
The answer to that one might be that many have already had their licenses extended from the original 40 years to 60 years, But even then, almost all existing nuclear would have been shut down prior to 2050. Oddly I found a couple that had been extended to 90 years operation.
Still, to keep up power output to 2050 implies new generation added or many extensions beyond 60 years operation. Good luck to everyone with that.
https://www.eia.gov/nuclear/spent_fuel/ussnftab2.php
Of course with natural gas growing as in the reference case the climate is in overdrive and the economy is in far overshoot.
Coal barely reduces in real output over 30 years.
Gone fishing,
I agree the EIA’s scenario does not look very realistic. Wind and solar power will fall in price and drive coal to 5% or less by 2050. Natural gas will also not be able to compete after 2025 and is likely to drop to 10% or less of US electric power output by 2050, likewise heat pumps (both air and ground source depending upon climate) will replace at least 50 % of natural gas use for heat and hot water by 2050 (perhaps more), better insulation levels, sealing of air leaks in homes and building standards for new homes and commercial buildings to passivehaus standards will also help cut natural gas use by perhaps an additional 25% (of current use for building heat). I believe these estimates are conservative, we could do much better with good government policy to address climate change.
Can anybody explain to me WHY solar farms and wind farms are being built on leased land? Farmland is simply NOT THAT VALUABLE, not so valuable as to justify the lease rates I read about. The developers should be buying the land outright.
Of course if there’s only ONE farm that’s suitable in a given locality, due to local political opposition, local roads, local access to the grid via a main line, and so forth, the farmer might be in the driver’s seat, and most farmers would rather eat shit with a splinter anyway than to sell out the home place, unless they are at death’s door.
Does anybody here have links to sites that have PROFESSIONALLY prepared data on the reduction in peak electrical demand, and on the reduction in need for off peak ( such as night and weekend) electricity, as the result of mandating the adoption of appliances designed to perform without a steady supply of electricity, and tightening up building codes ?
I know of a lot of things that can help, such as going to double or triple sized and super insulated hot water heaters that will last out two or three days of low solar or wind power production, etc, but any kind of comprehensive hard or estimated data is hard to find. Hard for me, anyway. I’m a computer nit wit.
Thanks in advance for any links.
Why Nuclear Can’t Save The Planet!
https://cleantechnica.com/2019/03/15/public-fear-of-nuclear-isnt-why-nuclear-energy-is-fading/
Public Fear Of Nuclear Isn’t Why Nuclear Energy Is Fading
What is apparent is that prior to 2005 most people charged with developing electrical generation in countries around the world realized it was too expensive, too slow to build, too inflexible, and that other alternatives, mostly gas at the time sadly, were cheaper. And that in 2016 to now, most people realize that nuclear is still too expensive, too slow to build, and too expensive, and that wind and solar are radically cheaper and faster to build. And that wind and solar can be built in any country in the world, unlike nuclear.
Fear of nuclear power is vastly overrated as an issue among pro-nuclear advocates. Like conservatives in the USA up to the Secretary of the Interior blaming non-existent eco-terrorists for west coast wildfires, it’s a strawman, a convenient fiction that the nuclear advocates share among themselves to avoid the harsh truth.
The harsh truth being: It Is The Economy Stupid!
I would love to hear anyone’s comment on this article! 😉
If nuclear energy were cheap and easy to build, it would be the prime source of electric power on the planet. If the advanced nuclear systems touted by Gates had ever come to fruition we would have a lot more than we do now.
Since neither condition is a reality, nuclear power will reduce except in places like China where money is no object. Certainly logical and sane thinking about safety and the environment would never limit the growth of nuclear, that is not how the planet is run by humans. Not in general at least.
Quick, rip down all the towers! I have actually witnessed this! Oh yeah, all wires in the sky have to go.
Guy wires pose a fatal threat to birds, who often circle the tower lights at night.
Towerkill is a phenomenon in which birds are killed by collisions with antenna towers. In the United States, the US Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that between 5 and 50 million birds are killed each year by tower kill
The effect on overall bird populations by towerkill may be small, but the phenomenon is of considerable concern to ornithologists, because many endangered bird species are being killed, and because so many birds are killed in such a small area of land. In at least one instance, several thousand birds were killed at a single tower in one night. Additionally, the unnatural lights on communication towers disrupt bird migration patterns in ways that are still not fully understood. At least 231 species have been affected, with neotropical migrants making up a large proportion of all species killed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Towerkill
Towerkill is a phenomenon in which birds are killed by collisions with antenna towers. In the United States, the US Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that between 5 and 50 million birds are killed each year by tower kill
The real problem is, renewables frying too many birds… /SARC!
No more fireworks please.
https://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-blogs/weathermatrix/4k-and-20-blackbirds-downed-from-the-sky/43945
Cut out industrial type farming too. Keep those nutrients where they belong.
https://www.chesapeakebay.net/discover/bay-101/bay_101_fish_kills
This year, above-average spring rainfall and streamflow is transporting nitrogen to tidal waters in amounts slightly above the long-term average, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, which provides the nitrogen-loading estimates used to generate the annual hypoxia forecast.
In spring 2018, the Susquehanna River delivered 85.7 million pounds of nitrogen into the Chesapeake Bay. The Potomac River, as measured near Washington, D.C., supplied an additional 30 million pounds of nitrogen, according to USGS.
https://phys.org/news/2018-06-chesapeake-bay-larger-than-average-summer-dead.html
https://electrek.co/2019/03/16/tesla-pickup-truck-decoding-teaser/
My guess is that the Tesla pickup will look clean and classy, but pretty much like other pickups, rather than cyber punk or any other outrageous ( to the typical new truck buyer) style.
The three models out already are basically clean classic and conventional in the styling. Tesla has not yet made the mistake of producing a vehicle that will look strange and outlandish to the buying customer.
http://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/2018/09/one-mans-trash/
I can see landfill mining work.
Karma?
Highest sea level rises in U.S. are in Texas and Louisiana, annual report finds
https://desdemonadespair.net/2019/03/highest-sea-level-rises-in-u-s-are-in-texas-and-louisiana-annual-report-finds.html
HAPPY ST. PATRICK’S DAY!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6dzUOYTQtQ
(A Biologist’s) St. Patrick’s Day Song
Cheers!
The closest new nuc design to commercialization in the USA is out of Oregon State Univ. 12 yrs in the pipeline so far. Its a serious effort.
If you are at all interested in the brief and where the project stands, here you go-
https://www.gazettetimes.com/business/local/nuscale-s-big-gamble-banking-on-nrc-approval-company-gears/article_1eace0f2-23c6-56a2-9719-f00da170d7dc.html#tracking-source=home-top-story
Food for thought: The inherent dangers of our tribal primitive evolutionary past when writ large in our global 21st century civilization.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/13/opinion/hate-politics.html
A recent survey asked Republicans and Democrats whether they agreed with the statement that members of the opposition party “are not just worse for politics — they are downright evil.”
The answers, published in January in a paper, “Lethal Mass Partisanship,” were startling, but maybe they shouldn’t have been.
Just over 42 percent of the people in each party view the opposition as “downright evil.” In real numbers, this suggests that 48.8 million voters out of the 136.7 million who cast ballots in 2016 believe that members of opposition party are in league with the devil.
The mass partisanship paper was written by Nathan P. Kalmoe and Lilliana Mason, political scientists at Louisiana State University and the University of Maryland.
https://www.dannyhayes.org/uploads/6/9/8/5/69858539/kalmoe___mason_ncapsa_2019_-_lethal_partisanship_-_final_lmedit.pdf
Lethal Mass Partisanship:
Prevalence, Correlates, & Electoral Contingencies1
Related Study:
Schadenfreude and the spread of political misfortune
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0201754
I’m not surprised.
