182 thoughts to “Open Thread Non-Petroleum October 31, 2020”
It seems to me that there is much discussion about energy but little about power.
Power matters because: power is energy per unit time: is:
– enough food per day
– enough water per day for cities
– enough repair per day for infrastructure
– etc.
For example, this year’s hurricanes illustrate that sufficient power is needed to replace damaged infrastructure at a rate greater than the rate at which hurricane’s do damage.
Insufficient energy per unit time for infrastructure repair and maintenance inevitably leads to decline.
Currently most power comes from rotating shaft heat engines.
Solar power most probably will become society’s primary source of energy as fossil fuels are exhausted.
Solar power ( with the exception of CSP ) generates electricity which uses electric motors if rotating shaft energy is required.
Rotating shaft heat engines can be very large so there is an advantage to large central rotating shaft power generation.
Without large amounts of electrical storage, solar power will not achieve the scale of heat engines because its variability makes it unsuitable for large power generators.
The probability is that the decline of fossil fuels for heat engines will result in smaller scale infrastructure. Thus the probability is that the existing 20th century infrastructure will have to be largely re-build in the 21st century.
Paul Isaacs
The probability is that the decline of fossil fuels for heat engines will result in smaller scale infrastructure.
Could you expand on that?
existing 20th century infrastructure will have to be largely re-build in the 21st century.
That would be the case under a BAU scenario, so the conclusion of your argument is unclear.
The probability is that the decline of fossil fuels for heat engines will result in smaller scale infrastructure.
Could you expand on that?
Oil, gas and heat engines can all scale significantly. There are economies of scale that have pushed them to very large size. Solar does not scale as well both because of the size of its collection area and because of its intermittency. Without storage, large scale solar installations would not be economically sound.
existing 20th century infrastructure will have to be largely re-build in the 21st century.
That would be the case under a BAU scenario, so the conclusion of your argument is unclear.
Sorry, bad choice of words. “largely replaced”
Regards,
Paul Isaacs
P+I
I don’t follow your thought train on this.
Keep in mind that electrical power flowing on the grid can drive huge electrical motors, and ‘fuel’ resistive (non-combustion) heating on a massive scale.
The source of electricity could be hydro.nucs ,solar, wind, coal , nat gas- the electrical motors don’t care the source.
The hydroelectric energy from the Grand Coolie dam in the 1940’s allowed huge manufacturing of ship and planes in WWII- fascinating read on this here- https://www.bpa.gov/news/newsroom/Pages/BPA-powered-the-industry-that-helped-win-World-War-II.aspx
Despite all that, a down-scaling of the industrial footprint of humanity is surely needed, if this habitable earth is to remain so.
Consider, the USA has a oil refining capacity of about 19 Mbpd. After a transition to electric transportation progresses for 20 years, refining capacity for oil be scaled back by perhaps 70-80%.
The excess capacity infrastructure can be repurposed, recycled, downsized.
The USA collectively drives about 3.2 trillion miles/yr. If that was all electric, the industrial footprint of the country needed to provide those miles would be much smaller than under the current ICE/petrol scenario- I assert.
Hello Hickory,
My post did not mention hydro generation. It was comparing heat engines ( almost always steam or gas turbines these days ) to PV solar power.
My conclusion was that 21st century power generation would not have as many centralized, large scale power plants.
Paul,
I’m not sure what you have in mind when you talk about oil fueled heat engines, and their ability to gain efficiencies of scale. Are you thinking of oil-fueled electrical generation? That’s pretty much been eliminated, because oil is too expensive for electrical generation and can’t compete with, well, anything.
Electric motors are superior in many ways. They’ve replaced diesel motors in trains, because they have much better torque at low speeds. They’re cheaper to build and easier to maintain. Tesla is successful in part because of their advantages: ICEs are only affordable when they’re built in massive quantity to bring down the cost of tooling for the zillions of precision components, so Lamborghinis are very expensive. So Tesla can start at the top of the food chain and then work it’s way down (the reverse of the Asian car company model).
Natural gas fueled electrical generation does not have to be enormously large: combined cycle generation can be installed in reasonably moderate plant sizes. Coal benefits from somewhat larger scale, but still doesn’t need to be gigawatt scale. Nuclear is really the only form of generation that needs enormous scale, and that’s a weakness. It means that projects are far too large to be manageable or affordable: look at the current projects in Europe, especially the UK.
Finally, it’s not true that PV has a problem with scale. Medium scale installations are extremely competitive.
Hello Nick,
My original post did not mention oil fueled. It spoke only of rotating shaft heat engines – a generic term for a prime mover that generates useful motion from a heat differential.
I do not dispute that electrical motors are superior to heat engines. But the post was concerned with prime mover power generators, not motors or other users of power.
I also do not dispute that heat engines do not have to be large. But ,in terms of power generation, many of them are. Especially, as you say, those powered by heat from nucs.
I did not say that solar does not scale. I did say that it is not probable that centralized giga-watt solar installations would be built – because they would require centralized giga-watt storage facilities.
Regards,
Paul Isaacs
Gigawatt scale solar won’t be common because price advantage of large installations over smaller ones doesn’t increase past a few hundred megawatts. There is no particular reason for storage to be centralized either.
“There are economies of scale that have pushed them to very large size. Solar does not scale as well both because of the size of its collection area and because of its intermittency. ”
Look, the economy of these large scale generators is not good. You can build for the same money wind+PV+open NG turbines+batteries.
It is naive to assume that the conventional generators do not need storage etc., they need less but that is not a game breaker.
The storage in Germany was built for baseload generators (coal, nuclear), they are sufficient to allow 70% of the electrcicity generated by wind and PV.
Paul seems to have conflated two different questions: economies of scale, and maximum feasible share of the grid’s output.
Hello Nick,
My post seems to be a miserable failure.
It was about the fact that energy is a necessary but not sufficient requirement for large scale infrastructure.
You need more than energy to run the infrastructure of cities, for example. You need power too. A fact that is rarely mentioned.
Much of the power in our current infrastructure comes from heat engine prime movers. The heat for many of those engines comes from the burning of fossil fuel.
PV is not a heat engine. To power our current infrastructure it will have to provide the same energy and power.
My conclusion was that it could not do so by simply being a drop in replacement for our existing heat engine prime movers.
In fact, I do not see anything that will allow us to maintain our current level of power consumption as fossil fuels decline.
Regards,
Paul Isaacs
Correct Nick G. Centralization isn’t really needed.
In fact the nuclear fanboys are arguing that decentralized power is cheaper, though their argument is doubtful at best.
You need more than energy to run the infrastructure of cities, for example. You need power too. A fact that is rarely mentioned.
Strange? I always thought energy and power were the same things.
Paul,
I’m afraid you haven’t really fleshed out your argument about why PV can’t replace Fossil Fuel. Why do you feel PV can’t provide sufficient power? Are you concerned about intermittency?
Ron,
Power is energy per unit time. Kilowatts are power, kilowatt hours are energy.
This leads to curious results.
Time is Money. Money is Power. So
Time = Power
or
Time = Energy / Time
Multiply both side by time, and you get time squared is energy. Or in other words, time is the square root of energy. We live in strange times.
For one thing, it would probably require a much smaller infrastructure. Consider the oil industry, since this is an oil blog.
I recently heard the argument on another forum that we need oil because you can’t build a battery big enough to operate a supertanker. The argument seems to be that we need oil to ship oil around the world.
Crude oil petroleum products and gas make up more than half of all international shipping by ton. See page 5 of thins UNCTAD report.
Refineries account for about 4% of all energy consumption in the US. About 2% of rail tonnage is oil, dwarfed by the 36% for coal. About 10% of the truck tonnage in America is for gasoline and fuel oil. In addition, trucks and trains are significant consumers of liquid fuel.
“A group of large Japanese companies has come together to launch a consortium that will build the infrastructure to develop and launch large electric vessels, like oil tankers.”
P + I-
Since you expressed concern about feasibility of solar powering the economy, here is an excerpt from an article that gives one answer to this question.
“In California, for example, a 100% SWB [solar/wind/battery] system with 3.8x more generating capacity than the state’s existing grid would need only 37 hours’ worth of batteries. The cost to build these assets between now and 2030 would be $115 billion. That’s $11.5 billion for ten years, or 0.35% of California’s $3.2 trillion GDP. The cost of electricity from this system would be less than 3 cents per kilowatt-hour, which would not only be the cheapest available option for new power generation but would be less expensive than continuing to operate most conventional power plants in the state as well.”
my note- the projected 3 cents/kwhr is a dramatically low price. Nationwide average is 11 cents/kwhr
“The following is a contributed article [the one quoted by Hickory] by Tony Seba and Adam Dorr, co-founder and research fellow, respectively, at RethinkX…” ~ Utilitydive
” ‘Tony Seba is a world-renowned thought leader…”…
‘James Arbib is a London-based investor in technology.’ ” ~ RethinkX, (Meet the Team page)
The little Tony-Seba-inside-my-head and those ‘thrown-around’ numbers above aside for a moment, that’s just California in the land of ~25% energy usage for ~5% of the rest of the world.
There seems to be two reasons why this has not been practical up until now. One, the machinery works in such a way that starting and stopping it every day is not feasible. Some kinds of equipment needs to run continuously in order to work properly. I haven’t found out whether this is the case in desalinization plants.
The other reason seems to be that the capital cost of a desalinization plant is high enough that you have to run it around the clock to keep the total costs low enough to be feasible, per cubic meter of water.
Now it seems that solar electricity has gotten to be cheap enough that running a desal plant during daylight hours only is a practical proposition.
I’m baffled by the emphasis on desal in places like California and KSA (and now Morocco). Recycling water is cheaper and easier. Las Vegas operates with recycled water: the tourists don’t seem to mind.
On the other hand, recycling can also be powered by PV.
Nick, many places in the west have already maxed out recycling.
And still the water is is in severe short supply, and salty.
Monterey County calif is a good example. Outstanding farmland (usually in the top 3 or 4 in country for value of product). But very short on water, and you have trouble even getting a permit to add a sink in the garage, let alone build a house in the county.
So yes, desal is a very attractive option if it is viable/affordable.
I suppose you have never lived in an arid zone.
Artichokes—
You shouldn’t suppose anything at all about other people. It’s not relevant to the discussion.
It’s recycling treated wastewater for farming. That’s perfectly sensible (as far as it goes), but that’s a much lower standard of water purity. I’m talking about recycling water for potable purposes, which AFAIK is the only sensible reason to do something as expensive as reverse osmosis: Your farm will go out of business very, very fast paying for desalination for irrigation water.
The thing is, treated wastewater is much easier to purify with reverse osmosis because it’s already very clean.So if you’re considering using seawater as your water source, you should maximize your use of treated wastewater first.
The problem here is that water policy here in the US as well as many other places in the world is crazy because it developed in a previous era where farmers dominated the economy. It prioritizes farmers and gives them free water, which they waste badly because it’s free. Then residential and commercial users get charged substantial costs and have to live with usage restrictions which are often pretty draconian. So, you mention developers that can’t get building permits. Does that make sense when farmers are using 80% of the water and wasting it with open irrigation ditches and incredibly thirsty crops in the desert??
That is one example, but I was referring to the the recycling of water for domestic use. It is a widespread practice in many arid urban zones
I’m familiar with the reuse of grey water and rain water, but I’m under the impression that re-use of treated wastewater for potable use is pretty unusual. Have you noticed some examples?
Here’s a quote: “In Orange County, for example, IPR (recycling) costs $800-$850 to produce enough recycled water for 2 families of 4 for a year. Desalinating an equal amount of seawater would require $1,200-$1,800 because of the amount of energy needed.”
smaller scale projects have been used in various places for a long time.
In general, it is better to just have a much smaller population, rather have to rely on reusing water or desalinization. Both of these efforts are a clear signal that humanity is far over-extended, and is simply crushing the ecosystem.
Hickory,
Thanks for the LA example.
As for recycling (or desalination), in LA’s case I’d say the primary problem is placing a large city in the desert. Pretty much at any size it’s going to have to go to unusual lengths to manage it’s water supply. OTOH, it doesn’t have to crush the neighboring ecosystems, if it’s well managed.
Larger scale does mean you have less margin for error. There’s really no clear point where you hit overpopulation: you just have less and less margin to recover from stupidness. I would agree that there’s a point where a reasonable person would say that further growth is too risky, and that we’ve hit or passed that point.
Finally, it’s worth pointing out that women all over the world have dramatically reduced their fertility, and clearly want to reduce it further. Even in the US, where the fertility rate is well below replacement, roughly 50% of all births are unplanned. And it’s not liberals that are blocking women, it’s conservatives who want to “go forth and multiply”. In Nigeria, its’ the Muslim north that has the highest fertility by a large margin. The same is true for KSA (though not for Iran, which seems to suggest that M.E. sexism has less to with Islam and more to do with Arab culture).
Liberate women, and you solve the fertility problem.
All they have to do is catch the water that falls out of the sky instead of building “flood control” canals designed to move the water away from the city to the ocean as quickly as possible, like this:
It’s stunning to look at pictures like this and listen to Californians whine about lack of water. How stupid can anyone be? There’s plenty of water. Los Angeles, for example, should tear up the pavement in the Los Angeles river and install check dams so the water will soak into the ground instead of flowing out to the ocean. Then wells would fill up.
I worked to stop a desal project in Marin, and won.
It was a project that only would of helped an out of county corp, and degraded the environment of residences.
The clueless idiots planned it on a pristine ocean spot, where a fishing and hunting club resided (probably some of the most conservative members in Marin).
We kicked their greedy asses!
The victory party was interesting, held at the fishing club.
Hint:
Not a good idea to piss off the left and the right.
I agree. Current farming practices in California are absurd. The solution is to rase the price of water to farmers, not to expensively desalinate and give it to them for free so they can waste more.
However, on current trends solar energy will get so cheap that desalination could see huge growth.
Furthermore, even very dry places with large populations have more than enough water, but poor land management means it is all wasted. Here is a recent video of supposedly dry Las Vegas:
In the abundance of water, the fool is thirsty — Bob Marley
Also note the way the illiterate reporter pronounces the s in debris.
A few times I have heard people mumble that trump is like hitler.
I don’t agree. For one thing , trump is relatively incompetent.
trump is more like mussolini- “A restless child, Mussolini was disobedient, unruly, and aggressive. He was a bully at school and moody at home”….and ultimately was thrown out of office in disgrace and is remembered by history as a fascist buffoon,
More importantly, I have come to realize that
trumps VOTERS ARE THE SAME KIND OF PEOPLE WHO EAGERLY VOTED for hitler
We study history so that we can achieve a small bit of wisdom from the mistakes of the past, rather than always needing to learn the lessons once again the hard way. May be smart to study and respect science as well.
I have observed news reports of unusually high early voting across most of the US to the point that in Texas and Hawaii early voting has already exceeded the final total vote tally for 2016. I have also seen reports of particularly unusual high numbers of younger voters casting their votes. Does anyone else here think that it is highly unlikely that all this determination to vote is any manifestation of a desire on the part of the electorate at large to give the current occupant of the WH another four years? My gut tells me that most polls may have underestimated support for Democrats by assuming that young voters are not “likely voters”. From the looks of it, America is anxious to rid itself of Trump.
Trump is more like Mussolini- “A restless child, Mussolini was disobedient, unruly, and aggressive.
Yesterday I heard a TV reporter refer to Trump as “Benito Trumpolini”.
Compare and Contrast: Trump Versus One Who Votes For A State Rep
“We study history so that we can achieve a small bit of wisdom from the mistakes of the past, rather than always needing to learn the lessons once again the hard way. May be smart to study and respect science as well.” ~ Hickory
Though it is still largely regarded as a wholly political tendency, anarchism has long enjoyed a close relationship with the sciences. In his seminal essay ‘Modern Science and Anarchism’, Peter Kropotkin wrote at the beginning of the twentieth century that ‘Anarchism is a world-concept based upon a mechanical explanation of all phenomena, embracing the whole of Nature—that is, including in it the life of human societies and their economic, political, and moral problems. Its method of investigation is that of the exact natural sciences, by which every scientifc conclusion must be verifed’.1 Anarchism, Kropotkin claimed, is the only ideology not bound to arbitrary stipulations about the proper functioning and organisation of societies. In particular, he placed stress on how the ethical principles of state capitalist societies are not in any way a reflection of human nature, but are rather imposed from above…”
“The state is the most destructive institution human beings have ever devised…
Whatever promotes the growth of the state also weakens the capacity of individuals in civil society to fend off the state’s depredations and therefore augments the public’s multifaceted victimization at the hands of state functionaries. Nothing promotes the growth of the state as much as national emergency…
States, by their very nature, are perpetually at war—not always against foreign foes, of course, but always against their own subjects. The state’s most fundamental purpose, the activity without which it cannot even exist, is robbery. The state gains its very sustenance from robbery, which it pretties up ideologically by giving it a different name (taxation) and by striving to sanctify its intrinsic crime as permissible and socially necessary. State propaganda, statist ideologies, and long-established routine combine to convince many people that they have a legitimate obligation, even a moral duty to pay taxes to the state that rules their society.
They fall into such erroneous moral reasoning because they are told incessantly that the tribute they fork over is actually a kind of price paid for essential services received, and that in the case of certain services, such as protection from foreign and domestic aggressors against their rights to life, liberty, and property, only the government can provide the service effectively. They are not permitted to test this claim by resorting to competing suppliers of law, order, and security, however, because the government enforces a monopoly over the production and distribution of its alleged ‘services’ and brings violence to bear against would-be competitors. In so doing, it reveals the fraud at the heart of its impudent claims and gives sufficient proof that it is not a genuine protector, but a mere protection racket.” ~ Robert Higgs
From the Director of Emergency Services at regional medical center
11/2/2020
“Beginning today, many cities, counties and states are expanding their Emergency Operations Centers to prepare for the coming days of possible civil unrest. This includes the areas in which … has facilities. You will see concentrated areas of law enforcement and emergency services on stand-stand by. As always, my goal is for each of you to be safe and aware of your surroundings. In addition, prepared for a surge in injuries due to unforeseen violence at any of our hospitals. Again, over the next several days, you may see and or be in an area of heightened tensions as you travel either for business or personal reasons.”…
Hello Ron,
From above:
“You need more than energy to run the infrastructure of cities, for example. You need power too. A fact that is rarely mentioned.
Strange? I always thought energy and power were the same things.”
Spindle Top and a fraced well both produce energy in the form of oil. But Spindle Top produced far more oil per day. That is SpindleTop was far more powerful. It could power far more cars every day.
Food is energy. But a person needs about 100 watts of power to maintain their body. Insufficient food ( energy ) will not keep you alive.
Medieval cathedrals could take 100 years to build. They had the energy to do the job but not the power to do it faster.
But for many forms of infrastructure power matters. People and food. Winter and warmth. Cities and sewer and water.
The 20th century had a surfeit of power and built infrastructure that has a high power requirement.
If that infrastructure is to carry on in the face of oil decline using solar PV, it will demand sufficient solar power in the form of solar energy.
From physics: Power = Energy/Time.
Electrically Watts = KilowattHours / Time.
Your body runs on watts. Rate of energy supply matters.
Regards,
Paul Isaacs
Paul,
Your example hasn’t really clarified things. Power is flow, energy per unit of time (watts): energy is watt-hours. In this case, Spindletop also produced a lot of energy.
So…why are you concerned that PV can’t produce enough power? The earth receives about 100,000 terawatts of power 24 hours per day, 7 days a week. That’s about 1,000 watts per square meter at noon. Just combine enough square meters and you can produce all the power you want.
Hello Nick,
I’m lost.
“Your example hasn’t really clarified things. Power is flow, energy per unit of time (watts): energy is watt-hours.”
Isn’t that what my post said?
“In this case, Spindletop also produced a lot of energy.”
Of course it did. That wasn’t the point. The point was the rate at which it produced that energy. Its power relative to a fraced well. Early 20th century vs. early 21st century comparison.
Regards,
Paul Isaacs
The clarification about power vs energy was for Ron, BTW.
But the point still isn’t clear. The US is producing far more oil than it did in the early 20th century. It has recently been producing more than it’s 1971 peak, due to fracked wells. And PV could easily produce far more power than that.
So if you’re trying to make a comparison between eras, or make a point about PV, that point isn’t clear.
Paul I-
Lets step back a little from the theoretically stance you have staked out.
Lets say you are standing outside your home in 2040.
Oil depletion is well underway, production globally down 30% from peak and nat gas just below peak at 90%.
And your region has poor supply, since the producing cartels have supply contracts that largely bypass your area.
You better hope that people in your region spent the last couple decades building out a robust solar/wind/storage (battery and hydrogen) production capacity. And in the deployment of electric vehicle transport capacity, including cargo.
I don’t know how far we will get in the battle of replacing fossil fuel with solar/wind/nucs/hydro. But every mile of progress in that replacement will be extremely valuable as fossil fuels supply subside. The degree to which the attempt is successful will determine just how much economic activity and population can be sustained [and the degree of prosperity or poverty in your region].
Or we can stand by with our hands in the pockets and fret about the idea that solar power is not dense energy.
btw- On my house I have solar PV. 20 panels at 330w each- its a fairly small system.
The electricity produced can electrocute a person, just as if it was produced by a coal power plant.
And the electricity from the roof can hurl my wifes car down the road for 300 miles at 70 mph.
The cost/mile for that electric car to go 300 miles is a $8.28 (using the nationwide average for electricity cost), and for a comparable petrol car it would cost $28.32 miles (using gallon price of $3.00).
For us, the 30 yr levelized cost of the solar electricity is far less than the 11 cents/kWh that is the nationwide utility average, that I used for he example. And I suspect the 30 yr average price for gasoline will be far higher than the 3.00/gallon used in the example.
My System, She Go Poof. On Phone, Long Time.
Paul,
If we buy into things like solar photovoltaic panels, wind turbines and/or electric vehicles and whatnot, then we are in effect voting more or less for the perpetuation of the status-quo, or at least it lasting long enough to be able to support what we just bought from it.
But how good is support these days?
And how secure are our jobs? Or social security or pensions, such as in the faces of financial/economic, ecologic and social decline?
When I was living in a small town, I lost the use of my bike’s rear wheel hub, and there were no bike shops in town, so I was without the use of my bike for a longer while than I expected and was used to. That small simple part rendered an otherwise perfectly useful bike relatively useless. I was lucky, though, because it was only a simple and common bike, with a lot of support relatively nearby, rather than, say, a full-blown photovoltaic system or electric automobile.
Hello Hickory,
New York, Chicago, Houston, LA how do you run them on solar?
Do you plug solar power into existing water, sewer, food distribution infrastructure? How do you power transportation? What are your storage facilities for overnight power? How many square miles of panels will you need.
This goes back to my original post. These cities need sufficient power to operate their infrastructure and big cities need a lot of infrastructure to be functional. That infrastructure, it seems to me, has an all-or-nothing character. There is no way to have 75% of a sewer system and maintain the integrity of the city.
Regards,
Paul Isaacs
I think what you’re asking is:
1) can solar power scale up enough to provide enough power to replace fossil fuels? and
2) what do you do at night, or in the depths of winter, or when there are clouds?
Do I have that right?
I don’t think that’s what he’s asking at all. He asked how do you power large cities in a non-fossil fuel setting. The magnitude of what it will take, I think, is not well understood. What large metro area is being powered this way? Wouldn’t you think that if a post fossil fuel civilization is to exist anywhere near the way it is now, that some prototype city would be created or converted??
“Wouldn’t you think that if a post fossil fuel civilization is to exist anywhere near the way it is now, that some prototype city would be created or converted??” ~ Edgy
Hell no. Nick likes to WING IT. ;D
The magnitude of what it will take is extremely well understood. Utilities and independent system operators know exactly how much power and energy are needed, and when. PV (and wind, and hydro, and nuclear, etc) are well understood. It’s quite clear how they work, what they produce and when.
If you want an example of detailed accounting and reporting of energy production and consumption (including solar and wind generation), go to Caiso.com, starting with http://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/default.aspx
This isn’t rocket science, it’s pretty basic engineering.
Hello Nick,
Electricity, which, I believe, is all that your post covers, is only a portion of the power that cities use – 20-25% I think. There is a big chunk of the power pie chart still to fill.
The link to the California ISO site would have been more reassuring if it had been a page describing how the ISO was going to convert totally to solar.
The link was for their daily usage. That they know reasonably accurately what their daily usage will be is rather a statement of the obvious.
If powering a city without fossil fuels were “pretty basic engineering”, it would have been done by now.
Regards,
Paul Isaacs
Well, that raises a lot of questions, each of which could occupy us a while. Let me ask a basic question: Why do you refer to only solar? Are you thinking that powering cities with only solar, with no wind, hydro, nuclear etc, would be a good idea?
Nick, some American cities for example are seeing a bit of an exodus apparently.
In any case, if you want to talk about different forms of power inputs to cities, then you open up a can of worms, which, to quote you, ‘raises a lot of questions’, many which may run strongly counter to what you might have in mind or in hopium.
“The link to the California ISO site would have been more reassuring if it had been a page describing how the ISO was going to convert totally to solar.”
They aren’t planning to do that. We’ll also use in-state and imported wind, hydropower, geothermal, and storage. Maybe wave power, too.
Hello Edgy,
Well said.
Cities are just a concrete example of the need for power.
More broadly, I also suspect that technological complexity is an emergent property of available power.
High technology is underpinned by a pyramid of successively less complexities. Each of those technologies needs to be powered.
The height of the pyramid would be a function of its area. In other words each increase in complexity would require an increase in power that was a function of the square of the complexity increase.
The conclusion is that the highest levels of technology will be the most vulnerable to energy decline. Cities are in that category.
Regards,
Paul Isaacs
Paul,
Could you define what you mean by complexity?
An electric vehicle, for instance, could be regarded as newer or higher tech than an ICE, but it’s far less complex: an ICE is a nightmare of zillions of complex parts that require extremely close tolerances to function at all, while an EV’s motor has one moving part.
PV may be high tech, but it has no moving parts and is simplicity itself to install and operate. Compare PV to any heat engine: far simpler, far more reliable, etc. Heck, PV has been described as a “rock that makes power”.
And where did the idea the idea that tech progress requires more energy come from? My iPad consumes less than 10% as much power as the first IBM PC. It’s more powerful than the mainframe I used as an undergrad, but uses about 5 watts, while the mainframe…
A horse is incredibly inefficient form of transportation: far inferior to a train, or an ICE. An EV uses about 1/3 as much power as an ICE.
PV or wind are far more space efficient compared to wood. They’re far less complex and far more reliable than the long and fragile oil supply chain that brings oil from deep underground to your gas station.
“:an ICE is a nightmare of zillions of complex parts that require extremely close tolerances to function at all, while an EV’s motor has one moving part.”
As I see it, the problem is in the complex control systems for that electric motor.
A properly maintained mechanically controlled ICE will run for tens of thousands of hours . . . and so will the electric motor.
However, the electric/electronic doodads on all classes of current machinery seem to be prone to failure long before the rotating assemblies.
Scrub Puller,
I know what you mean – automotive electrical systems seem to be a fairly common weak point. But electric motors are much easier to control: no liquid fuel to pump and ignite precisely, no fuel system and ignition systems, no oil systems. Battery packs do have cooling systems, but there are no moving parts in the packs to make life hard for those systems. No transmission (or much less complex transmission).
And automotive ICEs only seem reliable because they’re made in enormous volumes and receive enormous R&D investments. Boutique low volume cars are famous for being unreliable. That’s why companies like VW are making the decision to not develop new generations of ICEs – they’re so expensive to do right.
And you note that drive trains require maintenance: that’s much more demanding for ICEs, and they’re much less tolerant of missed maintenance.
Hello Nick,
“Could you define what you mean by complexity? ”
Heart transplants.
Regards,
Paul Isaacs
Blowing Our Fossil Fuel Heritage On Dubious Retrofits/Retools Instead of Immediately Powering Down
“Battery packs do have cooling systems…” ~ Nick G
AFAIK, ICE vehicles’ batteries don’t need cooling and ICE’s only need one battery, if that. EV’s still need fossil fuel (FF) inputs in terms of EV-production/transportation and FF-burning remote power stations to charge them and to make up for alternative power-station intermittency.
At the same time, I can produce my own ethanol locally that internal combustion engines can run on. There are probably other local benefits to owning an ICE compared with an electric motor system. Ditto with issues of alternate forms of pollution, sociopolitics and resource constraints, surrounding electrification at scale/complexity.
Some of this is also a bit of a false dichotomy, since not all of us use or need personal private vehicles, whether electric or internal combustion, and we can community-share them.
If the economic system is going to fundamentally change, likely with many jobs and the rat race in general drying up, (and maybe less tax revenue for roadway infrastructure maintenance) there’s also the increasing questions therefore of where we will be thinking we need to go with all those electric cars. For the sake of nostalgia for gridlock, sprawl, roadkill and inordinately-long commute times?
(There are a handful on this site who appear to own electric cars but they seem somewhat oblivious to their current context compared with how they will be in the face of social, economic and ecologically-driven changes. Electric vehicles seem too big and complex to become fancy door-stops.)
It seems to make much more sense to begin powering down now rather than later than continuing to blow our remaining fossil fuel heritage at this late climate-change/ecocidal/sociopolitically-unstable juncture on questionable greenwashed BAU attempts at retrofitting a fossil-fuel-based ‘economic engine’.
In general, I keep my mouth shut on this site and just try to learn . . . but I must take issue with your statement . . .
“A horse is incredibly inefficient form of transportation: far inferior to a train, or an ICE.”
It all depends on context mate . . . a horse, more properly, should be compared to a bicycle.
However, in a powered down future world, a mode of transport that has some built in “artificial intelligence”, can source its own fuel, provides usable and useful emissions, is self replicating and, in an emergency, can be eaten may once again prove to be a useful asset.
Scrub,
The problem with horses is that you have to feed them every day, 365 days a year. So, overall they need much more fuel than an ICE.
And unless the large majority of people relocate from cities, the manure would drown them.
> More broadly, I also suspect that technological complexity is an emergent property of available power.
Well maybe. But it is interesting to note that the world’s leading car exporting countries tax gas heavily at the pump. If high tech were emergent from abundant energy, Saudi Arabia would be the world’s high tech capital. But poor scrappy countries like Korea and Taiwan seem to do a lot better. Well they were poor a few decades ago anyway.
The guys who invented the Toyota production system (Taiichi Ohno and Kiichiro Toyoda) claim that shortages were crucial inspiration for them. Their system has now been at least partly adopted by the entire car industry and many others as well.
At first they tried imitating Detroit, but found the methods used there incredibly wasteful. They didn’t have the space or capital for huge stockpiles of unfinished parts, so they invented just-in-time. They couldn’t afford to fix cars that came off the production line defective, so they went all in on quality. Instead of buying expensive equipment to replace assembly line workers, they reduced the need for workers in waste disposal by eliminating single use packaging.
Basically they so poor they had to focus completely on reducing waste. Innovation comes when you are forced to innovate. Given a choice, people just coast. So less energy can be a good thing.
Yep.
A couple thoughts. First, it’s annoying that most of these “lean manufacturing”, zero-defect ideas were developed in the US but neglected; 2nd, the history of industrial progress is that of increasing efficiency, primarily of labor productivity but also of energy efficiency.
Efficiency seems quite overrated, such as with regard to overworking labor, overfishing the oceans and just plain efficiently raping the planet in general.
There’re also the issues surrounding ‘efficiently’ exporting and importing more or less the exact same product, as well as…
“IF EVs become prevalent, a lot less energy will be needed to do the same amount of pointless driving around in circles.” ~ Alimbiquated
Ya, but imagine the extra pointless driving we might achieve, all in the name of using less energy.
I’m going to keep it simple [for my sake]-
You get as much of the fossil fuel replacement done as quickly as you can muster, working like hell to get way ahead of fossil fuel depletion.
See where you end up.
Or follow the other path.
Kind of like Trumps plan with pandemic- surrender.
K.I.S.S
Ya, like my bike and that part that went poof. And that was actually simple, compared with talking simply about things that aren’t.
We follow a path that is less likely to put us up shit’s creek without a paddle– you know, like a lot of technologies that seemed like a good idea (if not for everyone) at the time, but now have us up shit’s creek?
There isn’t really a great need to replace fossil fuel, since most of it is wasted anyway. Cars are about 20% efficient. The best coal plants are about 35% efficient, with a few very new exceptions. Combined cycle gas is better, above 50%.
But all told, there is little need to even replace half of fossil fuels. And that’s not even counting how hopelessly wasteful most human society is with the usable energy fossil fuels generate.
Put another way, the Tesla Model 3 is rated at 141 MPG equivalent by the EPA. IF EVs become prevalent, a lot less energy will be needed to do the same amount of pointless driving around in circles.
Paul, Powering New York, Chicago and other cities outside of of extreme southern portion of the US has the serious challenge of the seasonality of solar. This obviously gets worse the further you get from the tropics. Houston and LA do not have the seasonality problem, in addition to which they do not require anything close to the heating required in winter for New York and Chicago.
LA has access to truly impressive solar resources from Nevada and Arizona apart from California’s own resources, so the issue boils down to overnight storage. I do not think we fully appreciate the tectonic shift that is likely to occur in the area of electricity storage. We will just have to wait and see how it all plays out. Houston has access to significant amounts of wind power as well so, the storage challenge may not be as large for Houston and other cities in Texas.
If you missed the three articles on “Electric Commercial Vehicles – a ten year update“, I invite you to have a look at them. There is in fact a huge amount of heavy lifting that can be done with electricity and some is already done. IIRC, the comments section of the ECV ten year update unveiled that some of the biggest machines on the planet are in fact powered by electricity.
As has been pointed out by others, looking at primary energy used for transport can be very misleading. Less than 25% of the primary energy contained in petroleum ends up doing useful work in a vehicle with an ICE as the traction motor. Well over half of the energy taken from a given source of electricity will end up doing useful work in an EV and if the electricity source is local PV, the proportion of useful work to energy generated should be significantly higher. Just imagine if all school buses in the southern US were EVs and spent the hours between the morning and afternoon runs plugged into a PV source at the depots where they park during the interim? If the buses used swap-able battery packs, when they go out for their runs the second pack could absorb all the energy being generated while they are out and then could be swapped out for use the following day.
Your initial post focused on power, questioning whether renewables, solar in particular, would be able to provide enough power. According to the SEIA’s press release on Q2 PV installations in the US , forecasts are for 18 GW of new solar in 2020. From the “Related News” section at the bottom of the linked page, “Solar Accounts for 40% of U.S. Electric Generating Capacity Additions in 2019, Adds 13.3 GW“. If the forecasts turn out to be correct, that is 31 GW in two years. There is a useful Wikipedia page, Growth of photovoltaics that provides a table for annual installations and cumulative capacity for many countries. From that table the US is looking like over 95 GW of solar capacity by the end of 2021. IMO it is not a stretch for the US to have in excess of 400 GW by the end of 2030 (doubling twice in ten years). That is a lot of power! The average power consumption for the entire US is 556 GW in the summer and 417 in the winter.
A final note, on the US elections, a Bidden/Harris administration means a lot more rhetoric from the top in support of renewable energy.
Powering New York, Chicago and other cities outside of of extreme southern portion of the US has the serious challenge of the seasonality of solar.
Iowa has an enormous amount of very cheap and reliable wind power. As a result, it has the highest percentage of wind power in the US (about 40%), and is working successfully to export power to Chicago and NYC.
There is a North-South corridor of wind power in the central US that starts at Texas and reaches up to the Dakotas. It can provide power to the whole US, as well as Canada & Mexico (should they want it).
As we saw in your EIA post, the combination of wind and solar covers all 12 months of the year pretty well.
Hello Island Boy,
Thank you for the comprehensive response.
My main goal for introducing power was to get time as a variable.
Energy is in newton-metres and does not contain time as a direct variable
Power is newton-metres / second. It was that rate dependency that I wanted to emphasize.
Most of our built infrastructure requires continuous power. Fossil fuels allowed a great deal of power hungry infrastructure to be built. Cities in particular.
A loss of even a portion of the required power to a city has immediate consequences.
My point is that building out solar after the loss of power has become chronic is too late. Looking through a power required lense makes this time criticality more evident.
“The U.S. military budget now stands at 1 trillion dollars, not just the $738 billion military budget but the nuclear weapons programs in the Department of Energy. I oppose the Pentagon’s aggression against Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Venezuela, Iran, North Korea, the growing occupations throughout Africa. China and Russia are increasingly targeted. I call for the shutting down of all U.S. military bases around the world and withdrawal of troops, planes & ships. The money should instead be used for education, infrastructure, healthcare, jobs and housing projects that actually benefit people, including reparations for countries harmed by U.S. aggression.”
“If elected, La Riva, a longtime San Francisco labor and anti-war activist, would push to end ‘the war on Black America’, abolish all anti-immigrant laws, end mass incarceration, make health care and higher education free, and close military bases around the world. She blames capitalism for the world’s environmental ills.
The 66-year-old candidate has spoken glowingly of former Cuban President Fidel Castro, writing that he has been ‘absolved by History’.
This is La Riva’s 10th time running either for president or vice president. She also ran for California governor twice and San Francisco mayor once. She also has the nomination of the Peace and Freedom Party.”
About centralized storage of solar and wind energy…….
I don’t think there IS any practical upper limit to centralized storage, depending on the technology used, other than the amount of energy that can be funneled into it, and retrieved from it.
These latter limits will be determined by the aggregate production capacity of wind and solar farms close enough to transmit the electricity to the storage facility, and the storage facility being close enough to transmit the electrical energy out to customers who need it, meaning cities and towns.
Liquid based batteries can be built with simply ENORMOUS reservoirs, and the reservoirs scale up better and better as you increase the capacity, because the bigger the pit, the greater the volume, in relation to the cost of construction. ( Pits will be used because they don’t need walls as strong as free standing tanks.)
And if you use sand or some other material to store heat, well again , the bigger the reservoir, the BETTER it will work, and the LONGER it will last before cooling off too much, and the more heat you can jam into it.
So the limits for centralized storage will likely be determined by wind and solar farm capacities, and the capacities of transmission lines, to and from.
Transmission lines, once built, last pretty much forever, with a modest maintenance budget.
But I’m not having much luck finding out what the price trends are for HVDC lines, because not very many are being built.
“But I’m not having much luck finding out what the price trends are for HVDC lines, because not very many are being built.
O.F.M., if you think that you’re not paying attention. ?