How long have I been saying it’s all about us versus them, our community /family/ religion/ culture / national identity as opposed to the OTHER’s community/family? religion/culture/ national identity ?
A number of obviously reasonably well educated, even superbly educated liberals ( who by and large dominate any political discussions, as opposed to purely technical discussions here) who post here have made it perfectly clear over time, reading between the lines, that they see the socially conservative and or religious people of this country as more or less only semi human, to be despised rather than accepted as fellow citizens with the right to their own ethics and way of life.
Now it’s certainly true that the socially conservative element is even MORE prone to this failing….. but then, as the liberal element is so extraordinarily fond of pointing out…… the conservative camp includes the large majority of voters who truly are ignorant.
Ignorance is actually a pretty goddamned good excuse for a lot of mistaken beliefs and thinking, unless you happen to be a hard core right winger, one of the kind that thinks all the problems experienced by poor, ignorant, uneducated people happen to be THEIR OWN FAULT, for not working hard enough to succeed and get rich, lol.
There’s nothing quite so satisfying as advertising one’s superior beauty, muscles, wealth, etchics, or education, because it’s STILL all about us versus them, and worth bragging about , any time your “us” has the advantage of “them”.
People possessed of the modest amount of intellectual horsepower needed to understand the link about lethal mass partisanship and what I’m saying will hopefully give some thought to the way they talk about the opposition political camp, and thus win over some fence sitting voters, while at the same time avoiding the error of motivating the “mind’s made up” opposition on election day.
Elections in the USA are often won or lost by as little as one percent of the electorate shifting from one side to the other. If you live in a competitive district or state, you can do your part by motivating just one or two stay at homes or fence sitters to vote your way in 2020.
I agree that none of this is surprising! The underlying causes of which are deeply rooted in our primate ancestor’s evolution. This is deeply primal. The real danger is that when these base instincts are manipulated by deliberate propaganda, we get Nazi Germany and a Holocaust!
https://complexsystems.org/335/us-versus-them-the-tribalism-trap/
“US” VERSUS “THEM”: THE TRIBALISM TRAP
One of the great contradictions of human psychology is our notorious double-standard with respect to how we treat others, as a rule. If a person is viewed as being one of “us” – a member of our group, or our religious faith, or our nation – we are predisposed to cooperate with them, to empathize with their hardships, come to their assistance if needed, and sometimes even sacrifice our lives for them. Because they are members of our “tribe”, we view them as sharing a common fate.
Yet, paradoxically, our sense of solidarity and “patriotism” comes to an abrupt halt at the “waters’ edge” – to re-use an old expression about our foreign policy. People who we identify as “they”, or “them” are, by definition, outsiders – not one of “us”. They are likely to be perceived as “different” from us and even undeserving. Our attitude toward them can range from indifference to fear and even hatred. We may see them as strangers, aliens, parasites, competitors, a mortal threat, or maybe even sub-human. In the extreme, we may be willing to maim or kill them without remorse. Think of the Rohingya in Myanmar, or the Jews in Nazi Germany, or the many other historical examples of genocide and “ethnic cleansing.”
From the NY Times article I linked above.
Just over 42 percent of the people in each party view the opposition as “downright evil.” In real numbers, this suggests that 48.8 million voters out of the 136.7 million who cast ballots in 2016 believe that members of opposition party are in league with the devil.
Just let that sink in for a moment.
And this is a Pepsi, and Pepsi Lite situation.
On a macro level, there is not much difference.
More like this:
Once I saw this guy on a bridge about to jump. I said, “Don’t do it!”
He said, “Nobody loves me.” I said, “God loves you. Do you believe in God?”
He said, “Yes.” I said, “Are you a Christian or a Jew?”
He said, “A Christian.” I said, “Me too! Protestant or Catholic?”
He said, “Protestant.” I said, “Me too! What denomination?”
He said, “Baptist.” I said, “Me too! Northern Baptist or Southern Baptist?”
He said, “Northern Baptist.” I said, “Me too! Northern Conservative Baptist or Northern Liberal Baptist?”
He said, “Northern Conservative Baptist.” I said, “Me too! Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region or Northern Conservative Baptist Eastern Region?”
He said, “Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region.” I said, “Me too!”
“Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879 or Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912?”
He said, “Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912” I said, “Die heretic!” And I pushed him over.
This tale of pushing the heretic over is supposed to be taken as a parable, and exaggeration, an example of artistic license.
But I actually know some people who have switched churches, up to the point of giving up spaces, in the church cemetery where generations of their parents and grandparents are buried, to go elsewhere, as the result of a dispute on a point of little more consequence.
And sometimes Jesus’s most devoted followers expel some members from their church as the result of disputes about such minor points. It’s easier to operate on the us versus them principle than it is the love thy neighbor and brother and sister human being principle.
BUT nevertheless, it’s possible, by being sneaky and devious, to quietly tunnel under the mental walls of the enemy camp, and plant the seeds of heresy and rebellion within the walls.
One way that has worked twice for me is to simply never mention republicans or democrats, and just focus on the cruelty and injustice of our health care system, wherein a poor person can’t get treatment for a serious injury or illness without likely being bankrupted…… if he or she gets care at all.
Once my chronically ill voter to be has gotten thoroughly pissed off and aroused, having escaped the clutches of hopelessness and apathy, I mention doing something… such as voting for the same politicians that put in Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, free school lunches, and the county health department…….. the Democrats.
It’s worked twice.
It’s worked a third time by helping a shotgun and fishing rod packing young nephew, born into a hard core R type family, come to understand who REALLY gives a damn about the environment…. because you see , he loves nature, and hunting and fishing, above everything else excepting getting laid, and he has that covered too, because he takes his girl with him on such outings. He’s now majoring in biology, a decision made with a great deal of encouragement on my part, and hopes to enjoy a career working in the field as a researcher, law enforcement officer, or park ranger, etc.
He will vote D in 2020 because he has already finished his freshman level but REAL chemistry and biology classes, and now KNOWS enough, because the chemistry included the basic physics of gases, to know that forced warming aka climate change is real and that it threatens to destroy most of what he holds most dear.
BTW,
The post has zero to do with religion, it was about tribalism!
Us vs. Them!
The religion part was just the backdrop to the story. I could rewrite it as say two members of different motorcycle gangs or any other group for that matter!
Cheers!
The country once split apart in the past. It is now splitting apart again, this time over energy slaves instead of actual human slaves. Whatever unity we had is being eroded away by both major parties.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/10/the-threat-of-tribalism/568342/
Back atcha Fred,
I understand, and understood.
I’ve seen the same story told in the form of patriotism, sports fandom, and even scientific debate, except that the supposed heretic was only doused in ice water in a public forum. That one was a comic take off on that very thing happening to EO Wilson.
Lots of junior but real and competent scientists have been silenced, over the years and centuries, by powerful older guys in their field, by the equivalent but less violent technique of ridicule and preventing them from getting good positions.
This has happened so often it has lead to the saying that science often advances one generation at a time, as the old guys die.
If religion isn’t, among many other things that it is, both good and bad, just ONE MORE FORM or manifestation of tribalism, I’m even dumber than some people think, lol.
“The more things change, the more they stay the same.” I don’t have any idea who said THIS first, but he she or maybe even IT was an astute student of ape nature, lol.
Now here’s evidence that the establishment has been wrong once again. It may not hold up, but it’s worth some thought.
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/people-can-sense-earth-magnetic-field-brain-waves-suggest?utm_source=email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=latest-newsletter-v2&utm_source=&utm_medium=&utm_campaign=
IF this holds, it would explain the fact that two or three people I have known, and many I have read about in old books seem to have an innate sense of direction. My old Daddy was/ is one of them. You could spin him around in the dark in the middle of the woods on a pitch black foggy night, and he invariably knew which way to go to home. He might start in the wrong direction, but he always corrected his mistake within a minute or so. But he’s bedridden now, for all practical purposes, and can’t demonstrate it ever again. Ditto the dogs, but tried it without the dogs along.
And even though he never got past what was the equivalent of junior high in a the backwoods one room school, he taught himself to tell time to within about five to ten minutes looking at the stars. He has never been able to explain how he does it, but he does say he learned just by looking, while using a watch, over a period of years. I suspect he subconsciously noted the rise and set of certain stars, given our location in the mid latitudes.
One thing that’s known to memory experts but few laymen that men and women who have little or no formal education sometimes have simply amazing memories, and can and do learn long stretches of poems, scripture, family history, etc, by heart, with the ability to repeat them word for word years later.
These people are not the same as the ones who can memorize anything, but lack in ordinary intelligence. They are usually in the middle of the curve in terms of everyday intellectual abilities and personality.
“Each year, the world consumes more than 92b tonnes of materials – biomass (mostly food), metals, fossil fuels and minerals – and this figure is growing at the rate of 3.2% per year.
Since 1970, extraction of of fossil fuels (coal, oil and gas) has increased from 6bn tonnes to 15bn tonnes, metals have risen by 2.7% a year, other minerals (particularly sand and gravel for concrete) have surged nearly fivefold from 9bn to 44bn tonnes, and biomass harvests have gone up from 9bn to 24bn tonnes.”
To picture the amount of extraction going on in the world think of it as Mount Everest being removed every 1.9 years.
Also think that as we expand our systems, more energy and material is needed just to maintain the system. Soon we will cross the point where the amount of energy and material needed to maintain is equal to our ability to extract that energy and material. What then?
Off to nowhere.
I think this says a lot about where civilization is putting it’s efforts and where it wants to be in the future.
http://kunstler.com/eyesore-of-the-month/december-2017/
Jeering White Boys
https://thebaffler.com/alienated/jeering-white-boys-zakaria
Meanwhile, if you watch the entire video of the event you realize the entire thing was made up to get CNN views and clicks.
I’m anything but a Trump supporter, but this whole episode has been ridiculous. CNN deserves to lose the 275 million dollar defamation suit now brought against them.
Naw, I think you are a typical lying Trump supporter.
I’m a registered Democrat and voted for Hillary in the last election.
You’ve also seen me (and agreed with me at times) talking in depth about environmental issues and risks on this forum. If you looked into my post history here you would see that I am very concerned about the current degradation to the environment, the current state of US politics, and the energy issues facing society.
Does any of this scream “lying Trump supporter” to you?
I can examine an incident with my own eyes and figure out when one side or the other has blown things out of proportion (or in this case simply made them up) and come to personal conclusions about what occurred.
But I guess this just makes me a “lying Trump supporter”.
I was replying to this line: the entire thing was made up to get CNN views and clicks.
Anyone with an ounce of brains will realize CNN did not make up the entire thing. The entire thing is exactly what it looks like, a bunch of smart ass kids, with MAGA caps, harrassing and old man. Only a Trump supporter would try to justify it. I hope they, that is the parents of the smart ass kids, lose their ass in the lawsuit.
If you watch the longer video of the event, you will see that
1. The children were harassed by a religious group.
2. In response, the children started performing school spirit chants with words like “CCH” (the name of their highschool)
3. A native American man inserts himself into the middle of their group, and locks eyes with a student while banging a drum. The students never did anything directly too him nor did they block his exit. They did not invite him in. He chose to insert himself. It was clearly an older and presumably wiser man attempting to provoke some sort of response from school age children.
Now, are those kids smartass, disrespectful, and uneducated? Yes, probably. Are they brainwashed by their communities and religious school? Definitely yes. Are they going to grow up and change their ways and become more respectful, helpful members of society? The odds are against them, but some surely will.
But since when have kids NOT been disrespectful little twerps? Should the punishment for being an idiot as a child really be to have your 16 year old face plastered across the entire country above the words “racist instigator”?
And in this instant, the kid was CLEARLY not the instigator, if you watch more than the 30 second clip that went viral.
I watched the whole thing, several times. CNN did not make it up as you stated. And the old man did not insert himself in the picture. He was just marching along and they surrounded him. CNN did nothing wrong, they just recorded the event. If those idiot parents sue them they will definitely lose.
You watched the entire 1.5 hour long video multiple times? Sorry if I find that hard to believe. The video cnn originally showed does not show the entire event. There is another, longer video, from a different angle, which shows the man walking into the middle of their (stationary) group, banging a drum.
Oh fuck no, I watchet the entire video shown on other channels several times, much longer but not an hour and a half. That was enough. CNN just pointed their camera and recorded the event, that’s all.
And you think the MAGA kids should be paid millions of dollars for having their public antics recorded? Bullshit! Only a rabid Trump supporter could believe such bullshit.
1.5 hours? You are just making that shit up.
Ron,
Here is a link to the full video. It is actually 1.75 hours long. Look at the 1 hour 12 minute mark to watch the native american man walk into the group of teenagers, banging a drum.
https://youtu.be/UQyBHTTqb38
Within 1 day (or so) of first airing the initial report, CNN got more video and showed the whole thing, explaining that the initial report was an incomplete view. They didn’t fabricate it. Better if they had the whole thing from the start.
Still, ugly from many angles.
Stoic smile, or disrespectful smirk? One could view it as an indicator of social progress that this is what we are now debating from our tribal perches.
Whale Ate 88 Pounds Of Plastic Before Washing Up Dead In Philippines
A whale that washed up dead on the shores of the Philippines last week had a staggering 88 pounds of plastic inside its stomach before succumbing to starvation and dehydration.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/dead-whale-plastic-phillipines_n_5c8f9b2ee4b0d7f6b0f6085d
The World’s Recycling Is in Chaos. Here’s What Has to Happen
Cheryl Katz
https://www.wired.com/story/the-worlds-recycling-is-in-chaos-heres-what-has-to-happen/
It has been a year since China jammed the works of recycling programs around the world by essentially shutting down what had been the industry’s biggest market. China’s National Sword policy, enacted in January 2018, banned the import of most plastics and other materials headed for that nation’s recycling processors, which had handled nearly half of the world’s recyclable waste for the past quarter century. The move was an effort to halt a deluge of soiled and contaminated materials that was overwhelming Chinese processing facilities and leaving the country with yet another environmental problem—and this one not of its own making.
In the year since, China’s plastic imports have plummeted by 99 percent, leading to a major global shift in where and how materials tossed in the recycling bin are being processed. While the glut of plastics is the main concern, China’s imports of mixed paper have also dropped by a third. Recycled aluminum and glass are less affected by the ban.
Even before China’s ban, only 9 percent of discarded plastic was being recycled, while 12 percent was burned. The rest was buried in landfills or simply dumped and left to wash into rivers and oceans. Without China to process plastic bottles, packaging, and food containers—not to mention industrial and other plastic waste—the already massive waste problem posed by our throwaway culture will be exacerbated, experts say. The planet’s load of nearly indestructible plastics—more than 8 billion tons have been produced worldwide over the past six decades—continues to grow.