CHINA’S STATE GRID CORP CRUSHES POWER TRANSMISSION RECORDS
State Grid’s 1.1 million volt DC line pushes power from Xinjiang to eastern megacities over 3000 kilometers to the east. China’s primary grid operator has energized its biggest and most powerful line yet, a 1.1-million-volt direct current (DC) behemoth that crushes world records for voltage, distance and power. The new ultra-high voltage DC (UHVDC) line built by Beijing-based State Grid Corporation of China can transmit up to 12 gigawatts. That is enough to power 50 million Chinese households. UHVDC technology is seen by Chinese president Xi Jinping as a key technology for his “Belt and Road” international development program. And at the UN’s 2015 Sustainable Development Summit Xi proposed the construction of intercontinental power links to massively scale-up cross-border sharing of renewable energy. But UHVDC also has an important role to play domestically, where Xi has promised to turn China’s skies blue again. Specifically, Xi has committed to ending rampant wastage of renewable power generation, whereby wind, solar and hydro power plants are deliberately shut off due to grid capacity and stability limits or to simply make room for coal-fired generation.
BTW, now that the IMF (and Bloomberg) has admitted China has overtaken the US as the World’s largest economy you can expect many more reports like this. NB, in Asia most leaders are engineers as opposed to the U.S. which tends to favor lawyers!
, in Asia most leaders are engineers as opposed to the U.S. which tends to favor lawyers!
I agree with your view of the problem here – US companies have bought the myth that a great manager can manage anything, without having technical or industry expertise.
One quibble: I think the problematic tendency for CEOs is accountants (and MBAs), rather than lawyers. For instance, you could trace the downfall of the US car industry to the ascendance of accountants.
For instance, you could trace the downfall of the US car industry to the ascendance of accountants.
Also Boeing, sadly.
in the usa we spend a lot more on accountants, legal action, political campaigning, and pharma advertising
When I did my civil engineering degree in Australia back in the 80’s many leaders’ backgrounds were engineering. We were told it was because engineering was a profession where young graduates got lots of early experience overseeing/managing people and projects compared to other professions – and that early experience kept them ahead for the rest of their careers. About then, MBA’s were invented, and the engineers’ advantage was lost. Maybe Asia is still in that earlier period in its development of leaders and will transistion soon 🙂
Maximum Power Principle
The growth-based economy has to create jobs jobs jobs to be competitive and to feed the increasingly complex system and the parasite politicians, corporate CEO’s and whonot.
“According to Howard T. Odum, ‘The maximum power principle can be stated: During self-organization, system designs develop and prevail that maximize power intake, energy transformation, and those uses that reinforce production and efficiency.’ ” ~ Wikipedia
Phil —
Good point. China, where I did a lot of work over a seven year period, produces roughly ten times more engineers per year that the U.S. They’re everywhere and not inferior in any way to those produced here (North America). Don’t get me wrong, while running my own (engineering) company, we made frequent use of lawyers and accountants; couldn’t have operated effectively without them. Secret is, keeping them on a short leash. ?
Another aspect of the whole situation is that rich countries have millions of cars with half full tanks sitting around all day, but no connection between this vast store of energy and the grid. Lots of EVs with vehicle to grid capability could act as a decentralized “virtual” power plant. Since the cars would have oversized batteries to deal with rare long trips this could go a long way towards smoothing out the bumps in the electricity supply. And in a sense it would be free, because the “real” use of the battery is to power the vehicle.
For example, California has about 80 GW (80 trillion watts) of production capacity. Output is usually about 30 GW. The state has about 15 million cars. If each car out put a mere 2 KW, they could run the entire grid. Or if 10% were parked and plugged in, and all the generation capacity switched off, each would only have to generate 20 KW to replace all the lost output. By comparison, a VWID3 has a 150 KW engine.
This may be one reason why Tesla is saying it doesn’t want to sell cars, and provide transportation as a service instead. They could run a giant virtual battery and make money on grid arbitrage at the same time with the same hardware.
That’s an important point.
It’s useful to keep in mind that you can get much of that benefit with something much simpler: grid-to-vehicle. If vehicles charge dynamically based on the power supply they can smooth out demand and make demand follow supply (rather than the conventional “load-following” approach).
So, EVs would charge during the daytime solar peak and at night when wind power has a peak in output. That wouldn’t require grid upgrades, and that wouldn’t cost car owners a thing, because they wouldn’t be adding charge-discharge cycles to their battery usage, just charging in a smart way. In fact, they could get paid for this arbitrage by getting discounted power.
Then add vehicle-to-grid (V2G) and you’d amplify the power of this system further.
Peak fascism in the USA?
Hope so, but not too confident about it since the ignorance and gullibility that votes for it is as big as ever.
“We wanted to show the rest of the world that America wasn’t a country of racist idiots. We wanted to strike a blow against the stupidity. We wanted to send a message that Trumpism was a fluke, that we were Obama’s America, not Trump’s. But Trumpism was not repudiated.”
trump would be much better off spending his legal capital on prepping for own personal defense [he will need it badly], rather than trying to stop the counting of the votes of american citizens- that is a losing battle chump.
The Dems in the past have been reluctant to pursue that path.
Let’s hope this timid response is in the past, and they get some balls.
Highlight on NIO. Yeh Nio, you know, one of the EV up and comers fast growing car companies from the worlds largest economy.
Check out their models- https://www.nio.com/
Grim news from southern hemisphere. Will they (we) turn it all into CO2?
FIRES IN BRAZIL’S AMAZON RAINFOREST JUMP IN OCTOBER
“Fires in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest surged in October and the number of blazes is up 25 percent in the first 10 months of 2020, compared with a year ago, data from government space research agency INPE showed. The agency recorded 17,326 hot spots in the world’s largest rainforest in October, more than double the number of fires detected in the same month last year. Destruction of the forest has soared since right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro took office in 2019.”
EV’s, perhaps even PV’s ( and their purchases by those who can afford them, and depending on how they are used) don’t cut it in comparison to many, if not most, others’ carbon footprints in a global context. In that view, PV’s/EV’s appear to amount, still, to very large relative energy footprints.
So if you really want to reduce your energy footprint, you may have to try much harder, and stop snowing yourself and/or others that you’re making a big enough difference with your ‘privileged greenwashy trinkets’.
Don’t be surprised by all the trump lawsuits aimed at disrupting the voting and challenging the democratic process.
After all, that is his modus operandi throughout his life.
Legal action and bribery is how he has handled
-his personal life [marriage/divorce/abortion hush]
-his financial life [bankruptcies, contract breeches, tax fraud]
-his public relations life [slander, etc]
Very few people have paid more in legal fees than this man.
Its an attempt to cover up his poor behavior, gross failure of business and life management, and all the times he loses.
AFAIK he wins few of his lawsuits, but the suits alone are very painful for most people. Fortunately, in my experience few local officials are afraid of such lawsuits.
The number one selling EV in China in Sept was a very samll car-
Wuling Mini EV, a SAIC-GM-Wuling joint venture, selling for less than $5000 US dollar equivalent.
‘Powering the car is a 27 hp electric motor hooked up to a compact 13.8 kWh battery pack. While the Mini EV tops out at just 62 mph (100 km/h), it does have a respectable range of up to 124 miles (200 km) on a single charge, more than enough for people who live in large urban areas and most of the time drive short distances.’
For most commuters in the world, this is sufficient to get the job done.
The energy/Co2 footprint for travel in this vehicle is tiny, compared to average commuter vehicle in use throughout the world currently.
Wuling (五菱) means “Five Diamonds” in Chinese, an apparent reference to Mitsubishi (三菱), which is Japanese for “Three Diamonds”.
There is still far too much embedded energy and resources in & surrounding a car, whether electric or internal combustion. It has to be shipped, shopped, supported, salvaged, etc..
Import that thing over to the USA, incidentally, and it’s not going to cost ~$5000 anymore, and some of the costs are going to be ‘externalities’, relatively invisible and borne by the rest of the planet.
Belated but I can sing it now:
Happy days are here again,
The skies above are clear again
Let us sing a song of cheer again
Happy days are here again,
Altogether shout it now
There’s no one who can doubt it now
So let’s tell the world about it now
Happy days are here again,
Your cares and troubles are gone
They’re be no more from now on
Happy days are here again,
The skies above are clear again
Let us sing a song of cheer again
Happy days are here again,
So long sad time, so long bad time
We are rid of Trump at last
Howdy gay times, cloudy gray times
You are now a thing of the past
I have been mystified by the behavior of all the people who could overlook the extremely negative behavior and failure of effective leadership of trump (for example- the trump pandemic failure), and vote for trump.
Trump the ‘most flawed human being I have ever known’ John Kelly [retired U.S. Marine Corps general who served as the White House Chief of Staff for President Donald Trump from July 31, 2017, to January 2, 2019]
It is easy to think ‘oh these 47% of voters are just idiots, fools or cruel-hearted’
But I think a different explanation applies to a majority of the trump/republican voters.
It is not the character of the person, but the information diet on which they gorge themselves-
a mental diet of Rush Limbaugh, Tucker Carlson, Fox, Giuliani, Q Anon, Steve Brannon, and their church, etc
This kind of mental diet will corrupt the thinking of just about anyone.
Like a sedentary person who eats 4000 cal/day- they will get fat!
The information diet these people consume is toxic, a mental carcinogen.
They will not realize that trump is lying to their face every day, almost every time he speaks.
They will overlook the fact that this ‘billionaire’ paid less tax than they did, through illegal maneuvering.
They will overlook the fact that he is an enemy of democracy like this country has never seen before.
They have been gradually brainwashed to become MAGA zombies.
There is only one cure for these people.
Stop feeding themselves the toxic information diet that takes a decent human being and turns them into the kind of person who would have voted for hitler.
I was temporarily banned from Twitter for the first time this morning for saying something that is obvious — the half of the country that supports Trump consists of rednecks. The proof is in the 2020 vote.
To say that means you have to ignore the swing by non-whites toward voting Trump, particularly Hispanics.
It’s true: white southerners aren’t the only people who can be confused and misled by propaganda.
Indeed, like the propaganda and ideological indoctrination that embellishes the monopoly on violence of nation-state governments.
“To say that means you have to ignore the swing by non-whites toward voting Trump, particularly Hispanics.”
“As humans, we emote first and reflect after; this propensity to react before reflecting is a trojan horse for devious fictions to become established.”
First of all, it doesn’t really matter – in the longer term -who wins. Wealth inequality is a huge driver behind all of this.
That said, the ability to choose your news / information sources leads to an echo chamber and people on two different sides of the spectrum are essentially unable to have a conversation.
it doesn’t really matter – in the longer term -who wins. Wealth inequality is a huge driver behind all of this.
Reagan won in 1980, and dramatically cut income tax rates for higher incomes. That rate cut is the major reason behind the increase in US wealth inequality over the last 35 years.
Elections matter.
Democrats have had the chance to increase rates on the rich multiple times. They have chosen not too. Both parties are owned by monied interests and don’t give a flying fuck about the average worker – although the republicans may give an even slightly smaller fuck.
WeekendPeak
When, exactly, could they have done something that difficult?
Obama had a majority in both houses of congress, and he used that to pass the Affordable Care Act. The ACA included a modest tax increase for the wealthy, and largely as a result of that Republicans have created a sh**storm about the ACA ever since.
Democrats are doing as much as they can to help working people. To do more would require more support from voters, who just this last week chose to vote for Republican senators and congress critters.
If the voters don’t move, the politicians can’t do it alone.
First of all, it doesn’t really matter – in the longer term -who wins. Wealth inequality is a huge driver behind all of this.
Bullshit! It matters a lot who wins. Trump gave the billionaires a huge tax cut and he gave the middle class the shaft. He is trying to get rid of the Affordable Care Act in the middle of a pandemic. If successful no one with a pre-conditioned problem could get insurance. Neither he nor the republican party gives a flying fuck about the middle class. And as far as the lower class goes, those working for the minimum wage if they can find work at all, Trump just would like to see them die.
Wealth inequality is what the Democrats are fighting against and what the Republicans are fighting for. So don’t come here with that bullshit that it makes no difference.
See comment above. To think that democrats want a more level playing field is naive. Both are feeding from the same trough.
And what trough is that? People who think that it doesn’t matter who is elected, that they are all alike, are not just naive, they are just down in the dirt stupid.
Do you actually think that it made no difference who came to power in Germany in the 1930s? Do you think that no matter who gained power in pre-war Germany would just have been another Hitler?
I love a good argument, but cynicism just burns my ass. Cynics are just lazy brained, they had just rather condemn everything and everyone rather than admit that they are actual differences in political philosophies. Communism and Fascism are polar opposites political philosophies. Both are horrible. Trump was an idiot who, though his every word and action showed he was a fascist, embraced the world’s most notorious Communist leader. Either Putin had something on him or he was just stupid to know the difference.
Totally agree with you WEEKENDPEAK, bankers, corporatocracy, AIPAC and other powerful lobbying group run the game. The U.S masses are quite naive and brainwashed into thinking their votes makes any difference. Noam Chomsky even acknowledges this point. That man is worthy of respect.
Iron Mike:
I try to never argue with a cynic. Their position is outside of reason and logic. However, you are going to have to post a link to Norm Chomsky says something so utterly stupid as “To think that democrats want a more level playing field is naive. Both are feeding from the same trough.” Or anything to that effect because I don’t believe it for one damn minute.
Norm Chomsky is anything but a cynic. Check out the two links below. And I could post a dozen more where Chomsky suggest it makes one hell of a lot of difference who you vote for.
From Wiki: Noam Chomsky is an intellectual, political activist, and critic of the foreign policy of the United States and other governments. Noam Chomsky describes himself as an anarcho-syndicalist and libertarian socialist, and is considered to be a key intellectual figure within the left wing of politics of the United States.[1]
Tried to edit a comment but it goes to spam:
This year roughly 14bn was spent on the election. That money was given/donated. 14bn gets you a seat at the table even if you’re not physically there. Laws that help you get passed, loopholes inserted in bill that are passed etc. And I can virtually guarantee you that those laws and loopholes are not designed to help the working class.
Rgds
WeekendPeak
Ron – responding to your comment above.
Did you read the article that I linked?
My guess is that Trump’s narcissism and ego prevents him from looking at anything that doesn’t glorify him.
I met him once – early 90’s. He wore a cape and his bodyguard would take it off for him. No handshake, just a nod. He looked and acted like a gangster. I am not a fan. The ease with which he lies is disturbing – I would not be surprised if he technically is a psychopath.
I agree that both parties have different agendas and personally I think that the stated agenda of the democrats is more reasonable. The problem is that – when push comes to shove – either party will do what their donors tell them to. The democrats passed NAFTA – not exactly to the benefit of the working class. Neither of them want to increase taxes in a meaningful manner. The inequality has gotten completely out of hand and in order to right that wrong relatively extreme measures need to be taken but the democrats are not able to get the buy-in to do that. And money has a lot to do with that.
“He wore a cape and his bodyguard would take it off for him. No handshake, just a nod. He looked and acted like a gangster.” ~ WeekendPeak
“The only difference between government and gangsters is your opinion.” ~ Chris Lyspooner
Exactly. Claims that it doesn’t matter who you vote for are just an attempt to undermine the country’s democracy.
Yep.
Such claims are appealing to Russian and Chinese advocates of autocracy.
Mike, I watched the entirety of both videos. Nowhere does Chomsky say that there is no difference between the Democrats and the Republicans. He said the US is a one-party state because they both serve business. But then he goes on to say the Democrats have moved right to the center but the Republicans have moved so far right that they are off the charts! Those are his very words: Off the charts!
The entire first video was a damnation of the Republican party. He talks of their very radical position on abortion and gun rights. In the second video, the Russian Today video, he again emphasizes that the Democrats have moved to the center, while the Republicans now represent the radical right.
His main complaint with the Democrats is that they now represent business and have abandoned the working class. I do not think that is the case with Biden and Chomksy just might today agree, But I do not know that he would. He also blamed the Democrats for chasing the Russian interference claim when there was no proof. I agree with him on that. They did interfere but not in a way it could be detected.
But nowhere in either video does he claim, as you said he did, that they are no difference in the two parties. You simply used to back up your claim when he did no such thing.
There is one hell of a lot of difference between the center and off the charts to the right.
I agree wholeheartedly.
I have seen a wide variety of columnists and pundits saying that the success of Trumpism is due to a failure of communication on the part of the Democrats. Sadly, not the case.
You have to get people to listen to you in order to communicate with them, and after that, you may have to get them to face up to harsh realities and make difficult choices. The GOP and their media overlords at Fox are not interested in harsh facts and difficult choices. They are selling a fantasy where a vaccine is just around the corner, those jobs from the tax cuts are almost here, you are better off not having healthcare because socialism is bad, and god wants you to have guns but not abortions. It is what their constituents want to hear, and it is resistant to reality.
This is an intransigent conundrum.
And no, I don’t have a solution. I have cousins-some of them as smart as me- who voted for Trump. (Being Canadian, all I can do is complain.) I hope Biden wins, and they can move the center back to the center (at least). But the amount of lying, obfuscation, and dirty dealing Fox and the GOP can do is impressive. Even sickness and death by the hundreds of thousands can’t cut through it.
Hickory wrote:
But I think a different explanation applies to a majority of the trump/republican voters.
It is not the character of the person, but the information diet on which they gorge themselves-
a mental diet of Rush Limbaugh, Tucker Carlson, Fox, Giuliani, Q Anon, Steve Brannon, and their church, etc
This kind of mental diet will corrupt the thinking of just about anyone.
Like a sedentary person who eats 4000 cal/day- they will get fat!
Exactly! No one could have said it better.
Now that America is great again, Biden can coast along on Trump’s coattails. ;D
A perspective from the other end of the world:
Ron, could it be argued tho that the popular vote which gave darn near exactly 50% each to red and blue demonstrates a deep yearning among many Americans for recognition of their pain, whatever that may be. From my perspective many of those who voted for Biden did so because they hated Trump and what he stood for – it was a philosophical or moral stance without an expectation of getting a better life from their vote. However those who voted for Trump did so out of desperation in the hope of getting some practical relief from their miserable circumstances.
These different motivations speak of the divide between the camps, and the new president would do well to reach out to the other party’s supporters in an effort to show empathy and practical assistance to this half of America’s citizenry. Failure to do this will as a minimum make for a difficult country to manage, and at worst may see dissolution of the union.
at worst may see dissolution of the union.
Sounds very much like Russian fear mongering.
Er no. Other end of the world! So I take it that your view is that the differences between red and blue states are not irreconcilable?
Yeah, the differences are being greatly exaggerated. For instance, Texas is the biggest & arguably most important Southern state, and 46% voted for Biden.
This question reminds me of Bin Laden thinking that Afghanistan had a significant role in the dissolution of the USSR, and that he could instigate a similar dissolution of the US. Both were unrealistic, the 2nd completely so.
“Sounds very much like Russian fear mongering.” ~ Nick G
Sounds very much like American ‘presstitute’ mantra.
Nah Caelen. Its just a gentle enquiry in a genuine effort to glean some sense out of the fog surrounding the USA elections from near 46 South 168 East.
I was referring to Nick’s passage itself.
Speaking of which, attached is an image found on Wikipedia, entry, ‘McCarthyism’.
Finally, some truly great news on the environment.
BIDEN VICTORY POSITIONS AMERICA FOR A 180-DEGREE TURN ON CLIMATE CHANGE
“Joe Biden, the winner of the presidency, will move to restore dozens of environmental safeguards President Trump abolished and launch the boldest climate change plan of any president in history. While some of Biden’s most sweeping programs will encounter stiff resistance from Senate Republicans and conservative attorneys general, the United States is poised to make a 180-degree turn on climate change and conservation policy.”
Doug, apparently you haven’t gotten the word. There is no difference between Biden and Trump. They both feed from the same trough. 😉
Ron, got my fingers crossed now on Senate control, in worst case, we might have to live with “executive orders” which seem to go a long way in the U.S.
It is going to be a fight.
But both Repug Senators in Georgia are not the strongest, or ethically pure for sure.
I spent quite a bit of time in Atlanta working, and was pleasantly surprised by the City.
Lets hope those seats are winnable.
When you look at the who the donors are you see that they are primarily businesses or financial institutions. A manager like Baine may not operate a business directly but does so indirectly. Same for most of the other finance people on the list.
So yes, republicans and democrats are feeding from the same trough.
They may have different policy positions but given that one does not bite the hand that feeds you it stands to reason that neither party is pro-labor, at least not in a material manner. For example NAFTA was not exactly a labor friendly act.
Republicans have been really good at exploiting the 3G’s, God, Gays and Guns. Hotbutton issues that very cortisol heavy but on one level are essential to who we are as humans but on another level distraction / noise of those who have the real power.
Clearly on a superficial social level democrats are more labor/people friendly but then why have they allowed for capital to accumulate at an increasing rate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estate_tax_in_the_United_States
the exclusion amount has increased from 675k in 2001 to 11.58mm in 2020 and the rate has decreased from 55% to 40%. Both parties had turns at the helm during this period.
Picketty’s point is that the growth of capital is much greater than that of the economy as a whole (and therefore much greater than that of labor) so labor gets en ever smaller and smaller part of the pie.
Currently 3 people in the US own as much as the bottom 50%. https://inequality.org/facts/wealth-inequality/
Both republicans and democrats have either enabled this, or at a minimum allowed this, to happen.
In order to bring the ratio of wealth back to a more reasonable level (whatever that is) relatively severe redistribution has to happen. The AOC corner of the democratic party may seem extreme but if you look at the extreme wealth distribution those types of policies are required although currently politically impossible to get enacted. And it is unreasonable for the donors listed above to be voting against their self-interest.
Rgds
WeekendPeak
WP, question: Did you vote? If so, for whom and why? If not, Why?
I can’t vote ( not an American) although I live here. Politically active though with real $$. If I could vote I would have voted democratic down the ticket – I think that a more humane approach gives us a higher chance of buying us time to not go over the edge.
But that doesn’t change the fact that the biggest issue we have is that both parties are beholden to those who give them money, which – by and large – is the Capital, not Labor. And that can’t be helped because capital has, well, the capital where labor just works and doesn’t get the chance to materially accumulate wealth. https://connectrandomdots.blogspot.com/2020/11/winner-takes-all-or-why-playing-field.html
Rgds
WeekendPeak
WP, your idea that Biden is beholden to his contributors is just nonsense. They gave because his philosophy is the same as theirs. Ditto for Trump’s contributors. People and organizations gave because they thought a Biden presidency would benefit their of what America should be.
Trump supporters gave because they wanted God and Guns in the public square and they wanted Gays out. They wanted Blacks to stay out of their communities and stop trying to be their equal.
Biden supporters gave because they wanted freedom of the press and medical care for the elderly. They wanted people with pre-conditions to be able to get insurance despite their condition. Orginazions that gave to Biden gave because of what they wanted the government to look like, fair and freedom for all.
This table lists the top donors to this candidate in the 2020 cycle. The money came from the organizations’ PACs; their individual members, employees or owners; and those individuals’ immediate families. At the federal level, the organizations themselves did not donate, as they are prohibited by law from doing so. Organization totals include subsidiaries and affiliates.
Contributor Total
Bloomberg LP $57,528,010
Future Forward USA Action $29,028,902
Priorities Usa $25,690,904
Sixteen Thirty Fund $24,624,073
Asana $21,932,480
Democracy PAC $19,000,000
Senate Majority PAC $12,872,124
American Bridge 21st Century $10,260,571
Paloma Partners $9,016,253
Euclidean Capital $7,006,800
Defending Democracy Together $6,776,862
Alphabet Inc $6,394,072
University of California $6,387,099
Simon Property Group $6,121,320
League of Conservation Voters $5,361,074
Y Combinator $5,359,141
FTX.US $5,220,000
Laborers Union $5,108,362
Future Majority $5,000,750
Renaissance Technologies $4,670,420
To Ron – (I can’t seem to edit my comments)
Let’s do a theoretical of how it works in the real world. Btw, everything is totally legal and there are lots of attorneys involved to make sure no lines are crossed.
Let’s assume somebody works as a portfolio manager for a large investment firm that is running 15bn and the owner of the firm has made a 50mm donation to his favorite candidate.
Assume a 10% return on the 15bn portfolio there is 1.5bn in annual P&L.
The portfolio manager is looking to add to a position in a XYZ company, but he has a question that he has run up the flagpole but to no avail. He has called investors relations at XYZ, their accounting department, prime brokerage people but can’t get to the person who may be able to answer the question. Voicemails go into a black hole, emails are ignored. It is important because he is looking to scale the position to 5% (750mm) so he really needs an answer to his question.
The boss (the owner of the company who wrote the 50mm check ) has his right hand man call – for example – the president’s chief of staff – and mentions that would like to see if he can do an introduction at XYZ company.
The next day at 2.30 he has a face to face meeting with the CFO of XYZ company and his accounting people and the questions are answered. [Expensive] lawyers are present in all phases, no “blue horesehoe loves anacot steel”. But he gets a question answered that competitors didn’t even get to ask. The question and answer by themselves are not particularly important but they can fill in a part of a puzzle that actually is very important to the investment thesis (mosaic theory).
Repeat this lots of times and this is what you end up with an edge over competitors that only grows over time. The next time the PM has a question there is no need to call the boss. He can simply pick up the phone and get the question answered.
It was unnecessary to remind anybody of the 50mm contribution (through a fund raiser, so an additional 25mm was raised at the event) but favors were created) and, in my example, called in.
At the end of the day the trade makes 250mm (30%), all completely legal.
The key to the story is that money gets you access. And that makes the playing field uneven. It may very well be that the contributions are because the donor feels the same way has the president (candidate) but the end result is that wealth concentration increases and increases. The share of the holders of capital increases and that of labor decreases.
To think that – to take the first on the list (Bloomberg) makes at 57mm donation and that no preferential treatment follows – not realistic. That is just not how humans are wired. There may be (and very will is no) intention of anything resembling a bribe or pay-to-play but it is essentially inevitable no matter how clean the intentions are.
Let’s assume that private / individual donations are outlawed and that the government simply gives each party 7bn to run their elections. Do you think that the hypothetical portfolio manager would get an answer to his question?
There is a reason why election finance regulations get looser and looser. Both parties benefit. The donor gets access, the recipient gets funds to run his campaign and also access to people who can help people in the recipients orbit – who doesn’t want to do a favor for the presidential candidate?
Money completely corrupts the system in a subtle and insidious way and no longer really functions for We, the People.
Rgds
WeekendPeak.
p.s. I really appreciate your blog.
To add to that – the higher the price to play is (“donations”) the less competition there is. Many people can write a $50 check, very few a $50mm. Guess who gets access? More expensive elections actually benefit top donors because there is less competition for access and relative importance (of the donor) increases.
The US system is completely screwed up.
Rgds
WeekendPeak
I just realized I did not address your point – why Biden would be beholden to his donors:
When somebody writes you a 50mm check without any apparent consideration you owe him. And both parties know it.
Rgds
WeekendPeak
I have said it before and I will say it again. You cynics just burn my ass. You think everyone is motivated purely by selfish reasons. No, fuck no. People donate to St. Jude Children’s Hospital because they want to help kids cure their cancer. Everyone is not a selfish asshole like you seem to believe. Bloomberg donated to Biden and other Democrats because he believed in what they are trying to do. Bloomberg has more money than he can ever possibly spend. So he spends some of it to try to help make his country a better place. He has the same political philosophy as Biden and other Democrats.
Millions of people donated to Biden because they wanted to get that idiot out of the White House. Millions donated to Trump because they wanted to make America white again. They hate people with a different philosophy. They hate gays but love God and guns. People donated to Trump because he has the same philosophy as they do. Or he pretends to have the same philosophy.
But you cynics will never, never understand that. People want a government that reflects their world view so they donate to the extent that they can afford it.
I will have no more to say on this subject.
From the dictionary:
cynic
[ˈsinik]
NOUN
a person who believes that people are motivated purely by self-interest rather than acting for honorable or unselfish reasons.
Weekend Peak Well put. The inequality of wealth distribution is destroying so much of the good in our global civilization and helping to rip it apart this nation and neither Party is focused on fixing it. Therefore neither Pig got my vote this round even though I voted for Andrew Yang in the primaries.
Having said that; The wealth inequality is just the consequence of our fiat debt based monetary system,that puts into motion the cantillon effect. Also in this perverted monetary system, capital can soon accumulate loads more capital and the holders can live high on the hog by dipping just a little bit into that pool. Meanwhile income earned from labor and small enterprises has been run over and dragged through the streets. And neither party is doing squat. Trump blames it on the Chinese and Mexicans the Democrats blame the rich but no one will even mention the corrupt monetary system. Yang’s suggestion was to compromise with the system and just demand that a small share of the money goes straight into the pockets of every citizen equally.
In the meantime it is so sad to observe the tragic consequences of the cantillon effect in the lives of people. Some of us continue to fight against all odds others have given and just survive from week to week while others have been able to maneuver into a spot closer to the spigot but even many of them have to sell their soul to the devil.
The best solution to this predicament I believe is Bitcoin. The hardest money out there, that can not be controlled by individuals or governments. So I’m voting for Bitcoin every day. It’s the vote that really counts. The announcement from Micro Strategy that they have converted 700 million $ of their treasury to Bitcoin is just the latest in Bitcoin gaining traction and setting limits to corrupt Government fiat.
On a side note, I’ve been thinking lately. What are the reasons that the Republicans currently rule in the country side and the Democrats in the cities?
On a side note, I’ve been thinking lately. What are the reasons that the Republicans currently rule in the country side and the Democrats in the cities?
A damn good question. However, there are far more than one reason. Google it and you will get them all. Google this: “Why Are Cities More Liberal Than Rural Areas?”. I did and there are far more reasons than I can list here.
However, I have a question that is at least as important. Why do Democratic college professors and faculty members outnumber Republican college professors and faculty members by more than ten to one? Actually, that is a rhetorical question, the answer should be obvious to everyone. They are just a lot smarter than the Republican red-neck riffraff. 😉
An extensive study of 8,688 tenure-track professors at 51 of the 66 top-ranked liberal arts colleges in the U.S. published by the National Association of Scholars found that the ratio of faculty members registered as Democrats compared to those registered Republican is now a stunning 10.4 to 1. If two military colleges that are technically described as “liberal arts colleges” are removed from the calculations, the ratio is 12.7 to 1.
The researcher, Mitchell Langbert, Associate Professor of Business at Brooklyn College, found that nearly 40% of the colleges in the study had zero faculty members who were registered Republican. Not a single one. Nearly 80% of the 51 colleges had so few Republican faculty members that they were statistically insignificant.
An education system that preys on young students, subjecting many of them to debt slavery to the tune of several hundred thousand right out of the gate. Many who are educated in a field that has no way to pay it back in a decade.
An education system that denies peak oil and the tragic consequences to our global civilization unless we mount a massive effort.
An education system denies the nutritional value of grass-fed animal products and instead promotes wheaties and canola oil. Trains doctors to treat chronic illness with drugs on top of drugs. To the point that the healthcare industry is on track to destroy the economy all by itself.
An educational system that is churning out the most delusional economists our nation has ever had. So it’s hardly a surprise that few conservative leaning individuals thrive in such an environment.
But that’s what we can expect in a fourth turning. Wintertime is upon us and death is arriving for most institutions along with social and religious structures in their current forms. As the phoenix they will rise again but organized in ways very different from the current versions. The unraveling is upon us and I hope to experience the Spring.
An education system that preys on young students, subjecting many of them to debt slavery to the tune of several hundred thousand right out of the gate.
Bullshit! Our educational system does not do that. It is the government who is so goddamn afraid of “socialism” that does this. We could have an educational system that is like most of Europe where education is free to everyone. That is if it weren’t for those goddamn Republicans who shout “socialism” every time someone mentions free education.
An education system that denies peak oil…
Oh, more bullshit. Our educational system does not deny peak oil. You just made that shit up. You lose all credibility when you just make up pure bullshit.
An education system denies the nutritional value of grass-fed animal products and instead promotes wheaties and canola oil.
Goddammit, how on earth do you come up with such pure bullshit. You are so full of bullshit that it is pathetic.
An educational system that is churning out the most delusional economists our nation has ever had.
Errr… exactly what delusional economics are they churning out. You just make up sheer nonsense and think you can slide it bye because you think everyone else is an ignoramus. You just make up stupid nonsense. And that last paragraph of yours is just too stupid to quote. You spout stupid nonsense and think it is the product of intellectual genius. At least you are good for a good laugh, but nothing else.
We could have an educational system that is like most of Europe where education is free to everyone. That is if it weren’t for those goddamn Republicans who shout “socialism” every time someone mentions free education.
Actually, it’s much worse than that: the wealthy (or, at least, a large fraction of billionaires) are defunding education because they see it as a threat to their power and money.
You see, reality has a liberal bias, and the more education you have, the more you tend to see that. For example, my father wanted me to take some economics courses in school but he was stunned when I came home spouting socialist ideas like the idea that monopolies tend to charge higher prices than markets with many suppliers…
Ron I’m a fanatical Socialist myself, especially at the family level. I also acknowledge that the net benefits of socialism diminish the larger the network becomes. K-12 is all socialized and much of community college. Isn’t that about enough? Why not just go full on communist?
Whether the student pays or whether society at large pays, does not change the fact that the education system overcharges so much for their services that given some time it will destroy even the US economy. The economy that is sucking the life blood
out of the rest of the world thanks to its ability to print the world’s reserve currency.
Nick Governments with Libertarian policies encourage markets to multiply while governments with socialist and communist policies encourage monopolies.
Farmlad, all that is well and good. But nothing you said in your post even addresses the fact that, among college professors and college faculty members, Democrats outnumber Republicans by over 10 to 1.
You had no explanation for that fact so you did a scattershot against the educational system in general, Other than the fact that your scattershot contained nothing but bullshit, that is a poor debating technique.
Farmlad,
I was being a bit ironic in my use of “socialism”. Free markets are, of course, a classic liberal idea. Corporate monopolies, on the other hand, are a favourite of conservatives, who are always in favor of things that give the wealthy more power.
This is the difference in one chart
“On a side note, I’ve been thinking lately. What are the reasons that the Republicans currently rule in the country side and the Democrats in the cities?”
More reasons-
There is no Fox news in the cities.
People in rural areas have a much greater tolerance for bullies, and being lied to.
People in the cities hear much more varied viewpoints, and are thus mentally enriched.
People in the cities have much better things to do than listen to Rush Limbaugh.
What’s been written here so far in response to that question is kind of a lazy analysis. In reality, the current rural/urban divide is rooted in a significant and profound political shift in the 2008-2010 time frame. Before then, Democrats could still win with broad enough support in majority white rural areas outside of the Deep South, but afterward, Republicans began easily racking up 60+% of the vote in most of these areas. I personally live in a predominantly rural area of the Midwest where, as recently as 15-20 years ago, Democrats routinely won state races, but now they’re stuck getting about 35% of the vote, maybe 40% if they’re lucky. As I see things, the following happened to cause the shift:
1. Cities bounced back faster economically from the 2008 recession.
2. Obama’s stimulus and Obamacare were both successfully portrayed by Republicans as being giveaway programs to (mostly) minorities in big cities.
3. The New Deal coalition that still had personal memories of the Great Depression died out or became too small to make a difference in elections.
4. Following the 1980s Midwestern farm crisis that Republicans took the brunt of blame for, rural Democrats were getting a fair number of socially conservative (but not evangelical) voters who preferred Democratic economic policy. However, once Democrats fully endorsed gay marriage in the early 2010s, these voters could no longer overlook the Democrats’ social platform and stopped voting for them.
I’ll add to what you said Geoff.
Many rural voters have swallowed the false story told by the NRA that the democratic party wants to ‘take away your guns’.
The reality is that the democrats do want to take away military assault rifles and other tools of warfare. They don’t want people to have the ability to inflict mass civilian causalities, or to out-gun police officers.
Like so many issues, it is not an all or none answer.
This chart shows the global source of greenhouse gases.
There is no single target for reduction, other than ‘human activities’ in general.
Its going to take a long time to roll emissions back.
The two biggest mechanisms to roll back emissions will be
-depletion of oil
-widespread deployment of solar
Unfortunately, climate scientists seem to agree, the scale of actions for development of energy based on renewable sources, development of electromobility and recycling is far too small in relation to what is needed. In other words, too little, too late. At least now, the world won’t have to fight against Trump insanity as well.
Unfortunately, climate scientists seem to agree
renewable sources, development of electromobility and recycling is far too small
I’d say that’s not accurate. You can certainly find some climate scientists who are feeling pessimistic about our rate of progress; it’s true that there are other important sources of climate change besides FF; and it’s likely that some carbon sequestration will be needed once we stop stuffing carbon into the air; but the idea that eliminating fossil fuels is “far too small” is highly misleading, and I don’t think you’ll find many climate scientists who would frame the problem in that way.
Eliminating FF emissions is big. It’s important. It’s an essential first step to dealing with climate change.
Dismissing renewables and EVs is a climate denier talking point. If we want change we need to encourage it.
Hi Nick, I did not mean to be dismissive about the attempts to reduce emissions, such as solar or EV or retrofitting building for energy efficiency, eating less meat, for example.
The chart I linked is good visual presentation of the fact that there is no particular sector of economic activity in the world that serves an easy target. Rather it is the sum total of activities ranging from cement manufacturing to cargo shipping to fertilizer production…
For example road transport across the world accounts for [only] 11.9% of total GHG emission.
Even by 2040, the degree of emission cut in transport is not going to make a big dent in the warming trend we are experiencing.
I am moving north.
Well, I was more replying to Doug’s framing of things than yours.
Anyway, overall fossil fuel burning is 73% of the problem. The nice things about that: there is a single strategy that will work pretty well across all these industries: a carbon tax combined with efficiency standards. The tax is the really simple part, but pretty much all of these industries have developed efficiency standards.
Doug is just BSing and disagreeing for the sake of disagreeing, as usual.
It’s part of a general strategy to encourage hopelessness. It’s a way to make people accept the status quo, while still pretending to “care”.
Dennis,
From this projection, and assuming the fossil fuel supply represents the actual consumption out to 2060, can you give a rough estimate of the percentage of fossil fuel GHG emissions still to come [relative to the the GHG emissions prior to 2020]?
Thank you.
McDonald’s may be getting serious with fake ground beef. Fake chicken nuggets too.
Americans eat more than five million head of cattle a year at McDonald’s alone.
The question is whether the same thing could happen to the beef industry that is happening to the coal industry. Cattle eat protein rich feed to build animal protein, but are only about 3% efficient. 97% of the protein gets wasted. A technology that converts feed grain directly into fake meat could easily do twenty times as well.
Yes.
This chart indicates the relative protein production/acre of various sources, with the information derived from USDA published data on average USA production data. Other sources such as turkey and goat for meat would fall between the chicken and pig protein output/acre.
This gives a rough indication of the huge gains possible by switching towards plant-based protein sources for the diet of USA. The potential gain can be applied to energy consumption, land use, environmental footprint of agriculture, and health costs .