Over the coming decade, as many as 111 million tons of plastics will have to find a new place to be processed or otherwise disposed of as a result of China’s ban, according to Brooks and University of Georgia engineering professor Jenna Jambeck. However, the places trying to take up some of the slack in 2018 tended to be lower-income countries, primarily in Southeast Asia, many of which lack the infrastructure to properly handle recyclables. Many of those countries were quickly overwhelmed by the volume and have also now cut back on imports.
As Costs Skyrocket, More U.S. Cities Stop Recycling
By Michael Corkery
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/16/business/local-recycling-costs.html
Recycling, for decades an almost reflexive effort by American households and businesses to reduce waste and help the environment, is collapsing in many parts of the country.
Philadelphia is now burning about half of its 1.5 million residents’ recycling material in an incinerator that converts waste to energy. In Memphis, the international airport still has recycling bins around the terminals, but every collected can, bottle and newspaper is sent to a landfill. And last month, officials in the central Florida city of Deltona faced the reality that, despite their best efforts to recycle, their curbside program was not working and suspended it.
Those are just three of the hundreds of towns and cities across the country that have canceled recycling programs, limited the types of material they accepted or agreed to huge price increases.
“Recycling has been dysfunctional for a long time,” said Mitch Hedlund, executive director of Recycle Across America, a nonprofit organization that pushes for more standardized labels on recycling bins to help people better sort material. “But not many people really noticed when China was our dumping ground.”
Living as I do in the tropics, it has struck me that one of the counter-intuitive things about plastic recycling is that it uses fossil fuel energy. I once took a load of PET bottles to a local recycling depot where they were using a giant shredder to shred the plastic before bagging it for export. No doubt when it reaches it’s destination further processing involves melting, again using fossil fuel energy.
There is an entrepreneur I saw at a solar trade show that had built a concentrating solar rig to do rotational molding of plastics. It consisted of a small field of mirrors, focused on a converted 20 foot shipping container. I wonder how long it will be before someone decides to use that kind of setup so that plastic can just be washed and then tossed into a solar heated vat with other plastic of the same type for a largely solar powered recycling process?
Over the coming decade, as many as 111 million tons of plastics will have to find a new place to be processed or otherwise disposed of as a result of China’s ban, according to Brooks and University of Georgia engineering professor Jenna Jambeck.
What a stupid statement! Demonstrates a total lack of knowledge and lack of vision!
I’m willing to go out on a limb and bet those 111 million tons of plastic products will never even be produced. They will be substituted by natural fully recyclable natural polymers and local 3D printing methods. Google Chitin and the 3D revolution. I’ve posted that link at least a dozen times already so I’m not doing it again.
But that is just the tip of the iceberg. I’m personally working with a young Brazilian entrepreneur who is being funded by Silicon Valley VC to produce and market products made from natural plant based materials for packaging, fast food plates, utensils, cups, straws, etc… I can’t reveal details at this time. This is not some vaporware pie in the sky idea. There are thousands of new ideas such as this one being developed the world over!
The usual disclaimer has to be made: This kind of development is NOT a silver bullet. None of this is going to save us! It may all be too little too late but those that continue to think the the future is going to look anything like the past by hanging on to fossil fuels and petrochemicals in general are going to be in for a rather rude awakening!
The fossil fuel and oil age are already over. Most people just don’t know it yet!
Cheers!
Fred
Keep me posted on that natural packaging. There is a LOT of that sort of stuff used around here but the market is very price sensitive. If the price is right I may be interested in supplying the product locally.
NAOM
OK,will keep that in mind!
Heh, after writing that I did some washing up. Last Saturday I bought some sprouts at the market and was washing out the container to re-use for mayonnaise. It felt a bit different so I took a look on the base –
Made in USA
Cold drinks only
GREENWARE
Made from plants
triangle 7 with pla under
syncronicity?
NAOM
Trump Parrots Anti-Science Misinformation As He Readies Climate Change Panel
President Donald Trump on Tuesday once again used his Twitter platform to share misinformation about climate change to his 59 million followers, quoting a “Fox & Friends” guest who falsely claimed global warming isn’t caused by man and could actually benefit many people.
Former Greenpeace Canada President Patrick Moore, a longtime nuclear energy industry shill, denied that human activity fuels climate change and claimed the phenomenon doesn’t pose an imminent danger to life on earth, despite the mountains of scientific evidence that suggest otherwise.
He dubbed the climate crisis as “fake news” and chalked up the catastrophic rise in global warming over the last few decades as simply “weather.”
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/donald-trump-patrick-moore_n_5c87d504e4b038892f47b332
The drama and tears we’re going to see from liberals because of this panel are going to be epic! ?
I did not mean that Conservatives are generally stupid; I meant, that stupid persons are generally Conservative. I believe that to be so obvious and undeniable a fact that I hardly think any hon. Gentleman will question it.
[John Stuart Mill, in a Parliamentary debate with the Conservative MP, John Pakington, May 31, 1866.]
I guess TheKrell proves John Stuart Mill’s point…. in spades.
I thought about responding to his comment and actually composed a lengthy response. But decided to delete it and put him on ignore instead! It is past time to stop wasting our time with stupid trolls. Especially those, whose sole purpose it is to foment discord just for the sake of discord!
This site needs a troll warning button!
Well, I think it important to note that, as a general rule, as this conservative admits, it’s the liberals who believe in science and conservatives who don’t.
I think that confirms John Stuart Mill’s opinion about which side of the political spectrum you find most stupid people.
Hard to disagree with that! But I think there is a difference between Trolls and stupid people. Or should we just lump all of them under the ‘Deliberately Ignorant’ label?
Guys, my point was a climate change panel/debate isn’t going to change anyone’s opinion on climate theories, but will be entertaining to watch and will get Fox good ratings, which is what they want.
Your point is on the top of your head
Europe is using wood from U.S forests to replace fossil fuels
https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/international-issues/europe-is-using-wood-from-u-s-forests-to-replace-fossil-fuels/
It’s enough to make a grown man cry,even an old farmer, to see what happens on a logging job these days. I live in an area where large landholdings in one tract are rare. The biggest single continuous tract of land in my immediate neighborhood, about three hundred acres, is in the process of being clear cut, with NOTHING left but stumps. Even the limbs and brush are being chipped, and sent someplace to be burnt, or sold as mulch.
At least local regs require leaving a narrow screen of trees alongside public roads, but it’s not enough you can’t see right thru it. And the land will either be cleared of stumps for farming, or it will be replanted, plantation style, probably with pine.
There are places further south where not even a sapling is left standing on square miles at a time.
This is an awesome politically driven boondoogle.
The Europeans would be many times better off, and the world would be better off, to spend the money spent on harvesting and transporting this wood sometimes hundreds of miles overland,an then across the Atlantic, and then to power plants, spending it on conservation measures, such as retrofitting older buildings and installing more electric car charging points and so forth.
The Europeans would be many times better off, and the world would be better off, to spend the money spent on harvesting and transporting this wood sometimes hundreds of miles overland,an then across the Atlantic, and then to power plants, spending it on conservation measures, such as retrofitting older buildings and installing more electric car charging points and so forth.
Oh, fer FUCK’s Sake !!!
Trust me on this! The Europeans are light years ahead of Americans on all of the above!
How do I know? Because I’ve been to Europe and seen it with my own eyes. I’ve seen the their old building retrofits, I’ve even worked on a few. I’ve been on their farms, I’ve talked to their farmers and helped plant fruit orchards. I know what they are doing with agricultural waste to biomass conversion and I’ve seen their solar farms, wind turbines and EV charging stations! I also see what is happening in the US.
See my comment down thread!
http://peakoilbarrel.com/open-thread-non-petroleum-march-14-2019/#comment-670351
In the meantime there has been a large US increase in the use of wood for heating.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=15431
Hey maybe we can find a way to burn wood pellets to run our AC units!
“The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.”
― Antonio Gramsci
See Europe for using wood to generate electricity. Also Vermont.
Wood is the lowest hanging fruit when oil, gas and coal run short.
Cherish those forests you see still standing. In 30-40 yrs they will be rare in many parts of the world, from Poland to Pennsylvania, Michigan to Ireland. Korea to Tuscany.
Cherish those forests you see still standing. In 30-40 yrs they will be rare in many parts of the world…
And there is a very high likelihood that at the point those few remaining stands will be wiped out by climate change, drought, pests and disease.
Stupid humans, that know the costs of everything but the value of nothing!
Europe is using wood from U.S forests to replace fossil fuels
That’s probably not a good idea nor is it sustainable and wood pellet burning may not even be carbon neutral even if it is obtained locally. Having said that…
First of all, wood pellets are not the full story behind biomass energy production in Europe. But even if it were, pellet imports are but a tiny fraction even of that.
https://www.drax.com/energy-policy/how-does-europe-use-biomass/
Europe and wood pellets
Nearly 22 million tonnes (Mt) of wood pellets were used in the European Union in 2015, making the region the leading wood pellet consumer in the world. It is also the world’s leading producer, creating roughly half of the world’s global output – largely from European trees.
A report from the Standing Forestry Committee, set up to represent the forestry industries in EU countries, found that just 4% of the woody biomass used in the EU was imported.
Of the 22Mt used across Europe, 10.5Mt was used for heating, while 11.5Mt was used for industrial uses like fueling power plants. But in the UK, the level of wood used for fuel falls some way behind EU averages. Thanks in large part to Drax and its transition from coal to renewable wood pellet-powered electricity generation, that’s changing, but the UK still has a way to go to catch the continental average.
What the entire world needs is more implementation of wind, solar, hydro, battery and other forms of energy storage and less and less use of fossil fuels. Period!
Set the sails, I feel the winds a’stirring
Towards the bright horizon set the way
Cast your reckless dreams upon our Mayflower
The haven from the world and her decay
Who could heed the words of Charlie Darwin
Fighting for a system built to fail
Spooning water from the broken vessels
As far as I can see, there is no land
Oh my god
The water’s all around us
Oh my god, it’s all around
Lyrics Charlie Darwin
Song by The Low Anthem
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66SPUQEgEKk
Invest $200 in wood, it lasts a short time, part of a season. Then it is gone.
Invest $200 in insulation, it lasts a lifetime and keeps working silently reducing heat and cooling demand with no effort. No trees need be cut down. It can prevent up to 70 million BTU loss over it’s lifetime. That’s 45 times the effective heat energy of the wood. In already insulated areas it’s only about 10 to 15 times the wood energy. With no further effort or cost. In fact it saves money.
Invest $200 in a PV panel, it lasts 30 to 50 years and quietly produces power that can be used for heating or many other uses. Instead of just 15 to 20 million BTU from a cord of wood it produces up to 75 million BTU over it’s lifetime.
Combine insulation and PV or thermal solar and never have to burn again.
Yep, invest in what works rather than stay on the hamster wheel of civilization. It reduces the GHG and pollution load too.
Yep, invest in what works rather than stay on the hamster wheel of civilization.
Especially if your hamster wheel is still powered by fossils fuels!
Great idea, a hamster driving it’s car on a hamster wheel.
Wood burning in whatever form has also a serious drawback: the smoke contains lots of nanoparticles etc that cause actual deaths from related lung diseases. Also those particles can get into bloodstream and cause other issues, especially for very young, old and persons already weakened by some unrelated disease…
Come tell that to my pyromaniac neighbor who needs to have a bonfire for a couple hours each day (no matter the weather) to stop himself from beating up his wife and kids. According to him, and the local city council, my concerns over the health effects of unregulated wood burning in my city is all scientific gobbledygook and a probable hoax anyway, since wood is an organic material and therefore cannot be dangerous.
I hope you are not downwind of him.
Perhaps you could discuss with him if there is real difference between smoking and inhaling wood smoke… or perhaps better not…
Despite some very cold weather in mid winter in the USA,
globally the last 3 months have very warm (hot) by historical standards.
Here is a good summary-
https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/news/global-climate-201902
Back atcha from up above Fred,
I agree with you that Europe, at least Western Europe, is decades ahead of the USA, overall, in terms of energy efficiency and conservation.
But as GF has rightly posted in this thread, it’s still better by a mile to invest the money in solar panels or wind farms plus efficiency measures such as more insulation.
One of my neighbors has a tight well constructed and well insulated little house, by current Yankee standards anyway, about a thousand square feet, and he burns about two hundred fifty bucks worth of pellets annually in a four thousand dollar pellet stove. He could install a new heat pump for that much,locally, and within five or ten more years, he could be running in mostly on solar, wind, and or water power even here in Virginia, which is sort of slow on the uptake of wind and solar power.
But in his case at least, the wood is harvested and processed within a hundred mile radius of our immediate community.
I have no doubt that even in West Germany there are still some houses and buildings that are in dire need of either being torn down altogether, if they are old and rotten, or else retrofitted.
But I haven’t had the good fortune to travel extensively, as you have, and I might be wrong on this last point, lol. It won’t be the first nor the last time, but I’m here as much to advance my own knowledge as to spread the farmer’s perspective.
And I must admit that I’m still using from fifty to a hundred gallons of kerosene annually in a high efficiency mini furnace that ducts the exhaust right thru an outside wall, thru an exhaust vent that’s only two inches in diameter, as backup, for my wood stove. I’ll keep on doing so until it becomes obvious I should install a heat pump, which won’t be too much longer, because I won’t be able to harvest firewood more than a few more years.
Delaying the purchase means having a BETTER quality heat pump, plus it will be under warranty longer, with the warranty maybe even outlasting me, if I can delay the installation a few more years.
It’s my firm belief that a lot of hard core Trump types I know will install their own solar panels within the next few years……. just as soon as it becomes obvious to them that they can save enough on their electricity bill to justify the investment.
For now, and for the same reason, I’m delaying putting in five to ten thousand watts worth myself, because the cost of them is falling faster, annually, than the avoided cost of purchased electricity is, here, locally, on that same annual basis.
But as GF has rightly posted in this thread, it’s still better by a mile to invest the money in solar panels or wind farms plus efficiency measures such as more insulation.
Which is exactly what they are doing!
I have no doubt that even in West Germany there are still some houses and buildings that are in dire need of either being torn down altogether, if they are old and rotten, or else retrofitted.
But I haven’t had the good fortune to travel extensively, as you have, and I might be wrong on this last point, lol.
Sure, you might find some buildings in West Germany, here and there that could use a good retrofit. Though that would be the exception and not the rule. So I’d say that on this point, you are mostly wrong! I’m not holding that against you, just stating the facts as I have seen them!
Cheers!
Back atcha one more time Fred,
How well are they coming along in the old East German sector?
I imagine they are mostly caught up, because it’s been quite some time since the Wall came down, but I don’t see much if anything in the news about the former commie dominated part of Germany.
I never get mad about finding out I’m wrong. You and the rest of the guys here are helping me make sure I’ll have my facts straight when I go live with my own site, hopefully sometime this year.
How well are they coming along in the old East German sector?
Admittedly I have much less firsthand experience in what used to be East Germany. I’ll have to look into that! But I have a hunch that they are not all that far behind.