The current products now on the market [ex Beyond Meat] have pea protein as the primary source of protein. This sector of the food science industry (conversion of plant protein into end use food products) is in early innings. The progress achieved in the early innings is impressive.
Do you happen to have a link handy?
Bloody clouds!
BETWEEN A CLOUD AND A HOT PLACE
“Low climate sensitivity has been ruled out, but the door remains open for alarmingly high estimates. Improved understanding of cloud feedbacks is vital for better constraining the upper limit of future warming. A new report in Nature Geoscience suggests that a worryingly high sensitivity is plausible due to the nonlinear response of clouds. Better understanding of how clouds may evolve with warming is therefore crucial for determining the extent of future temperature change. It has become clear that a climate sensitivity below 2 °C is extremely unlikely based on observations of how much warming has already occurred since pre-industrial times. This is further supported by our current understanding of individual feedback mechanisms, such as changes in atmospheric water vapor and surface albedo, which act to amplify warming. High-end estimates of climate sensitivity are less well constrained. Though ECS (equilibrium climate sensitivity) is likely to be below 4.1 °C, substantially higher values are still plausible. Many of the latest global climate models exhibit high climate sensitivities, with 10 out of 27 models having an ECS over 4.5 °C.
Tightening the constraints on climate sensitivity is crucial for designing and implementing effective mitigation and adaptation strategies. To narrow the range, we must quantify the extent to which nonlinear cloud feedbacks could amplify the global temperature response to carbon dioxide. Long-awaited progress in reducing ECS uncertainty is now being made, but there is still work to be done while the magnitude of future warming remains hidden by the clouds.”
Joe Biden’s plans to tackle climate change bring much needed good news to environmentalists:
HOW THE PRESIDENT-ELECT PLANS TO TACKLE CLIMATE CHANGE
“More radical Democrats such as congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez have put forward a proposal called the Green New Deal, which would eliminate carbon emissions from most sources over a decade. The Biden climate plan is more moderate [more realistic]. If enacted, it would still be the most progressive climate strategy the US has ever attempted. There will be a big push on electric vehicles, a big push on efficient buildings, both residential and offices, a big push on creating a new kind of civilian conservation corps and doing a lot of nature-based solutions on climate change…
Joe Biden also knows better than many how navigate the upper house; he was elected to the senate six times before serving as vice-president under Barack Obama. If the president-elect can structure his plans so that they create jobs and new infrastructure, while also tackling carbon emissions, he may be able to find a way forward that works for both sides of the aisle.”
Meanwhile: Vice President-Elect Kamala Devi Harris joyfully emerged on the presidential stage Saturday night.
“God forbid a Black woman walk through the world filled with joy. Saturday’s historic moment was vindication, not that we needed it, as well as an affirmation that we will move through the world on our own terms. There was recognition—and great hope—that our daughters will have a smoother path, and that, as Harris notes, “while I may be the first woman in this office, I will not be the last because every little girl watching tonight sees that this is a country of possibilities.”
The childhood home of Vice President elect Kamala Harris, as seen on Sunday in Berkeley, CA
She and her mother lived upstairs, above the Montessori School on the first floor.
Finally,
The Arctic Refuge is facing a serious threat. Drilling proponents are attempting to push through legislation that would turn this incredible, wild landscape and vital bird habitat into an oil field and may even use backdoor budget tactics to force it through Congress. Having run seismic surveys in the arctic I was fortunate to be able to visit the Refuge, on occasion, and see for myself this majestic region. I also know that seismic surveys, all by themselves, would/will seriously damage this rarely seen reserve. I pray [not literally] Biden and the newly elected Democrats will be able to stop the needless degradation/exploitation of the priceless Arctic Refuge. Fingers crossed!
Whether or not Biden is president next year there will be NO socialism of any kind in the United States! The senate with McConnell in charge will see to it, otherwise the Courts will. Patriots and conservatives are going to be so fired up to vote in 2022 that you dem’s heads are going to spin when you see how big the R majorities are and how many democrat governors get voted out.
Zooks, my condolences on your loss. You must be crying in your beer every night since the election. Your loss must seem unbearable. But you did lose. That is undeniable. The American people have spoken. End of story.
What happens in the next two years remains to be seen. Social security is a socialist program. It is the most popular program in the history of the Republic. Almost every American just loves it, including me.
But you seem to be fired up. You are against any more such socialist programs like Socal Security. Well, good luck with that one. But the Accordical Care Act seems to be very popular with the American public. So you are wrong on that one. So what gives you such confidence that you are correct on where the public sentiment will lie in the next two years?
Zooks, we know what you are against. But what are you for? What do you want for American health care? What do you want for the middle class of America? What do you want for racial justice? What do you want for our relation with out NATO allies? What do you want for Russia and Putin in our relationship with the Communist nation of Russia? After all, Russia is the most socialist nation in the world in which Trump has warmly embraced.
Just where do you stand on these issues? Have you given any deep thought to these issues?
Zooks-“there will be NO socialism of any kind in the United States! ”
So, you say McConnell is going to end Social Security and Medicare?
And he will end public schools?
No more agriculture subsidies?
No more child labor laws?
No more support to Veterans?
Wow, I hadn’t heard the news.
There is going to be a hell of lot of pissed off Americans.
For anyone interested in geoscience news. More details are available in the applicable Earth and Planetary Science Letters journal article.
SCIENTISTS HAVE DISCOVERED AN ANCIENT LAKEBED DEEP BENEATH THE GREENLAND ICE
“Scientists have detected what they say are the sediments of a huge ancient lake bed sealed more than a mile under the ice of northwest Greenland—the first-ever discovery of such a sub-glacial feature anywhere in the world. Apparently formed at a time when the area was ice-free but now completely frozen in, the lake bed may be hundreds of thousands or millions of years old, and contain unique fossil and chemical traces of past climates and life. Scientists consider such data vital to understanding what the Greenland ice sheet may do in coming years as climate warms, and thus the site makes a tantalizing target for drilling. A paper describing the discovery is in press at the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters…
The researchers assembled a detailed picture of the lake basin and its surroundings by analyzing radar, gravity and magnetic data gathered by NASA. Ice-penetrating radar provided a basic topographic map of the earth’ s surface underlying the ice. This revealed the outlines of the smooth, low-lying basin, nestled among higher-elevation rocks. Gravity measurements showed that the material in the basin is less dense than the surrounding hard, metamorphic rocks—evidence that it is composed of sediments washed in from the sides. Measurements of magnetism (sediments are less magnetic than solid rock) helped the team map the depths of the sediments.”
very cool. the biotic component will be most interesting to see
This is surprising, to me anyway. In spite of reduced activity arising from virus lockdowns, CO2 level seems to be increasing unabated. If so, not good!
It seems to me that there is much discussion about energy but little about power.
Power matters because: power is energy per unit time: is:
– enough food per day
– enough water per day for cities
– enough repair per day for infrastructure
– etc.
For example, this year’s hurricanes illustrate that sufficient power is needed to replace damaged infrastructure at a rate greater than the rate at which hurricane’s do damage.
Insufficient energy per unit time for infrastructure repair and maintenance inevitably leads to decline.
Currently most power comes from rotating shaft heat engines.
Solar power most probably will become society’s primary source of energy as fossil fuels are exhausted.
Solar power ( with the exception of CSP ) generates electricity which uses electric motors if rotating shaft energy is required.
Rotating shaft heat engines can be very large so there is an advantage to large central rotating shaft power generation.
Without large amounts of electrical storage, solar power will not achieve the scale of heat engines because its variability makes it unsuitable for large power generators.
The probability is that the decline of fossil fuels for heat engines will result in smaller scale infrastructure. Thus the probability is that the existing 20th century infrastructure will have to be largely re-build in the 21st century.
Paul Isaacs
The probability is that the decline of fossil fuels for heat engines will result in smaller scale infrastructure.
Could you expand on that?
existing 20th century infrastructure will have to be largely re-build in the 21st century.
That would be the case under a BAU scenario, so the conclusion of your argument is unclear.
The probability is that the decline of fossil fuels for heat engines will result in smaller scale infrastructure.
Could you expand on that?
Oil, gas and heat engines can all scale significantly. There are economies of scale that have pushed them to very large size. Solar does not scale as well both because of the size of its collection area and because of its intermittency. Without storage, large scale solar installations would not be economically sound.
existing 20th century infrastructure will have to be largely re-build in the 21st century.
That would be the case under a BAU scenario, so the conclusion of your argument is unclear.
Sorry, bad choice of words. “largely replaced”
Regards,
Paul Isaacs
P+I
I don’t follow your thought train on this.
Keep in mind that electrical power flowing on the grid can drive huge electrical motors, and ‘fuel’ resistive (non-combustion) heating on a massive scale.
The source of electricity could be hydro.nucs ,solar, wind, coal , nat gas- the electrical motors don’t care the source.
The hydroelectric energy from the Grand Coolie dam in the 1940’s allowed huge manufacturing of ship and planes in WWII- fascinating read on this here-
https://www.bpa.gov/news/newsroom/Pages/BPA-powered-the-industry-that-helped-win-World-War-II.aspx
Despite all that, a down-scaling of the industrial footprint of humanity is surely needed, if this habitable earth is to remain so.
Consider, the USA has a oil refining capacity of about 19 Mbpd. After a transition to electric transportation progresses for 20 years, refining capacity for oil be scaled back by perhaps 70-80%.
The excess capacity infrastructure can be repurposed, recycled, downsized.
The USA collectively drives about 3.2 trillion miles/yr. If that was all electric, the industrial footprint of the country needed to provide those miles would be much smaller than under the current ICE/petrol scenario- I assert.
Hello Hickory,
My post did not mention hydro generation. It was comparing heat engines ( almost always steam or gas turbines these days ) to PV solar power.
My conclusion was that 21st century power generation would not have as many centralized, large scale power plants.
Paul,
I’m not sure what you have in mind when you talk about oil fueled heat engines, and their ability to gain efficiencies of scale. Are you thinking of oil-fueled electrical generation? That’s pretty much been eliminated, because oil is too expensive for electrical generation and can’t compete with, well, anything.
Electric motors are superior in many ways. They’ve replaced diesel motors in trains, because they have much better torque at low speeds. They’re cheaper to build and easier to maintain. Tesla is successful in part because of their advantages: ICEs are only affordable when they’re built in massive quantity to bring down the cost of tooling for the zillions of precision components, so Lamborghinis are very expensive. So Tesla can start at the top of the food chain and then work it’s way down (the reverse of the Asian car company model).
Natural gas fueled electrical generation does not have to be enormously large: combined cycle generation can be installed in reasonably moderate plant sizes. Coal benefits from somewhat larger scale, but still doesn’t need to be gigawatt scale. Nuclear is really the only form of generation that needs enormous scale, and that’s a weakness. It means that projects are far too large to be manageable or affordable: look at the current projects in Europe, especially the UK.
Finally, it’s not true that PV has a problem with scale. Medium scale installations are extremely competitive.
Hello Nick,
My original post did not mention oil fueled. It spoke only of rotating shaft heat engines – a generic term for a prime mover that generates useful motion from a heat differential.
I do not dispute that electrical motors are superior to heat engines. But the post was concerned with prime mover power generators, not motors or other users of power.
I also do not dispute that heat engines do not have to be large. But ,in terms of power generation, many of them are. Especially, as you say, those powered by heat from nucs.
I did not say that solar does not scale. I did say that it is not probable that centralized giga-watt solar installations would be built – because they would require centralized giga-watt storage facilities.
Regards,
Paul Isaacs
Gigawatt scale solar won’t be common because price advantage of large installations over smaller ones doesn’t increase past a few hundred megawatts. There is no particular reason for storage to be centralized either.
“There are economies of scale that have pushed them to very large size. Solar does not scale as well both because of the size of its collection area and because of its intermittency. ”
Look, the economy of these large scale generators is not good. You can build for the same money wind+PV+open NG turbines+batteries.
It is naive to assume that the conventional generators do not need storage etc., they need less but that is not a game breaker.
The storage in Germany was built for baseload generators (coal, nuclear), they are sufficient to allow 70% of the electrcicity generated by wind and PV.
Paul seems to have conflated two different questions: economies of scale, and maximum feasible share of the grid’s output.
Hello Nick,
My post seems to be a miserable failure.
It was about the fact that energy is a necessary but not sufficient requirement for large scale infrastructure.
You need more than energy to run the infrastructure of cities, for example. You need power too. A fact that is rarely mentioned.
Much of the power in our current infrastructure comes from heat engine prime movers. The heat for many of those engines comes from the burning of fossil fuel.
PV is not a heat engine. To power our current infrastructure it will have to provide the same energy and power.
My conclusion was that it could not do so by simply being a drop in replacement for our existing heat engine prime movers.
In fact, I do not see anything that will allow us to maintain our current level of power consumption as fossil fuels decline.
Regards,
Paul Isaacs
Correct Nick G. Centralization isn’t really needed.
In fact the nuclear fanboys are arguing that decentralized power is cheaper, though their argument is doubtful at best.
You need more than energy to run the infrastructure of cities, for example. You need power too. A fact that is rarely mentioned.
Strange? I always thought energy and power were the same things.
Paul,
I’m afraid you haven’t really fleshed out your argument about why PV can’t replace Fossil Fuel. Why do you feel PV can’t provide sufficient power? Are you concerned about intermittency?
Ron,
Power is energy per unit time. Kilowatts are power, kilowatt hours are energy.
This leads to curious results.
Time is Money. Money is Power. So
Time = Power
or
Time = Energy / Time
Multiply both side by time, and you get time squared is energy. Or in other words, time is the square root of energy. We live in strange times.
For one thing, it would probably require a much smaller infrastructure. Consider the oil industry, since this is an oil blog.
I recently heard the argument on another forum that we need oil because you can’t build a battery big enough to operate a supertanker. The argument seems to be that we need oil to ship oil around the world.
Crude oil petroleum products and gas make up more than half of all international shipping by ton. See page 5 of thins UNCTAD report.
https://unctad.org/system/files/official-document/rmt2018_en.pdf
Refineries account for about 4% of all energy consumption in the US. About 2% of rail tonnage is oil, dwarfed by the 36% for coal. About 10% of the truck tonnage in America is for gasoline and fuel oil. In addition, trucks and trains are significant consumers of liquid fuel.
Of course electrical infrastructure will have to replace that, but it is smaller and lighter weight. A grid connected EV charger is trivial compared to a gas station.
https://ops.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/fhwahop16083/ch1.htm#:~:text=Rail%20is%20used%20primarily%20for,be%20delivered%20to%20retail%20locations.
Good thoughts about infrastructure.
About oil tankers:
“A group of large Japanese companies has come together to launch a consortium that will build the infrastructure to develop and launch large electric vessels, like oil tankers.”
https://electrek.co/2020/05/22/electric-oil-tankers-coming/
P + I-
Since you expressed concern about feasibility of solar powering the economy, here is an excerpt from an article that gives one answer to this question.
“In California, for example, a 100% SWB [solar/wind/battery] system with 3.8x more generating capacity than the state’s existing grid would need only 37 hours’ worth of batteries. The cost to build these assets between now and 2030 would be $115 billion. That’s $11.5 billion for ten years, or 0.35% of California’s $3.2 trillion GDP. The cost of electricity from this system would be less than 3 cents per kilowatt-hour, which would not only be the cheapest available option for new power generation but would be less expensive than continuing to operate most conventional power plants in the state as well.”
my note- the projected 3 cents/kwhr is a dramatically low price. Nationwide average is 11 cents/kwhr
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/100-solar-wind-and-batteries-is-just-the-start-the-super-power-they-p/588412/
Upcoming Single From The Album, ‘Snow-Jobs’: ‘The Little Tony-Seba’s-Inside-Our-Heads (Everything X Mix)’
LOL…
The little Tony-Seba-inside-my-head and those ‘thrown-around’ numbers above aside for a moment, that’s just California in the land of ~25% energy usage for ~5% of the rest of the world.
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2020/10/30/pv-powered-desalination-is-the-most-competitive-design/
I’ve been wondering for quite a while if it would be practical to run a desalinization plant intermittently, using solar or wind sourced electricity.
There seems to be two reasons why this has not been practical up until now. One, the machinery works in such a way that starting and stopping it every day is not feasible. Some kinds of equipment needs to run continuously in order to work properly. I haven’t found out whether this is the case in desalinization plants.
The other reason seems to be that the capital cost of a desalinization plant is high enough that you have to run it around the clock to keep the total costs low enough to be feasible, per cubic meter of water.
Now it seems that solar electricity has gotten to be cheap enough that running a desal plant during daylight hours only is a practical proposition.
I’m baffled by the emphasis on desal in places like California and KSA (and now Morocco). Recycling water is cheaper and easier. Las Vegas operates with recycled water: the tourists don’t seem to mind.
On the other hand, recycling can also be powered by PV.
Nick, many places in the west have already maxed out recycling.
And still the water is is in severe short supply, and salty.
Monterey County calif is a good example. Outstanding farmland (usually in the top 3 or 4 in country for value of product). But very short on water, and you have trouble even getting a permit to add a sink in the garage, let alone build a house in the county.
So yes, desal is a very attractive option if it is viable/affordable.
I suppose you have never lived in an arid zone.
Artichokes—
You shouldn’t suppose anything at all about other people. It’s not relevant to the discussion.
Is this what you’re talking about?
https://www.montereyonewater.org/210/Castroville-Seawater-Intrusion-Project-O
It’s recycling treated wastewater for farming. That’s perfectly sensible (as far as it goes), but that’s a much lower standard of water purity. I’m talking about recycling water for potable purposes, which AFAIK is the only sensible reason to do something as expensive as reverse osmosis: Your farm will go out of business very, very fast paying for desalination for irrigation water.
The thing is, treated wastewater is much easier to purify with reverse osmosis because it’s already very clean.So if you’re considering using seawater as your water source, you should maximize your use of treated wastewater first.
The problem here is that water policy here in the US as well as many other places in the world is crazy because it developed in a previous era where farmers dominated the economy. It prioritizes farmers and gives them free water, which they waste badly because it’s free. Then residential and commercial users get charged substantial costs and have to live with usage restrictions which are often pretty draconian. So, you mention developers that can’t get building permits. Does that make sense when farmers are using 80% of the water and wasting it with open irrigation ditches and incredibly thirsty crops in the desert??
That is one example, but I was referring to the the recycling of water for domestic use. It is a widespread practice in many arid urban zones
I’m familiar with the reuse of grey water and rain water, but I’m under the impression that re-use of treated wastewater for potable use is pretty unusual. Have you noticed some examples?
This seems to be a decent article: https://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2011/04/04/from-wastewater-to-drinking-water/
Here’s a quote: “In Orange County, for example, IPR (recycling) costs $800-$850 to produce enough recycled water for 2 families of 4 for a year. Desalinating an equal amount of seawater would require $1,200-$1,800 because of the amount of energy needed.”
Nick-
L.A. will recycle 100% of its wastewater by 2035
https://www.lamayor.org/mayor-garcetti-los-angeles-will-recycle-100-city’s-wastewater-2035
smaller scale projects have been used in various places for a long time.
In general, it is better to just have a much smaller population, rather have to rely on reusing water or desalinization. Both of these efforts are a clear signal that humanity is far over-extended, and is simply crushing the ecosystem.
Hickory,
Thanks for the LA example.