Cheers!
Photographer Captures Last Images of Majestic Super Tusker Elephant
https://weather.com/science/nature/news/2019-03-15-super-tusker-elephant-will-burrard-lucas-photos#1
https://electrek.co/2019/03/19/egeb-uk-wind-renewables/
The Limey’s ( I’m fond of them, and don’t mind being called a Yankee at all, even though I’m from Virginia.) got thirty five percent of their electricity from wind this past week.
That’s thirty five percent’s worth of money for fuel they didn’t have to send to other countries, some of them the more or less declared enemies of their country and ours, and more of them the sort that aren’t exactly our FRIENDS.
The anti renewables crowd will as usual go out of their way to overlook such news.
OFM, over on the oil thread, Hugo points out that Germany only gets 5% of its electricity from solar. He forgets to point out that one of his links shows Germany at 45% renewables for 2019 (up 13% from 2018). Cognitive dissonance?
Hugo might find the following news deeply upsetting then:
Germany renewables share jumped to to 72.4% last week
A year ago, Germany set itself a target of securing 65 per cent of its electricity needs from renewable energy sources by 2030 – one of the more ambitious renewable energy targets anywhere in the world, but one that is still well short of the 100 per cent many experts believe is not only necessary, but possible in Germany.
Possible may be underselling it, however, if the last few weeks of electricity generation in Germany are anything to go by.
A week ago, RenewEconomy editor Giles Parkinson reported that Germany had sourced nearly 65 per cent of its electricity generation from renewables for the week finishing March 3 – “week 10”, according to the parlance of the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems (Fraunhofer ISE), from whom the data has been sourced.
Weeks 11 and 12 have seen Germany’s renewable electricity generation continue to increase, with week 11 (the week ending March 10) securing 67.6 per cent of its electricity from renewable energy sources while week 12 (the week ending March 17) increasing that percentage to 72.4 per cent.
Hugo might find the following news deeply upsetting then:
Yeah, I imagine that he and others like him, might have their heads actually explode if they visit Germany and other parts of Europe in person!
WOW! Awesome creature. Cause of death, old age. Contributing factors, drought and not enough food.
About 20 individuals like her left on the planet! Most people on this planet will never even get to see these incredible photographs, let alone a living breathing creature like her.
Meanwhile Donald Trump Jr. got to kill an elephant and cut it’s tail 0ff. What a despicable piece of shit!
.
Like father, like son.
As stated, “What a despicable piece of shit!”
.
Bullying McCain, Trump shows his fights don’t stop at the graveyard’s edge
WASHINGTON — Picking on a dead man seems like the ultimate bully move.
But president Donald Trump continues to trash the late Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., all the same.
“I was never a fan of John McCain, and I never will be,” Trump said at the White House Tuesday, showing that his grudges don’t stop at the graveyard’s edge.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/bullying-mccain-trump-shows-his-fights-dont-stop-at-the-graveyards-edge/ar-BBUYX1w?ocid=spartanntp
The bigger they are, the harder they fall. The clock is ticking.
These people are fucking sick.
Republicans like them. Are proud of them. Will vote for them again.
Most of the christian fundamentalists voted for them, approving of their ethics.
A majority of every christian sect voted for trump (except for maybe Quakers- I haven’t seen the numbers).
Obviously, they don’t see Joshua of Nazareth as a role model in their daily life (as if we needed more proof).
Is that a wild elephant or a situation where it was raised specially for harvest?
Wow! Just fucking wow!
Yeah, I thought that question was hilarious. That guy just has to be the typical Trump supporter, dumb as a rock.
Super moon tonight and tomorrow for those of us lucky enough to have clear skies.
Vernal equinox at 5:58 EDT.
Last night it was easy to walk around without a headlamp with the bright moon.
Wonderful nuclear, the answer to all our problems.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/20/brazilian-drug-gang-opens-fire-on-convoy-of-trucks-carrying-nuclear-fuel
NAOM
To be fair, this was a random gang shooting and the convoy transporting unprocessed uranium just happened to get caught in the crossfire. There was zero risk to anyone from the uranium. Now, as for the risk of acute lead poisoning… that would have been a whole nuther matter!
BTW, I used to dive Ilha Grande island near Angra. It is still beautiful even today.
I could do without a nuclear reactor nearby!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilha_Grande
Cheers!
Ilha Grande = Big Island ?
I have only visited one beach, one that was popular with Sao Paulo, didn’t want to swim – too many floaters, very contaminated. Scenery on the beach was very worthwhile 😉
NAOM
Yes, Ilha Grande means big island. There are still lot’s of nice beaches in São Paulo State. I like some of the beaches north of Ubatuba, The Surf Capital of São Paulo State! BTW, its about 165 Km from Ilha Grande to Ubatuba heading south on The Rio Santos highway!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubatuba
E FredM,
What is the unprocessed uranium? Yellowcake? Ore?
Enquiring minds want to know.
From the articles I read some said natural uranium others seemed to imply it was fuel rods. Processing seems to be done at Resende with enrichment in the UK so I would guess they were fuel rods.
NAOM
Well, I went to a Brazilian source:
From a link to the OGLOBO Rio news site:
https://oglobo.globo.com/rio/traficantes-atacam-comboio-de-uranio-da-usina-nuclear-de-angra-dos-reis-23534175
O comboio saiu da sede da Indústrias Nucleares do Brasil (INB), em Resende, no sul do estado do Rio, em direção de Angra dos Reis por volta das 6h20m. Dois caminhões com pastilhas de urânio enriquecido estavam sendo escoltados pela Polícia Rodoviária Federal e veículos do Instituto Estadual do Ambiente (Inea).
A empresa revelou que a carga correu risco: “Se um tiro de arma de fogo conseguisse atravessar a proteção do contêiner, poderia danificar o combustível nuclear. No entanto, isso não colocaria em risco a população nem o meio ambiente. O urânio contido em um elemento combustível está em estado natural, tendo o mesmo nível de radioatividade encontrado na natureza”.
Translation:
The convy had left the headquarters of Indústrias Nucleares do Brasil (INB) in Resende, in the south of the state of Rio, towards Angra dos Reis at around 6:20 am. Two trucks with enriched uranium pellets were being escorted by the Federal Highway Police and vehicles from the State Environmental Institute (Inea).
The company revealed that the cargo was at risk: “If a gunshot had been able to penetrate the protective container, it could have damaged the nuclear fuel, but this would not have endangered the public or the environment. The fuel was in a natural state, having the same level of radioactivity as that found in nature.
“Two trucks with enriched uranium pellets”
“The fuel was in a natural state”
Not a contradiction, surely? 🙂 I think that moving from the processing plant to a power plant would suggest fuel rods. A few bullets shouldn’t cause a great hazard with uranium but the rods would need to go back for rework.
NAOM
BTW, the word ‘pastilha’ can also be translated as ‘cake’.
I think that moving from the processing plant to a power plant would suggest fuel rods.
Agree!
Someone should take it upon themselves to write a course teaching wannabe journalists, how to use internet search engines…
Interesting cake, does it have chocolate on top? 🙂 In Spanish they would be different but uranium yellowcake is purified but unenriched.
NAOM
Exxon’s Climate Denial Set To Face First Public Scrutiny As Legal Woes Mount
It’s been nearly four years since leaked documents revealed Exxon Mobil Corp. understood that fossil fuel emissions caused the planet to warm before it began funding a Big Tobacco-style misinformation campaign to discredit climate science.
Now the world’s largest publicly traded oil company will face public questions for the first time over its role in creating a climate crisis that threatens to upend human civilization and render dozens of major cities uninhabitable before the end of the century.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/exxon-mobil-climate-change-denial_n_5c901482e4b0d50544fee0f2
Dennis what do you think of this?
The Coming Crisis the Fed Can’t Fix: Credit Exhaustion
http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2019/03/the-coming-crisis-fed-cant-fix-credit.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+google/RzFQ+(oftwominds)
Iron Mike,
That is bunk, read some economics. Or try
https://www.bis.org/statistics/totcredit.htm?m=6%7C380%7C669
Chart below uses data from link above. Not likely to be a problem until World Debt to GDP is above 300%. The author of that piece seems to be a political scientist (his knowledge of economics seems to be a t an introductory level based on his analysis). An undergraduate student would get a C at best for that essay.
https://electrek.co/2019/03/19/canada-incentive-electric-cars-tesla-excluded/
Methinks this may be the kick in the butt that Tesla needs to get one more price reduction into effect on the Model3.
I’m not sure just how this price is calculated, but according to the link, Tesla would have to reduce the price of the 3 a couple of thousand. I presume this means it must also be readily available for delivery at that price.
I wonder who took who to lunch while choosing the cut off price, lol.
Perhaps its time for me to move permanently to Europe?! At least people there seem to get it! WTF is wrong with the USA?!
https://physicsworld.com/a/a-clean-planet-for-all/
A Clean Planet for All
The European Commission (EC) has outlined a new approach to moving to a net-zero greenhouse gas emissions economy by 2050. It says this would cost perhaps €1.42 trillion per annum. Much of that would have to be spent anyway, however, to replace existing capital items, including power plants and vehicles. And, if geared to a net-zero emission target, that investment would reduce and avoid some costs, using energy more efficiently and phasing out the use of increasingly expensive fossil fuels.
Keeping in mind, as we have previously discussed on this site, that the amount that the world spends on the fashion industry alone, tops 2.4 trillion annually.
Personally, I don’t see why the transistion to renewable energy and efficient buildings will actually cost anything at all over the long run. All the measures I take actually save me money, more money saved each year. If the change costs money it is generally not better, but is just hooked into a stupid wasteful system and should not be pursued. The whole idea is to short circuit the system, not build another complicated stupid one.
Sure the governments can supply initial interest free capital loans to get the ball rolling but the payback time is just a few years and the money gets rolled over. Eventually everyone is richer, healthier and the system runs better. Plenty of money left over for healthcare, education and increasing nature preserves.
The current system of energy and infrastructure is a lot like driving with a foot pressing the brake pedal.
Increasing the size of government by allowing it to spend more is rarely a good idea unless you happen to enjoy higher taxes and fewer personal freedoms.
Here in the US we could stop being such an empire, cut back on military, cut some of the legacy subsidies and pay for about anything we want to do. However, the problems is getting more than a few politicians agreeing on anything without big payouts to the dissenter’s pet projects.
Dan, are you a conservative by any chance? If taxes are for the public good (most of them are), bring them on!
Yup, before moving to Florida, I used to live in the Northeast, so big government, high tax, heavy regulation states left quite an unsavory taste in my mouth. Of course it goes without saying that significantly more people are moving out of states like New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, etc. than moving in.
You know what Danny Boy?! It is brainwashed morons like you, with the intellectual capabilities of a mentally deficient sea slug. and who are totally ignorant even of their own basic American history, that are usually the proudest wearers of those red MAGA hats!
You want to MAGA then let’s go back to the good old days of the 1950s and up until about the 70s or so, when the marginal tax rate on the super rich was 70% and the top marginal tax rate even hit 91%.
Maybe you should take a clue from Rutger Bergman, the Dutch Historian who told the billionaires at Davos point blank to their faces, that they were full of shit, for the simple reason, that they were not paying their fair share in taxes. And you, by mindlessly supporting their ideology, are a huge part of the problem.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goFzOBk9-sY
Rutger Bregman & Winnie Byanyima at DAVOS
From the March 19, 2019 (yesterday) edition of the EIA’s Today in Energy
U.S. renewable electricity generation has doubled since 2008
Renewable generation provided a new record of 742 million megawatthours (MWh) of electricity in 2018, nearly double the 382 million MWh produced in 2008. Renewables provided 17.6% of electricity generation in the United States in 2018.
Nearly 90% of the increase in U.S. renewable electricity between 2008 and 2018 came from wind and solar generation. Wind generation rose from 55 million MWh in 2008 to 275 million MWh in 2018 (6.5% of total electricity generation), exceeded only by conventional hydroelectric at 292 million MWh (6.9% of total generation).
U.S. solar generation has increased from 2 million MWh in 2008 to 96 million MWh in 2018. Solar generation accounted for 2.3% of electricity generation in 2018. Solar generation is generally categorized as small-scale (customer-sited or rooftop) solar installations or utility-scale installations. In 2018, 69% of solar generation, or 67 million MWh, was utility-scale solar.
Now from the March 20, 2019 (today) edition:
EIA projects U.S. energy-related CO2 emissions will remain near current level through 2050
Carbon dioxide emissions from U.S. energy consumption will remain near current levels through 2050, according to projections in EIA’s Annual Energy Outlook 2019. The AEO2019 Reference case, which reflects no changes to current laws and regulations and extends current trends in technology, projects that U.S. energy-related carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions will be 5,019 million metric tons in 2050, or 4% below their 2018 value, as emissions associated with coal and petroleum consumption fall and emissions from natural gas consumption rise.
Whatever!
I am tempted to email them and ask how they arrive at the projections, when juxtaposed with the facts presented in the March 19 article. I guess they must think that, as the costs of electricity from renewable sources continue to fall, consumers will just forego the available savings and utilities will forego the opportunity to compete or generate higher profits? Also I’m guessing that the likes of Tesla are just flukes and there is no chance that a substantial portion of the US vehicle fleet will be electric by 2050? Going by the most recent projections from Tony Seba, any vehicles powered by ICEs in 2050 will be at least 25 years old, since he projects that ICE sales will have ended by 2025!
Go figure!
Where we see trends, EIA see upstarts about to quench. So take the most optimistic view and blend it with the EIA view to get a probable reality.
Renewable energy should be really taking over the total energy in the 2030’s to 2040’s, only 50 years late but better late than never(if we can still function).
Californian solar output met 59% of demand at one point on Saturday
On Saturday afternoon, utility-scale solar output on California’s grid peaked at 10,745 MW – its highest level since last summer. More importantly, California is wringing greater flexibility out of its imports, meaning more renewables with less curtailment.
From pv magazine USA.
California continues to break new ground in terms of integrating solar, and sometimes the records come when least expected. Data from the California Independent System Operator (CAISO) showed, on Saturday solar output peaked at 10,765 megawatts, at around 2.45pm local time.
According to several sources, that was the highest level since California set its record of 10.74 GW in June – despite Saturday’s achievement arriving ahead of tomorrow’s spring equinox.
Those two figures only included solar connected to the transmission grid, leaving out behind-the-meter consumption. Based on previous estimates, rooftop and other smaller solar installations connected to the grid probably produced around 50% more energy, meaning total output may have been around 16 GW.
Nor does this include all of California, as the cities of Los Angeles and Sacramento are among the areas that are not part of the CAISO grid.
Deployment and demand
It should be no surprise that California is setting new records as the state continues to lead the U.S. According to analyst Wood Mackenzie Power & Renewables and industry body the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA), California deployed 3.4 GW of solar last year – more than three times as much as any other state.
Just to give some perspective on energy and in particular electric consumption in the USA. Industry and heating/air conditioning are big factors.