As for recycling (or desalination), in LA’s case I’d say the primary problem is placing a large city in the desert. Pretty much at any size it’s going to have to go to unusual lengths to manage it’s water supply. OTOH, it doesn’t have to crush the neighboring ecosystems, if it’s well managed.
Larger scale does mean you have less margin for error. There’s really no clear point where you hit overpopulation: you just have less and less margin to recover from stupidness. I would agree that there’s a point where a reasonable person would say that further growth is too risky, and that we’ve hit or passed that point.
Finally, it’s worth pointing out that women all over the world have dramatically reduced their fertility, and clearly want to reduce it further. Even in the US, where the fertility rate is well below replacement, roughly 50% of all births are unplanned. And it’s not liberals that are blocking women, it’s conservatives who want to “go forth and multiply”. In Nigeria, its’ the Muslim north that has the highest fertility by a large margin. The same is true for KSA (though not for Iran, which seems to suggest that M.E. sexism has less to with Islam and more to do with Arab culture).
Liberate women, and you solve the fertility problem.
All they have to do is catch the water that falls out of the sky instead of building “flood control” canals designed to move the water away from the city to the ocean as quickly as possible, like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jM4jebOBbEw
It’s stunning to look at pictures like this and listen to Californians whine about lack of water. How stupid can anyone be? There’s plenty of water. Los Angeles, for example, should tear up the pavement in the Los Angeles river and install check dams so the water will soak into the ground instead of flowing out to the ocean. Then wells would fill up.
I worked to stop a desal project in Marin, and won.
It was a project that only would of helped an out of county corp, and degraded the environment of residences.
The clueless idiots planned it on a pristine ocean spot, where a fishing and hunting club resided (probably some of the most conservative members in Marin).
We kicked their greedy asses!
The victory party was interesting, held at the fishing club.
Hint:
Not a good idea to piss off the left and the right.
I agree. Current farming practices in California are absurd. The solution is to rase the price of water to farmers, not to expensively desalinate and give it to them for free so they can waste more.
However, on current trends solar energy will get so cheap that desalination could see huge growth.
Furthermore, even very dry places with large populations have more than enough water, but poor land management means it is all wasted. Here is a recent video of supposedly dry Las Vegas:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1upu_ZfLuU
In the abundance of water, the fool is thirsty — Bob Marley
Also note the way the illiterate reporter pronounces the s in debris.
A few times I have heard people mumble that trump is like hitler.
I don’t agree. For one thing , trump is relatively incompetent.
trump is more like mussolini- “A restless child, Mussolini was disobedient, unruly, and aggressive. He was a bully at school and moody at home”….and ultimately was thrown out of office in disgrace and is remembered by history as a fascist buffoon,
More importantly, I have come to realize that
trumps VOTERS ARE THE SAME KIND OF PEOPLE WHO EAGERLY VOTED for hitler
We study history so that we can achieve a small bit of wisdom from the mistakes of the past, rather than always needing to learn the lessons once again the hard way. May be smart to study and respect science as well.
I have observed news reports of unusually high early voting across most of the US to the point that in Texas and Hawaii early voting has already exceeded the final total vote tally for 2016. I have also seen reports of particularly unusual high numbers of younger voters casting their votes. Does anyone else here think that it is highly unlikely that all this determination to vote is any manifestation of a desire on the part of the electorate at large to give the current occupant of the WH another four years? My gut tells me that most polls may have underestimated support for Democrats by assuming that young voters are not “likely voters”. From the looks of it, America is anxious to rid itself of Trump.
Trump is more like Mussolini- “A restless child, Mussolini was disobedient, unruly, and aggressive.
Yesterday I heard a TV reporter refer to Trump as “Benito Trumpolini”.
I like it!
Benito ‘Idioto’ Trumpolini.
https://glineq.blogspot.com/2020/11/what-we-owe-to-donald-j-trump.html
Compare and Contrast: Trump Versus One Who Votes For A State Rep
Anarchism and Science
“The state is the most destructive institution human beings have ever devised…
Whatever promotes the growth of the state also weakens the capacity of individuals in civil society to fend off the state’s depredations and therefore augments the public’s multifaceted victimization at the hands of state functionaries. Nothing promotes the growth of the state as much as national emergency…
States, by their very nature, are perpetually at war—not always against foreign foes, of course, but always against their own subjects. The state’s most fundamental purpose, the activity without which it cannot even exist, is robbery. The state gains its very sustenance from robbery, which it pretties up ideologically by giving it a different name (taxation) and by striving to sanctify its intrinsic crime as permissible and socially necessary. State propaganda, statist ideologies, and long-established routine combine to convince many people that they have a legitimate obligation, even a moral duty to pay taxes to the state that rules their society.
They fall into such erroneous moral reasoning because they are told incessantly that the tribute they fork over is actually a kind of price paid for essential services received, and that in the case of certain services, such as protection from foreign and domestic aggressors against their rights to life, liberty, and property, only the government can provide the service effectively. They are not permitted to test this claim by resorting to competing suppliers of law, order, and security, however, because the government enforces a monopoly over the production and distribution of its alleged ‘services’ and brings violence to bear against would-be competitors. In so doing, it reveals the fraud at the heart of its impudent claims and gives sufficient proof that it is not a genuine protector, but a mere protection racket.” ~ Robert Higgs
From the Director of Emergency Services at regional medical center
11/2/2020
“Beginning today, many cities, counties and states are expanding their Emergency Operations Centers to prepare for the coming days of possible civil unrest. This includes the areas in which … has facilities. You will see concentrated areas of law enforcement and emergency services on stand-stand by. As always, my goal is for each of you to be safe and aware of your surroundings. In addition, prepared for a surge in injuries due to unforeseen violence at any of our hospitals. Again, over the next several days, you may see and or be in an area of heightened tensions as you travel either for business or personal reasons.”…
Hello Ron,
From above:
“You need more than energy to run the infrastructure of cities, for example. You need power too. A fact that is rarely mentioned.
Strange? I always thought energy and power were the same things.”
Spindle Top and a fraced well both produce energy in the form of oil. But Spindle Top produced far more oil per day. That is SpindleTop was far more powerful. It could power far more cars every day.
Food is energy. But a person needs about 100 watts of power to maintain their body. Insufficient food ( energy ) will not keep you alive.
Medieval cathedrals could take 100 years to build. They had the energy to do the job but not the power to do it faster.
But for many forms of infrastructure power matters. People and food. Winter and warmth. Cities and sewer and water.
The 20th century had a surfeit of power and built infrastructure that has a high power requirement.
If that infrastructure is to carry on in the face of oil decline using solar PV, it will demand sufficient solar power in the form of solar energy.
From physics: Power = Energy/Time.
Electrically Watts = KilowattHours / Time.
Your body runs on watts. Rate of energy supply matters.
Regards,
Paul Isaacs
Paul,
Your example hasn’t really clarified things. Power is flow, energy per unit of time (watts): energy is watt-hours. In this case, Spindletop also produced a lot of energy.
So…why are you concerned that PV can’t produce enough power? The earth receives about 100,000 terawatts of power 24 hours per day, 7 days a week. That’s about 1,000 watts per square meter at noon. Just combine enough square meters and you can produce all the power you want.
Hello Nick,
I’m lost.
“Your example hasn’t really clarified things. Power is flow, energy per unit of time (watts): energy is watt-hours.”
Isn’t that what my post said?
“In this case, Spindletop also produced a lot of energy.”
Of course it did. That wasn’t the point. The point was the rate at which it produced that energy. Its power relative to a fraced well. Early 20th century vs. early 21st century comparison.
Regards,
Paul Isaacs
The clarification about power vs energy was for Ron, BTW.
But the point still isn’t clear. The US is producing far more oil than it did in the early 20th century. It has recently been producing more than it’s 1971 peak, due to fracked wells. And PV could easily produce far more power than that.
So if you’re trying to make a comparison between eras, or make a point about PV, that point isn’t clear.
Paul I-
Lets step back a little from the theoretically stance you have staked out.
Lets say you are standing outside your home in 2040.
Oil depletion is well underway, production globally down 30% from peak and nat gas just below peak at 90%.
And your region has poor supply, since the producing cartels have supply contracts that largely bypass your area.
You better hope that people in your region spent the last couple decades building out a robust solar/wind/storage (battery and hydrogen) production capacity. And in the deployment of electric vehicle transport capacity, including cargo.
I don’t know how far we will get in the battle of replacing fossil fuel with solar/wind/nucs/hydro. But every mile of progress in that replacement will be extremely valuable as fossil fuels supply subside. The degree to which the attempt is successful will determine just how much economic activity and population can be sustained [and the degree of prosperity or poverty in your region].
Or we can stand by with our hands in the pockets and fret about the idea that solar power is not dense energy.
btw- On my house I have solar PV. 20 panels at 330w each- its a fairly small system.
The electricity produced can electrocute a person, just as if it was produced by a coal power plant.
And the electricity from the roof can hurl my wifes car down the road for 300 miles at 70 mph.
The cost/mile for that electric car to go 300 miles is a $8.28 (using the nationwide average for electricity cost), and for a comparable petrol car it would cost $28.32 miles (using gallon price of $3.00).
For us, the 30 yr levelized cost of the solar electricity is far less than the 11 cents/kWh that is the nationwide utility average, that I used for he example. And I suspect the 30 yr average price for gasoline will be far higher than the 3.00/gallon used in the example.
My System, She Go Poof. On Phone, Long Time.
Paul,
If we buy into things like solar photovoltaic panels, wind turbines and/or electric vehicles and whatnot, then we are in effect voting more or less for the perpetuation of the status-quo, or at least it lasting long enough to be able to support what we just bought from it.
But how good is support these days?
And how secure are our jobs? Or social security or pensions, such as in the faces of financial/economic, ecologic and social decline?
When I was living in a small town, I lost the use of my bike’s rear wheel hub, and there were no bike shops in town, so I was without the use of my bike for a longer while than I expected and was used to. That small simple part rendered an otherwise perfectly useful bike relatively useless. I was lucky, though, because it was only a simple and common bike, with a lot of support relatively nearby, rather than, say, a full-blown photovoltaic system or electric automobile.
Hello Hickory,
New York, Chicago, Houston, LA how do you run them on solar?
Do you plug solar power into existing water, sewer, food distribution infrastructure? How do you power transportation? What are your storage facilities for overnight power? How many square miles of panels will you need.
This goes back to my original post. These cities need sufficient power to operate their infrastructure and big cities need a lot of infrastructure to be functional. That infrastructure, it seems to me, has an all-or-nothing character. There is no way to have 75% of a sewer system and maintain the integrity of the city.
Regards,
Paul Isaacs
I think what you’re asking is:
1) can solar power scale up enough to provide enough power to replace fossil fuels? and
2) what do you do at night, or in the depths of winter, or when there are clouds?
Do I have that right?
I don’t think that’s what he’s asking at all. He asked how do you power large cities in a non-fossil fuel setting. The magnitude of what it will take, I think, is not well understood. What large metro area is being powered this way? Wouldn’t you think that if a post fossil fuel civilization is to exist anywhere near the way it is now, that some prototype city would be created or converted??
Hell no. Nick likes to WING IT. ;D
The magnitude of what it will take is extremely well understood. Utilities and independent system operators know exactly how much power and energy are needed, and when. PV (and wind, and hydro, and nuclear, etc) are well understood. It’s quite clear how they work, what they produce and when.
If you want an example of detailed accounting and reporting of energy production and consumption (including solar and wind generation), go to Caiso.com, starting with http://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/default.aspx
This isn’t rocket science, it’s pretty basic engineering.
Hello Nick,
Electricity, which, I believe, is all that your post covers, is only a portion of the power that cities use – 20-25% I think. There is a big chunk of the power pie chart still to fill.
The link to the California ISO site would have been more reassuring if it had been a page describing how the ISO was going to convert totally to solar.
The link was for their daily usage. That they know reasonably accurately what their daily usage will be is rather a statement of the obvious.
If powering a city without fossil fuels were “pretty basic engineering”, it would have been done by now.
Regards,
Paul Isaacs
Well, that raises a lot of questions, each of which could occupy us a while. Let me ask a basic question: Why do you refer to only solar? Are you thinking that powering cities with only solar, with no wind, hydro, nuclear etc, would be a good idea?
Nick, some American cities for example are seeing a bit of an exodus apparently.
In any case, if you want to talk about different forms of power inputs to cities, then you open up a can of worms, which, to quote you, ‘raises a lot of questions’, many which may run strongly counter to what you might have in mind or in hopium.
“The link to the California ISO site would have been more reassuring if it had been a page describing how the ISO was going to convert totally to solar.”
They aren’t planning to do that. We’ll also use in-state and imported wind, hydropower, geothermal, and storage. Maybe wave power, too.
Hello Edgy,
Well said.
Cities are just a concrete example of the need for power.
More broadly, I also suspect that technological complexity is an emergent property of available power.
High technology is underpinned by a pyramid of successively less complexities. Each of those technologies needs to be powered.
The height of the pyramid would be a function of its area. In other words each increase in complexity would require an increase in power that was a function of the square of the complexity increase.
The conclusion is that the highest levels of technology will be the most vulnerable to energy decline. Cities are in that category.
Regards,
Paul Isaacs
Paul,
Could you define what you mean by complexity?
An electric vehicle, for instance, could be regarded as newer or higher tech than an ICE, but it’s far less complex: an ICE is a nightmare of zillions of complex parts that require extremely close tolerances to function at all, while an EV’s motor has one moving part.
PV may be high tech, but it has no moving parts and is simplicity itself to install and operate. Compare PV to any heat engine: far simpler, far more reliable, etc. Heck, PV has been described as a “rock that makes power”.
And where did the idea the idea that tech progress requires more energy come from? My iPad consumes less than 10% as much power as the first IBM PC. It’s more powerful than the mainframe I used as an undergrad, but uses about 5 watts, while the mainframe…
A horse is incredibly inefficient form of transportation: far inferior to a train, or an ICE. An EV uses about 1/3 as much power as an ICE.
PV or wind are far more space efficient compared to wood. They’re far less complex and far more reliable than the long and fragile oil supply chain that brings oil from deep underground to your gas station.
“:an ICE is a nightmare of zillions of complex parts that require extremely close tolerances to function at all, while an EV’s motor has one moving part.”
As I see it, the problem is in the complex control systems for that electric motor.
A properly maintained mechanically controlled ICE will run for tens of thousands of hours . . . and so will the electric motor.
However, the electric/electronic doodads on all classes of current machinery seem to be prone to failure long before the rotating assemblies.
Scrub Puller,
I know what you mean – automotive electrical systems seem to be a fairly common weak point. But electric motors are much easier to control: no liquid fuel to pump and ignite precisely, no fuel system and ignition systems, no oil systems. Battery packs do have cooling systems, but there are no moving parts in the packs to make life hard for those systems. No transmission (or much less complex transmission).
And automotive ICEs only seem reliable because they’re made in enormous volumes and receive enormous R&D investments. Boutique low volume cars are famous for being unreliable. That’s why companies like VW are making the decision to not develop new generations of ICEs – they’re so expensive to do right.
And you note that drive trains require maintenance: that’s much more demanding for ICEs, and they’re much less tolerant of missed maintenance.
Hello Nick,
“Could you define what you mean by complexity? ”
Heart transplants.
Regards,
Paul Isaacs
Blowing Our Fossil Fuel Heritage On Dubious Retrofits/Retools Instead of Immediately Powering Down
AFAIK, ICE vehicles’ batteries don’t need cooling and ICE’s only need one battery, if that. EV’s still need fossil fuel (FF) inputs in terms of EV-production/transportation and FF-burning remote power stations to charge them and to make up for alternative power-station intermittency.
At the same time, I can produce my own ethanol locally that internal combustion engines can run on. There are probably other local benefits to owning an ICE compared with an electric motor system. Ditto with issues of alternate forms of pollution, sociopolitics and resource constraints, surrounding electrification at scale/complexity.
Some of this is also a bit of a false dichotomy, since not all of us use or need personal private vehicles, whether electric or internal combustion, and we can community-share them.
If the economic system is going to fundamentally change, likely with many jobs and the rat race in general drying up, (and maybe less tax revenue for roadway infrastructure maintenance) there’s also the increasing questions therefore of where we will be thinking we need to go with all those electric cars. For the sake of nostalgia for gridlock, sprawl, roadkill and inordinately-long commute times?
(There are a handful on this site who appear to own electric cars but they seem somewhat oblivious to their current context compared with how they will be in the face of social, economic and ecologically-driven changes. Electric vehicles seem too big and complex to become fancy door-stops.)
It seems to make much more sense to begin powering down now rather than later than continuing to blow our remaining fossil fuel heritage at this late climate-change/ecocidal/sociopolitically-unstable juncture on questionable greenwashed BAU attempts at retrofitting a fossil-fuel-based ‘economic engine’.
See also ‘The EV/PV Snow-Job’.
G’day Nick.
In general, I keep my mouth shut on this site and just try to learn . . . but I must take issue with your statement . . .
“A horse is incredibly inefficient form of transportation: far inferior to a train, or an ICE.”
It all depends on context mate . . . a horse, more properly, should be compared to a bicycle.
However, in a powered down future world, a mode of transport that has some built in “artificial intelligence”, can source its own fuel, provides usable and useful emissions, is self replicating and, in an emergency, can be eaten may once again prove to be a useful asset.
Scrub,
The problem with horses is that you have to feed them every day, 365 days a year. So, overall they need much more fuel than an ICE.
And unless the large majority of people relocate from cities, the manure would drown them.
> More broadly, I also suspect that technological complexity is an emergent property of available power.
Well maybe. But it is interesting to note that the world’s leading car exporting countries tax gas heavily at the pump. If high tech were emergent from abundant energy, Saudi Arabia would be the world’s high tech capital. But poor scrappy countries like Korea and Taiwan seem to do a lot better. Well they were poor a few decades ago anyway.
The guys who invented the Toyota production system (Taiichi Ohno and Kiichiro Toyoda) claim that shortages were crucial inspiration for them. Their system has now been at least partly adopted by the entire car industry and many others as well.
At first they tried imitating Detroit, but found the methods used there incredibly wasteful. They didn’t have the space or capital for huge stockpiles of unfinished parts, so they invented just-in-time. They couldn’t afford to fix cars that came off the production line defective, so they went all in on quality. Instead of buying expensive equipment to replace assembly line workers, they reduced the need for workers in waste disposal by eliminating single use packaging.
Basically they so poor they had to focus completely on reducing waste. Innovation comes when you are forced to innovate. Given a choice, people just coast. So less energy can be a good thing.
Yep.
A couple thoughts. First, it’s annoying that most of these “lean manufacturing”, zero-defect ideas were developed in the US but neglected; 2nd, the history of industrial progress is that of increasing efficiency, primarily of labor productivity but also of energy efficiency.
Efficiency seems quite overrated, such as with regard to overworking labor, overfishing the oceans and just plain efficiently raping the planet in general.
There’re also the issues surrounding ‘efficiently’ exporting and importing more or less the exact same product, as well as…
Ya, but imagine the extra pointless driving we might achieve, all in the name of using less energy.
I’m going to keep it simple [for my sake]-
You get as much of the fossil fuel replacement done as quickly as you can muster, working like hell to get way ahead of fossil fuel depletion.
See where you end up.
Or follow the other path.
Kind of like Trumps plan with pandemic- surrender.
K.I.S.S
Ya, like my bike and that part that went poof. And that was actually simple, compared with talking simply about things that aren’t.
We follow a path that is less likely to put us up shit’s creek without a paddle– you know, like a lot of technologies that seemed like a good idea (if not for everyone) at the time, but now have us up shit’s creek?
Some people never learn.
U.S. Solar Industry Wants Government Bailout As Bankruptcies Loom
There isn’t really a great need to replace fossil fuel, since most of it is wasted anyway. Cars are about 20% efficient. The best coal plants are about 35% efficient, with a few very new exceptions. Combined cycle gas is better, above 50%.
But all told, there is little need to even replace half of fossil fuels. And that’s not even counting how hopelessly wasteful most human society is with the usable energy fossil fuels generate.
Put another way, the Tesla Model 3 is rated at 141 MPG equivalent by the EPA. IF EVs become prevalent, a lot less energy will be needed to do the same amount of pointless driving around in circles.
Paul, Powering New York, Chicago and other cities outside of of extreme southern portion of the US has the serious challenge of the seasonality of solar. This obviously gets worse the further you get from the tropics. Houston and LA do not have the seasonality problem, in addition to which they do not require anything close to the heating required in winter for New York and Chicago.
LA has access to truly impressive solar resources from Nevada and Arizona apart from California’s own resources, so the issue boils down to overnight storage. I do not think we fully appreciate the tectonic shift that is likely to occur in the area of electricity storage. We will just have to wait and see how it all plays out. Houston has access to significant amounts of wind power as well so, the storage challenge may not be as large for Houston and other cities in Texas.
If you missed the three articles on “Electric Commercial Vehicles – a ten year update“, I invite you to have a look at them. There is in fact a huge amount of heavy lifting that can be done with electricity and some is already done. IIRC, the comments section of the ECV ten year update unveiled that some of the biggest machines on the planet are in fact powered by electricity.
As has been pointed out by others, looking at primary energy used for transport can be very misleading. Less than 25% of the primary energy contained in petroleum ends up doing useful work in a vehicle with an ICE as the traction motor. Well over half of the energy taken from a given source of electricity will end up doing useful work in an EV and if the electricity source is local PV, the proportion of useful work to energy generated should be significantly higher. Just imagine if all school buses in the southern US were EVs and spent the hours between the morning and afternoon runs plugged into a PV source at the depots where they park during the interim? If the buses used swap-able battery packs, when they go out for their runs the second pack could absorb all the energy being generated while they are out and then could be swapped out for use the following day.
Your initial post focused on power, questioning whether renewables, solar in particular, would be able to provide enough power. According to the SEIA’s press release on Q2 PV installations in the US , forecasts are for 18 GW of new solar in 2020. From the “Related News” section at the bottom of the linked page, “Solar Accounts for 40% of U.S. Electric Generating Capacity Additions in 2019, Adds 13.3 GW“. If the forecasts turn out to be correct, that is 31 GW in two years. There is a useful Wikipedia page, Growth of photovoltaics that provides a table for annual installations and cumulative capacity for many countries. From that table the US is looking like over 95 GW of solar capacity by the end of 2021. IMO it is not a stretch for the US to have in excess of 400 GW by the end of 2030 (doubling twice in ten years). That is a lot of power! The average power consumption for the entire US is 556 GW in the summer and 417 in the winter.
A final note, on the US elections, a Bidden/Harris administration means a lot more rhetoric from the top in support of renewable energy.
Powering New York, Chicago and other cities outside of of extreme southern portion of the US has the serious challenge of the seasonality of solar.
Iowa has an enormous amount of very cheap and reliable wind power. As a result, it has the highest percentage of wind power in the US (about 40%), and is working successfully to export power to Chicago and NYC.
There is a North-South corridor of wind power in the central US that starts at Texas and reaches up to the Dakotas. It can provide power to the whole US, as well as Canada & Mexico (should they want it).
As we saw in your EIA post, the combination of wind and solar covers all 12 months of the year pretty well.
Hello Island Boy,
Thank you for the comprehensive response.
My main goal for introducing power was to get time as a variable.
Energy is in newton-metres and does not contain time as a direct variable
Power is newton-metres / second. It was that rate dependency that I wanted to emphasize.
Most of our built infrastructure requires continuous power. Fossil fuels allowed a great deal of power hungry infrastructure to be built. Cities in particular.
A loss of even a portion of the required power to a city has immediate consequences.
My point is that building out solar after the loss of power has become chronic is too late. Looking through a power required lense makes this time criticality more evident.
Regards,
Paul Isaacs
Gloria La Riva For President! ^u’
Gloria La Riva’s Issue Positions (Political Courage Test)
Get to Know This Year’s 3rd-Party Presidential Candidates
About centralized storage of solar and wind energy…….
I don’t think there IS any practical upper limit to centralized storage, depending on the technology used, other than the amount of energy that can be funneled into it, and retrieved from it.
These latter limits will be determined by the aggregate production capacity of wind and solar farms close enough to transmit the electricity to the storage facility, and the storage facility being close enough to transmit the electrical energy out to customers who need it, meaning cities and towns.
Liquid based batteries can be built with simply ENORMOUS reservoirs, and the reservoirs scale up better and better as you increase the capacity, because the bigger the pit, the greater the volume, in relation to the cost of construction. ( Pits will be used because they don’t need walls as strong as free standing tanks.)
And if you use sand or some other material to store heat, well again , the bigger the reservoir, the BETTER it will work, and the LONGER it will last before cooling off too much, and the more heat you can jam into it.
So the limits for centralized storage will likely be determined by wind and solar farm capacities, and the capacities of transmission lines, to and from.
Transmission lines, once built, last pretty much forever, with a modest maintenance budget.
But I’m not having much luck finding out what the price trends are for HVDC lines, because not very many are being built.
“But I’m not having much luck finding out what the price trends are for HVDC lines, because not very many are being built.
O.F.M., if you think that you’re not paying attention. ?
CHINA’S STATE GRID CORP CRUSHES POWER TRANSMISSION RECORDS
State Grid’s 1.1 million volt DC line pushes power from Xinjiang to eastern megacities over 3000 kilometers to the east. China’s primary grid operator has energized its biggest and most powerful line yet, a 1.1-million-volt direct current (DC) behemoth that crushes world records for voltage, distance and power. The new ultra-high voltage DC (UHVDC) line built by Beijing-based State Grid Corporation of China can transmit up to 12 gigawatts. That is enough to power 50 million Chinese households. UHVDC technology is seen by Chinese president Xi Jinping as a key technology for his “Belt and Road” international development program. And at the UN’s 2015 Sustainable Development Summit Xi proposed the construction of intercontinental power links to massively scale-up cross-border sharing of renewable energy. But UHVDC also has an important role to play domestically, where Xi has promised to turn China’s skies blue again. Specifically, Xi has committed to ending rampant wastage of renewable power generation, whereby wind, solar and hydro power plants are deliberately shut off due to grid capacity and stability limits or to simply make room for coal-fired generation.
BTW, now that the IMF (and Bloomberg) has admitted China has overtaken the US as the World’s largest economy you can expect many more reports like this. NB, in Asia most leaders are engineers as opposed to the U.S. which tends to favor lawyers!
https://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/the-smarter-grid/chinas-state-grid-corp-crushes-power-transmission-records
https://eurasiantimes.com/imf-admits-china-has-long-overtaken-the-us-as-the-worlds-largest-economy-but-why-is-the-media-silent/
, in Asia most leaders are engineers as opposed to the U.S. which tends to favor lawyers!
I agree with your view of the problem here – US companies have bought the myth that a great manager can manage anything, without having technical or industry expertise.
One quibble: I think the problematic tendency for CEOs is accountants (and MBAs), rather than lawyers. For instance, you could trace the downfall of the US car industry to the ascendance of accountants.
For instance, you could trace the downfall of the US car industry to the ascendance of accountants.
Also Boeing, sadly.
in the usa we spend a lot more on accountants, legal action, political campaigning, and pharma advertising
When I did my civil engineering degree in Australia back in the 80’s many leaders’ backgrounds were engineering. We were told it was because engineering was a profession where young graduates got lots of early experience overseeing/managing people and projects compared to other professions – and that early experience kept them ahead for the rest of their careers. About then, MBA’s were invented, and the engineers’ advantage was lost. Maybe Asia is still in that earlier period in its development of leaders and will transistion soon 🙂
Maximum Power Principle
The growth-based economy has to create jobs jobs jobs to be competitive and to feed the increasingly complex system and the parasite politicians, corporate CEO’s and whonot.
Phil —
Good point. China, where I did a lot of work over a seven year period, produces roughly ten times more engineers per year that the U.S. They’re everywhere and not inferior in any way to those produced here (North America). Don’t get me wrong, while running my own (engineering) company, we made frequent use of lawyers and accountants; couldn’t have operated effectively without them. Secret is, keeping them on a short leash. ?
Another aspect of the whole situation is that rich countries have millions of cars with half full tanks sitting around all day, but no connection between this vast store of energy and the grid. Lots of EVs with vehicle to grid capability could act as a decentralized “virtual” power plant. Since the cars would have oversized batteries to deal with rare long trips this could go a long way towards smoothing out the bumps in the electricity supply. And in a sense it would be free, because the “real” use of the battery is to power the vehicle.
For example, California has about 80 GW (80 trillion watts) of production capacity. Output is usually about 30 GW. The state has about 15 million cars. If each car out put a mere 2 KW, they could run the entire grid. Or if 10% were parked and plugged in, and all the generation capacity switched off, each would only have to generate 20 KW to replace all the lost output. By comparison, a VWID3 has a 150 KW engine.
This may be one reason why Tesla is saying it doesn’t want to sell cars, and provide transportation as a service instead. They could run a giant virtual battery and make money on grid arbitrage at the same time with the same hardware.
That’s an important point.
It’s useful to keep in mind that you can get much of that benefit with something much simpler: grid-to-vehicle. If vehicles charge dynamically based on the power supply they can smooth out demand and make demand follow supply (rather than the conventional “load-following” approach).
So, EVs would charge during the daytime solar peak and at night when wind power has a peak in output. That wouldn’t require grid upgrades, and that wouldn’t cost car owners a thing, because they wouldn’t be adding charge-discharge cycles to their battery usage, just charging in a smart way. In fact, they could get paid for this arbitrage by getting discounted power.
Then add vehicle-to-grid (V2G) and you’d amplify the power of this system further.
They’re planning to kill all the mink in Denmark.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-denmark-mink/denmark-to-cull-entire-herd-of-mink-due-to-risk-of-coronavirus-mutation-tv2-idUSKBN27K1X6
15 million or more.
Peak fascism in the USA?
Hope so, but not too confident about it since the ignorance and gullibility that votes for it is as big as ever.
“We wanted to show the rest of the world that America wasn’t a country of racist idiots. We wanted to strike a blow against the stupidity. We wanted to send a message that Trumpism was a fluke, that we were Obama’s America, not Trump’s. But Trumpism was not repudiated.”
trump would be much better off spending his legal capital on prepping for own personal defense [he will need it badly], rather than trying to stop the counting of the votes of american citizens- that is a losing battle chump.
The Dems in the past have been reluctant to pursue that path.
Let’s hope this timid response is in the past, and they get some balls.
Highlight on NIO. Yeh Nio, you know, one of the EV up and comers fast growing car companies from the worlds largest economy.
Check out their models-
https://www.nio.com/
Grim news from southern hemisphere. Will they (we) turn it all into CO2?
FIRES IN BRAZIL’S AMAZON RAINFOREST JUMP IN OCTOBER
“Fires in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest surged in October and the number of blazes is up 25 percent in the first 10 months of 2020, compared with a year ago, data from government space research agency INPE showed. The agency recorded 17,326 hot spots in the world’s largest rainforest in October, more than double the number of fires detected in the same month last year. Destruction of the forest has soared since right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro took office in 2019.”
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/11/2/fires-in-brazils-amazon-rainforest-jump-in-october
Addendum To: Blowing Our Fossil Fuel Heritage On Dubious Retrofits/Retools Instead of Immediately Powering Down
The EV/PV Snow-Job
EV’s, perhaps even PV’s ( and their purchases by those who can afford them, and depending on how they are used) don’t cut it in comparison to many, if not most, others’ carbon footprints in a global context. In that view, PV’s/EV’s appear to amount, still, to very large relative energy footprints.
So if you really want to reduce your energy footprint, you may have to try much harder, and stop snowing yourself and/or others that you’re making a big enough difference with your ‘privileged greenwashy trinkets’.
Don’t be surprised by all the trump lawsuits aimed at disrupting the voting and challenging the democratic process.
After all, that is his modus operandi throughout his life.
Legal action and bribery is how he has handled
-his personal life [marriage/divorce/abortion hush]
-his financial life [bankruptcies, contract breeches, tax fraud]
-his public relations life [slander, etc]
Very few people have paid more in legal fees than this man.
Its an attempt to cover up his poor behavior, gross failure of business and life management, and all the times he loses.
AFAIK he wins few of his lawsuits, but the suits alone are very painful for most people. Fortunately, in my experience few local officials are afraid of such lawsuits.
The number one selling EV in China in Sept was a very samll car-
Wuling Mini EV, a SAIC-GM-Wuling joint venture, selling for less than $5000 US dollar equivalent.
‘Powering the car is a 27 hp electric motor hooked up to a compact 13.8 kWh battery pack. While the Mini EV tops out at just 62 mph (100 km/h), it does have a respectable range of up to 124 miles (200 km) on a single charge, more than enough for people who live in large urban areas and most of the time drive short distances.’
For most commuters in the world, this is sufficient to get the job done.
The energy/Co2 footprint for travel in this vehicle is tiny, compared to average commuter vehicle in use throughout the world currently.
https://www.carscoops.com/2020/08/tiny-wuling-hongguang-mini-ev-has-locked-in-50000-orders/
Wuling (五菱) means “Five Diamonds” in Chinese, an apparent reference to Mitsubishi (三菱), which is Japanese for “Three Diamonds”.
There is still far too much embedded energy and resources in & surrounding a car, whether electric or internal combustion. It has to be shipped, shopped, supported, salvaged, etc..
Import that thing over to the USA, incidentally, and it’s not going to cost ~$5000 anymore, and some of the costs are going to be ‘externalities’, relatively invisible and borne by the rest of the planet.
Belated but I can sing it now:
Happy days are here again,
The skies above are clear again
Let us sing a song of cheer again
Happy days are here again,
Altogether shout it now
There’s no one who can doubt it now
So let’s tell the world about it now
Happy days are here again,
Your cares and troubles are gone
They’re be no more from now on
Happy days are here again,
The skies above are clear again
Let us sing a song of cheer again
Happy days are here again,
So long sad time, so long bad time
We are rid of Trump at last
Howdy gay times, cloudy gray times
You are now a thing of the past
I have been mystified by the behavior of all the people who could overlook the extremely negative behavior and failure of effective leadership of trump (for example- the trump pandemic failure), and vote for trump.
Trump the ‘most flawed human being I have ever known’ John Kelly [retired U.S. Marine Corps general who served as the White House Chief of Staff for President Donald Trump from July 31, 2017, to January 2, 2019]
It is easy to think ‘oh these 47% of voters are just idiots, fools or cruel-hearted’
But I think a different explanation applies to a majority of the trump/republican voters.
It is not the character of the person, but the information diet on which they gorge themselves-
a mental diet of Rush Limbaugh, Tucker Carlson, Fox, Giuliani, Q Anon, Steve Brannon, and their church, etc
This kind of mental diet will corrupt the thinking of just about anyone.
Like a sedentary person who eats 4000 cal/day- they will get fat!
The information diet these people consume is toxic, a mental carcinogen.
They will not realize that trump is lying to their face every day, almost every time he speaks.
They will overlook the fact that this ‘billionaire’ paid less tax than they did, through illegal maneuvering.
They will overlook the fact that he is an enemy of democracy like this country has never seen before.
They have been gradually brainwashed to become MAGA zombies.
There is only one cure for these people.
Stop feeding themselves the toxic information diet that takes a decent human being and turns them into the kind of person who would have voted for hitler.
How to judge if your media source is unbiased and fact based?
An organization has done hard work to rank USA media- here is the updated version 5.
Seek unbiased fact-
https://www.adfontesmedia.com/interactive-media-bias-chart-2/
I was temporarily banned from Twitter for the first time this morning for saying something that is obvious — the half of the country that supports Trump consists of rednecks. The proof is in the 2020 vote.
To say that means you have to ignore the swing by non-whites toward voting Trump, particularly Hispanics.
It’s true: white southerners aren’t the only people who can be confused and misled by propaganda.
Indeed, like the propaganda and ideological indoctrination that embellishes the monopoly on violence of nation-state governments.
“To say that means you have to ignore the swing by non-whites toward voting Trump, particularly Hispanics.”
Arizona?
information hygiene–
https://www.embopress.org/doi/full/10.15252/embr.202051819?campaign=woletoc
That’s a great read, thanks for sharing!
“As humans, we emote first and reflect after; this propensity to react before reflecting is a trojan horse for devious fictions to become established.”
First of all, it doesn’t really matter – in the longer term -who wins. Wealth inequality is a huge driver behind all of this.
That said, the ability to choose your news / information sources leads to an echo chamber and people on two different sides of the spectrum are essentially unable to have a conversation.
https://connectrandomdots.blogspot.com/2020/11/winner-takes-all-or-why-playing-field.html
it doesn’t really matter – in the longer term -who wins. Wealth inequality is a huge driver behind all of this.
Reagan won in 1980, and dramatically cut income tax rates for higher incomes. That rate cut is the major reason behind the increase in US wealth inequality over the last 35 years.
Elections matter.
Democrats have had the chance to increase rates on the rich multiple times. They have chosen not too. Both parties are owned by monied interests and don’t give a flying fuck about the average worker – although the republicans may give an even slightly smaller fuck.
WeekendPeak
When, exactly, could they have done something that difficult?
Obama had a majority in both houses of congress, and he used that to pass the Affordable Care Act. The ACA included a modest tax increase for the wealthy, and largely as a result of that Republicans have created a sh**storm about the ACA ever since.
Democrats are doing as much as they can to help working people. To do more would require more support from voters, who just this last week chose to vote for Republican senators and congress critters.
If the voters don’t move, the politicians can’t do it alone.
First of all, it doesn’t really matter – in the longer term -who wins. Wealth inequality is a huge driver behind all of this.
Bullshit! It matters a lot who wins. Trump gave the billionaires a huge tax cut and he gave the middle class the shaft. He is trying to get rid of the Affordable Care Act in the middle of a pandemic. If successful no one with a pre-conditioned problem could get insurance. Neither he nor the republican party gives a flying fuck about the middle class. And as far as the lower class goes, those working for the minimum wage if they can find work at all, Trump just would like to see them die.
Wealth inequality is what the Democrats are fighting against and what the Republicans are fighting for. So don’t come here with that bullshit that it makes no difference.
See comment above. To think that democrats want a more level playing field is naive. Both are feeding from the same trough.
And what trough is that? People who think that it doesn’t matter who is elected, that they are all alike, are not just naive, they are just down in the dirt stupid.
Do you actually think that it made no difference who came to power in Germany in the 1930s? Do you think that no matter who gained power in pre-war Germany would just have been another Hitler?
I love a good argument, but cynicism just burns my ass. Cynics are just lazy brained, they had just rather condemn everything and everyone rather than admit that they are actual differences in political philosophies. Communism and Fascism are polar opposites political philosophies. Both are horrible. Trump was an idiot who, though his every word and action showed he was a fascist, embraced the world’s most notorious Communist leader. Either Putin had something on him or he was just stupid to know the difference.