The states that use the most and least energy per capita
https://www.forbes.com/sites/rebeccalerner/2017/08/09/power-hungry-the-states-that-use-the-most-and-least-energy-per-capita/#50c085a31aad
U.S. Per Capita Electricity Use By State
https://www.energy.ca.gov/almanac/electricity_data/us_per_capita_electricity.html
Spotted an electric Nissan Leaf, for the first time, today. Also the Hyundai showroom has a new window sticker up for the IONIQ Electric. Maybe it is the start of a surge here though there is no charging infrastructure. One thing that bothers me is what will be the reaction of the ratacobres, will they start cutting off the charger cable?
NAOM
PS On the subject of theft – err, it might be termed as recycling – thieves are stealing razor wire fron the border fence and reselling it to locals!
One thing that bothers me is what will be the reaction of the ratacobres, will they start cutting off the charger cable?
They might just be shocked by the consequences… 😉
Interesting!
https://electrek.co/2019/03/20/chinese-electric-buses-oil/
Chinese electric buses making biggest dent in worldwide oil demand
Phil Dzikiy- Mar. 20th 2019 11:05 am ET
Thanks Fred,
From the piece you linked:
The report estimates that “for every 1,000 electric buses on the road, 500 barrels of diesel are displaced each day.” The same number of battery-powered electric vehicles only displaces 15 barrels of oil a day, by comparison.
Interesting indeed, and encouraging. Commercial Trucks, especially short haul should be next, probably a much bigger bang than personal vehicles and might be quicker to turn over as there are far fewer large commercial vehicles (GVW>4 metric tonnes) than smaller vehicles to replace.
The stop and go plus slower run of city buses is the forte’ of electric vehicles and the worst way to run an ICE.
Some info on taxi driving.
“According to the PBS program “Taxi Dreams,” the average number of miles driven by a taxi driver in New York City in a 12-hour shift is 180. If you do the simple math, a cab running five days a week would rack up 46,800 miles in 52 weeks. Because some cabs are used for double shifts, meaning that two drivers share the same vehicle in two 12-hour shifts, an average cab being used to pull double shifts could rack up 93,600 miles in a year or more.”
“Reported by Metro Taxi (metrotaxidenver.com), Denver’s largest taxicab company has 492 cabs on the road, and the company’s cabs average 70,000 miles per year. In an effort to reduce fuel costs and CO2 emissions, Metro Taxi has converted 15 percent of their vehicles to hybrid taxis. The hybrids get 50 to 55 miles per gallon, and Metro Taxi estimates that converting one taxi to a hybrid is the equivalent to converting five non-commercial vehicles into hybrids.”
https://careertrend.com/how-many-miles-does-an-average-taxi-cab-driver-drive-yearly-13658842.html
Of course the drives are often done in stop and go conditions, the cars sit idling half the time and I probably many are lead footed with not much thought for efficiency. Probably 15 to 20 mpg at best in many cases.
Modeling a fleet of electric taxis:
“Using models they built and data from more than 10 million taxi trips in New York City, they found that shared automated electric vehicles, or SAEVs, could get the job done at a lower cost – by an order of magnitude – than present-day taxis while also reducing greenhouse gas emissions and energy consumption. What’s more, they found that “range anxiety” is moot because smaller cars with a smaller battery range were sufficient to complete the trips, although more charging stations would be needed.”
https://phys.org/news/2018-03-fleet-automated-electric-taxis-environmental.html
https://cleantechnica.com/2019/03/20/gaf-energy-introduces-integrated-solar-roof-shingle-system/
Thats good to see. “Standard Industries, the largest roofing company in the world, has created a new division known as GAF Energy “
WARNING 1969
I guess he was an alarmist before the term was even coined. /SARC!
In any case, we currently seem to be headed in the wrong direction in geopolitical terms!
There was a lot known about the causes of climate change and the effects of industrial pollution by the 1950s. The US Air Force had funded extensive atmospheric electromagnetic transmission studies to find windows in the atmosphere for their infrared guided missile programs.
A 1958 view if climate change
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-AXBbuDxRY
A recording from 1956
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdALFnlwV_o
So it is not surprising that when Limits to Growth came out people got a bit excited and since the major global dimming of the 1950s and 60’s caused temps to level out, the anti-warmers started their campaign of “the next ice age is coming”.
Of course when the air was cleaned up somewhat the temperature rose quickly and now the GHG’s are at such a level even global dimming (mostly from Asia now) cannot stop the warming.
Now after almost 70 years, efforts to conserve, make more efficient and produce new sustainable energy systems have only dented the progress of mankind in it’s redistribution of life, material and energy on this planet.
The electric ‘Deliverator’, by Arcimoto! Love it-
https://cleantechnica.com/2019/03/20/arcimoto-introduces-a-custom-built-electric-vehicle-for-around-town-deliveries/
As air pollution gets worse, a dystopian accessory is born
By Rose Eveleth
https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/3/19/18262556/face-mask-air-filter-pollution-vogmask-airpop
The global future of air quality doesn’t look so good. As humanity continues to make little progress fighting climate change, fires are expected to get more frequent.
But what is the average person supposed to do when the air around them is no longer safe to breathe?
Enter the face mask, an accessory ripe for the market in these dystopian times. People who live in desert areas have long known to cover their mouths and protect their lungs from dust. But in the past few years, a handful of companies have started making air filtration masks engineered specifically for both fashion and function. In California, a company called Vogmask has all but cornered the market with its brightly colored designs. And abroad, companies like Airpop and Respro are entering the fold, hoping to provide an attractive alternative to the standard white painter’s mask. But how does a new accessory category take off — especially one that covers a good portion of a wearer’s face?
Some parts of the world already have a huge head start here. People in Korea, Japan, and parts of China regularly wear what are often called “courtesy masks” — surgical masks worn to prevent their germs from infecting others. “It’s considered a polite thing to wear if you’re sick,” says Christina Xu, a researcher who studies cultural trends in the US and China.
Taking sunglasses as precedent could also reveal how the adoption of masks might play out. “Designer sunglasses went from being something that was very luxury menswear to luxury womenswear,” Xu says. Eventually, sunglasses branched out into all kinds of forms: sleek, bedazzled, futuristic, bright, athletic. “All of those are still sunglasses and still fashionable, just in very different ways of expressing who the wearer is.” And, like sunglasses, some masks will be cheap and not really work to protect you, while others will be expensive, luxurious items that you keep for years.
The near-future of this accessory could depend on who picks up the object first. Xu says she could see it going a few ways: It could be adopted by streetwear fans (Supreme already sells a face mask, although it doesn’t seem to actually do much in the way of safety or filtration) or by users who prefer the Burning Man aesthetic. Or perhaps the wellness world adopts these masks, in which case the product design would look quite different. “The other direction might be the sort of Lululemon-ification of the masks, if they’re treated as these essential wellness objects and they enter the world of performance fabrics and athleisure and athletic wear,” Xu says. Think Goop or Fabletics, but for face masks.
One more nail in the coffin of pot prohibition.
https://www.wpri.com/politics/ri-enlists-former-colorado-marijuana-czar-to-help-implement-legal-cannabis/1864493650
This is an issue that’s putting the steel toed boot to the Republican asses who still resist it in any competitive district. Old folks may just want to get drunk, instead of smoking, but they have way to many kids and grandkids in legal hot water, unable to get good jobs, etc, due to idiotic pot laws, to continue to support prohibition, as a voting block, as of 2020. If they’re fence sitters, so called independents, this one issue is enough to make Democrats out of them in 2020 in at least a couple of million cases.