Totally agree with you WEEKENDPEAK, bankers, corporatocracy, AIPAC and other powerful lobbying group run the game. The U.S masses are quite naive and brainwashed into thinking their votes makes any difference. Noam Chomsky even acknowledges this point. That man is worthy of respect.
Iron Mike:
I try to never argue with a cynic. Their position is outside of reason and logic. However, you are going to have to post a link to Norm Chomsky says something so utterly stupid as “To think that democrats want a more level playing field is naive. Both are feeding from the same trough.” Or anything to that effect because I don’t believe it for one damn minute.
Norm Chomsky is anything but a cynic. Check out the two links below. And I could post a dozen more where Chomsky suggest it makes one hell of a lot of difference who you vote for.
Noam Chomsky wants you to vote for Joe Biden and then haunt his dreams
Noam Chomsky: Those who failed to recognize Trump as the greater evil made ‘a bad mistake’
From Wiki: Noam Chomsky is an intellectual, political activist, and critic of the foreign policy of the United States and other governments. Noam Chomsky describes himself as an anarcho-syndicalist and libertarian socialist, and is considered to be a key intellectual figure within the left wing of politics of the United States.[1]
Ron:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoDB2z0mLAU
United States is an one party state: Noam Chomsky…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcb_iN2RhpM
Tried to edit a comment but it goes to spam:
This year roughly 14bn was spent on the election. That money was given/donated. 14bn gets you a seat at the table even if you’re not physically there. Laws that help you get passed, loopholes inserted in bill that are passed etc. And I can virtually guarantee you that those laws and loopholes are not designed to help the working class.
Rgds
WeekendPeak
Ron – responding to your comment above.
Did you read the article that I linked?
My guess is that Trump’s narcissism and ego prevents him from looking at anything that doesn’t glorify him.
I met him once – early 90’s. He wore a cape and his bodyguard would take it off for him. No handshake, just a nod. He looked and acted like a gangster. I am not a fan. The ease with which he lies is disturbing – I would not be surprised if he technically is a psychopath.
I agree that both parties have different agendas and personally I think that the stated agenda of the democrats is more reasonable. The problem is that – when push comes to shove – either party will do what their donors tell them to. The democrats passed NAFTA – not exactly to the benefit of the working class. Neither of them want to increase taxes in a meaningful manner. The inequality has gotten completely out of hand and in order to right that wrong relatively extreme measures need to be taken but the democrats are not able to get the buy-in to do that. And money has a lot to do with that.
“The only difference between government and gangsters is your opinion.” ~ Chris Lyspooner
Exactly. Claims that it doesn’t matter who you vote for are just an attempt to undermine the country’s democracy.
Yep.
Such claims are appealing to Russian and Chinese advocates of autocracy.
Mike, I watched the entirety of both videos. Nowhere does Chomsky say that there is no difference between the Democrats and the Republicans. He said the US is a one-party state because they both serve business. But then he goes on to say the Democrats have moved right to the center but the Republicans have moved so far right that they are off the charts! Those are his very words: Off the charts!
The entire first video was a damnation of the Republican party. He talks of their very radical position on abortion and gun rights. In the second video, the Russian Today video, he again emphasizes that the Democrats have moved to the center, while the Republicans now represent the radical right.
His main complaint with the Democrats is that they now represent business and have abandoned the working class. I do not think that is the case with Biden and Chomksy just might today agree, But I do not know that he would. He also blamed the Democrats for chasing the Russian interference claim when there was no proof. I agree with him on that. They did interfere but not in a way it could be detected.
But nowhere in either video does he claim, as you said he did, that they are no difference in the two parties. You simply used to back up your claim when he did no such thing.
There is one hell of a lot of difference between the center and off the charts to the right.
I agree wholeheartedly.
I have seen a wide variety of columnists and pundits saying that the success of Trumpism is due to a failure of communication on the part of the Democrats. Sadly, not the case.
You have to get people to listen to you in order to communicate with them, and after that, you may have to get them to face up to harsh realities and make difficult choices. The GOP and their media overlords at Fox are not interested in harsh facts and difficult choices. They are selling a fantasy where a vaccine is just around the corner, those jobs from the tax cuts are almost here, you are better off not having healthcare because socialism is bad, and god wants you to have guns but not abortions. It is what their constituents want to hear, and it is resistant to reality.
This is an intransigent conundrum.
And no, I don’t have a solution. I have cousins-some of them as smart as me- who voted for Trump. (Being Canadian, all I can do is complain.) I hope Biden wins, and they can move the center back to the center (at least). But the amount of lying, obfuscation, and dirty dealing Fox and the GOP can do is impressive. Even sickness and death by the hundreds of thousands can’t cut through it.
Hickory wrote:
But I think a different explanation applies to a majority of the trump/republican voters.
It is not the character of the person, but the information diet on which they gorge themselves-
a mental diet of Rush Limbaugh, Tucker Carlson, Fox, Giuliani, Q Anon, Steve Brannon, and their church, etc
This kind of mental diet will corrupt the thinking of just about anyone.
Like a sedentary person who eats 4000 cal/day- they will get fat!
Exactly! No one could have said it better.
Now that America is great again, Biden can coast along on Trump’s coattails. ;D
A perspective from the other end of the world:
Ron, could it be argued tho that the popular vote which gave darn near exactly 50% each to red and blue demonstrates a deep yearning among many Americans for recognition of their pain, whatever that may be. From my perspective many of those who voted for Biden did so because they hated Trump and what he stood for – it was a philosophical or moral stance without an expectation of getting a better life from their vote. However those who voted for Trump did so out of desperation in the hope of getting some practical relief from their miserable circumstances.
These different motivations speak of the divide between the camps, and the new president would do well to reach out to the other party’s supporters in an effort to show empathy and practical assistance to this half of America’s citizenry. Failure to do this will as a minimum make for a difficult country to manage, and at worst may see dissolution of the union.
at worst may see dissolution of the union.
Sounds very much like Russian fear mongering.
Er no. Other end of the world! So I take it that your view is that the differences between red and blue states are not irreconcilable?
Yeah, the differences are being greatly exaggerated. For instance, Texas is the biggest & arguably most important Southern state, and 46% voted for Biden.
This question reminds me of Bin Laden thinking that Afghanistan had a significant role in the dissolution of the USSR, and that he could instigate a similar dissolution of the US. Both were unrealistic, the 2nd completely so.
“Sounds very much like Russian fear mongering.” ~ Nick G
Sounds very much like American ‘presstitute’ mantra.
Nah Caelen. Its just a gentle enquiry in a genuine effort to glean some sense out of the fog surrounding the USA elections from near 46 South 168 East.
I was referring to Nick’s passage itself.
Speaking of which, attached is an image found on Wikipedia, entry, ‘McCarthyism’.
Finally, some truly great news on the environment.
BIDEN VICTORY POSITIONS AMERICA FOR A 180-DEGREE TURN ON CLIMATE CHANGE
“Joe Biden, the winner of the presidency, will move to restore dozens of environmental safeguards President Trump abolished and launch the boldest climate change plan of any president in history. While some of Biden’s most sweeping programs will encounter stiff resistance from Senate Republicans and conservative attorneys general, the United States is poised to make a 180-degree turn on climate change and conservation policy.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2020/11/07/biden-climate-change-monuments/
Doug, apparently you haven’t gotten the word. There is no difference between Biden and Trump. They both feed from the same trough. 😉
Ron, got my fingers crossed now on Senate control, in worst case, we might have to live with “executive orders” which seem to go a long way in the U.S.
It is going to be a fight.
But both Repug Senators in Georgia are not the strongest, or ethically pure for sure.
I spent quite a bit of time in Atlanta working, and was pleasantly surprised by the City.
Lets hope those seats are winnable.
Here is a link to totals: 1.51bn for democrats, 1.57bn for republicans.
https://www.npr.org/2020/05/20/858347477/money-tracker-how-much-trump-and-biden-have-raised-in-the-2020-election
FollowTheMoney:
https://www.followthemoney.org/
Here are some of the largest donors to federal political campaigns.
https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/biggest-donors?cycle=2020&view=fc
When you download the csv file and add the numbers Democrats received 582mm and republicans 670mm
When you look at the who the donors are you see that they are primarily businesses or financial institutions. A manager like Baine may not operate a business directly but does so indirectly. Same for most of the other finance people on the list.
So yes, republicans and democrats are feeding from the same trough.
They may have different policy positions but given that one does not bite the hand that feeds you it stands to reason that neither party is pro-labor, at least not in a material manner. For example NAFTA was not exactly a labor friendly act.
Republicans have been really good at exploiting the 3G’s, God, Gays and Guns. Hotbutton issues that very cortisol heavy but on one level are essential to who we are as humans but on another level distraction / noise of those who have the real power.
Clearly on a superficial social level democrats are more labor/people friendly but then why have they allowed for capital to accumulate at an increasing rate:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estate_tax_in_the_United_States
the exclusion amount has increased from 675k in 2001 to 11.58mm in 2020 and the rate has decreased from 55% to 40%. Both parties had turns at the helm during this period.
Picketty’s point is that the growth of capital is much greater than that of the economy as a whole (and therefore much greater than that of labor) so labor gets en ever smaller and smaller part of the pie.
Currently 3 people in the US own as much as the bottom 50%.
https://inequality.org/facts/wealth-inequality/
Both republicans and democrats have either enabled this, or at a minimum allowed this, to happen.
In order to bring the ratio of wealth back to a more reasonable level (whatever that is) relatively severe redistribution has to happen. The AOC corner of the democratic party may seem extreme but if you look at the extreme wealth distribution those types of policies are required although currently politically impossible to get enacted. And it is unreasonable for the donors listed above to be voting against their self-interest.
Rgds
WeekendPeak
WP, question: Did you vote? If so, for whom and why? If not, Why?
I can’t vote ( not an American) although I live here. Politically active though with real $$. If I could vote I would have voted democratic down the ticket – I think that a more humane approach gives us a higher chance of buying us time to not go over the edge.
But that doesn’t change the fact that the biggest issue we have is that both parties are beholden to those who give them money, which – by and large – is the Capital, not Labor. And that can’t be helped because capital has, well, the capital where labor just works and doesn’t get the chance to materially accumulate wealth.
https://connectrandomdots.blogspot.com/2020/11/winner-takes-all-or-why-playing-field.html
Rgds
WeekendPeak
WP, your idea that Biden is beholden to his contributors is just nonsense. They gave because his philosophy is the same as theirs. Ditto for Trump’s contributors. People and organizations gave because they thought a Biden presidency would benefit their of what America should be.
Trump supporters gave because they wanted God and Guns in the public square and they wanted Gays out. They wanted Blacks to stay out of their communities and stop trying to be their equal.
Biden supporters gave because they wanted freedom of the press and medical care for the elderly. They wanted people with pre-conditions to be able to get insurance despite their condition. Orginazions that gave to Biden gave because of what they wanted the government to look like, fair and freedom for all.
Here is a list of Biden supporters.
Top Contributors, federal election data for Joe Biden, 2020 cycle
This table lists the top donors to this candidate in the 2020 cycle. The money came from the organizations’ PACs; their individual members, employees or owners; and those individuals’ immediate families. At the federal level, the organizations themselves did not donate, as they are prohibited by law from doing so. Organization totals include subsidiaries and affiliates.
Contributor Total
Bloomberg LP $57,528,010
Future Forward USA Action $29,028,902
Priorities Usa $25,690,904
Sixteen Thirty Fund $24,624,073
Asana $21,932,480
Democracy PAC $19,000,000
Senate Majority PAC $12,872,124
American Bridge 21st Century $10,260,571
Paloma Partners $9,016,253
Euclidean Capital $7,006,800
Defending Democracy Together $6,776,862
Alphabet Inc $6,394,072
University of California $6,387,099
Simon Property Group $6,121,320
League of Conservation Voters $5,361,074
Y Combinator $5,359,141
FTX.US $5,220,000
Laborers Union $5,108,362
Future Majority $5,000,750
Renaissance Technologies $4,670,420
To Ron – (I can’t seem to edit my comments)
Let’s do a theoretical of how it works in the real world. Btw, everything is totally legal and there are lots of attorneys involved to make sure no lines are crossed.
Let’s assume somebody works as a portfolio manager for a large investment firm that is running 15bn and the owner of the firm has made a 50mm donation to his favorite candidate.
Assume a 10% return on the 15bn portfolio there is 1.5bn in annual P&L.
The portfolio manager is looking to add to a position in a XYZ company, but he has a question that he has run up the flagpole but to no avail. He has called investors relations at XYZ, their accounting department, prime brokerage people but can’t get to the person who may be able to answer the question. Voicemails go into a black hole, emails are ignored. It is important because he is looking to scale the position to 5% (750mm) so he really needs an answer to his question.
The boss (the owner of the company who wrote the 50mm check ) has his right hand man call – for example – the president’s chief of staff – and mentions that would like to see if he can do an introduction at XYZ company.
The next day at 2.30 he has a face to face meeting with the CFO of XYZ company and his accounting people and the questions are answered. [Expensive] lawyers are present in all phases, no “blue horesehoe loves anacot steel”. But he gets a question answered that competitors didn’t even get to ask. The question and answer by themselves are not particularly important but they can fill in a part of a puzzle that actually is very important to the investment thesis (mosaic theory).
Repeat this lots of times and this is what you end up with an edge over competitors that only grows over time. The next time the PM has a question there is no need to call the boss. He can simply pick up the phone and get the question answered.
It was unnecessary to remind anybody of the 50mm contribution (through a fund raiser, so an additional 25mm was raised at the event) but favors were created) and, in my example, called in.
At the end of the day the trade makes 250mm (30%), all completely legal.
The key to the story is that money gets you access. And that makes the playing field uneven. It may very well be that the contributions are because the donor feels the same way has the president (candidate) but the end result is that wealth concentration increases and increases. The share of the holders of capital increases and that of labor decreases.
To think that – to take the first on the list (Bloomberg) makes at 57mm donation and that no preferential treatment follows – not realistic. That is just not how humans are wired. There may be (and very will is no) intention of anything resembling a bribe or pay-to-play but it is essentially inevitable no matter how clean the intentions are.
Let’s assume that private / individual donations are outlawed and that the government simply gives each party 7bn to run their elections. Do you think that the hypothetical portfolio manager would get an answer to his question?
There is a reason why election finance regulations get looser and looser. Both parties benefit. The donor gets access, the recipient gets funds to run his campaign and also access to people who can help people in the recipients orbit – who doesn’t want to do a favor for the presidential candidate?
Money completely corrupts the system in a subtle and insidious way and no longer really functions for We, the People.
Rgds
WeekendPeak.
p.s. I really appreciate your blog.
To add to that – the higher the price to play is (“donations”) the less competition there is. Many people can write a $50 check, very few a $50mm. Guess who gets access? More expensive elections actually benefit top donors because there is less competition for access and relative importance (of the donor) increases.
The US system is completely screwed up.
Rgds
WeekendPeak
I just realized I did not address your point – why Biden would be beholden to his donors:
When somebody writes you a 50mm check without any apparent consideration you owe him. And both parties know it.
Rgds
WeekendPeak
I have said it before and I will say it again. You cynics just burn my ass. You think everyone is motivated purely by selfish reasons. No, fuck no. People donate to St. Jude Children’s Hospital because they want to help kids cure their cancer. Everyone is not a selfish asshole like you seem to believe. Bloomberg donated to Biden and other Democrats because he believed in what they are trying to do. Bloomberg has more money than he can ever possibly spend. So he spends some of it to try to help make his country a better place. He has the same political philosophy as Biden and other Democrats.
Millions of people donated to Biden because they wanted to get that idiot out of the White House. Millions donated to Trump because they wanted to make America white again. They hate people with a different philosophy. They hate gays but love God and guns. People donated to Trump because he has the same philosophy as they do. Or he pretends to have the same philosophy.
But you cynics will never, never understand that. People want a government that reflects their world view so they donate to the extent that they can afford it.
I will have no more to say on this subject.
From the dictionary:
cynic
[ˈsinik]
NOUN
a person who believes that people are motivated purely by self-interest rather than acting for honorable or unselfish reasons.
Weekend Peak Well put. The inequality of wealth distribution is destroying so much of the good in our global civilization and helping to rip it apart this nation and neither Party is focused on fixing it. Therefore neither Pig got my vote this round even though I voted for Andrew Yang in the primaries.
Having said that; The wealth inequality is just the consequence of our fiat debt based monetary system,that puts into motion the cantillon effect. Also in this perverted monetary system, capital can soon accumulate loads more capital and the holders can live high on the hog by dipping just a little bit into that pool. Meanwhile income earned from labor and small enterprises has been run over and dragged through the streets. And neither party is doing squat. Trump blames it on the Chinese and Mexicans the Democrats blame the rich but no one will even mention the corrupt monetary system. Yang’s suggestion was to compromise with the system and just demand that a small share of the money goes straight into the pockets of every citizen equally.
In the meantime it is so sad to observe the tragic consequences of the cantillon effect in the lives of people. Some of us continue to fight against all odds others have given and just survive from week to week while others have been able to maneuver into a spot closer to the spigot but even many of them have to sell their soul to the devil.
The best solution to this predicament I believe is Bitcoin. The hardest money out there, that can not be controlled by individuals or governments. So I’m voting for Bitcoin every day. It’s the vote that really counts. The announcement from Micro Strategy that they have converted 700 million $ of their treasury to Bitcoin is just the latest in Bitcoin gaining traction and setting limits to corrupt Government fiat.
On a side note, I’ve been thinking lately. What are the reasons that the Republicans currently rule in the country side and the Democrats in the cities?
On a side note, I’ve been thinking lately. What are the reasons that the Republicans currently rule in the country side and the Democrats in the cities?
A damn good question. However, there are far more than one reason. Google it and you will get them all. Google this: “Why Are Cities More Liberal Than Rural Areas?”. I did and there are far more reasons than I can list here.
However, I have a question that is at least as important. Why do Democratic college professors and faculty members outnumber Republican college professors and faculty members by more than ten to one? Actually, that is a rhetorical question, the answer should be obvious to everyone. They are just a lot smarter than the Republican red-neck riffraff. 😉
How Politically Biased Are Colleges? New Study Finds It’s Far Worse Than Anybody Thought.
An extensive study of 8,688 tenure-track professors at 51 of the 66 top-ranked liberal arts colleges in the U.S. published by the National Association of Scholars found that the ratio of faculty members registered as Democrats compared to those registered Republican is now a stunning 10.4 to 1. If two military colleges that are technically described as “liberal arts colleges” are removed from the calculations, the ratio is 12.7 to 1.
The researcher, Mitchell Langbert, Associate Professor of Business at Brooklyn College, found that nearly 40% of the colleges in the study had zero faculty members who were registered Republican. Not a single one. Nearly 80% of the 51 colleges had so few Republican faculty members that they were statistically insignificant.
An education system that preys on young students, subjecting many of them to debt slavery to the tune of several hundred thousand right out of the gate. Many who are educated in a field that has no way to pay it back in a decade.
An education system that denies peak oil and the tragic consequences to our global civilization unless we mount a massive effort.
An education system denies the nutritional value of grass-fed animal products and instead promotes wheaties and canola oil. Trains doctors to treat chronic illness with drugs on top of drugs. To the point that the healthcare industry is on track to destroy the economy all by itself.
An educational system that is churning out the most delusional economists our nation has ever had. So it’s hardly a surprise that few conservative leaning individuals thrive in such an environment.
But that’s what we can expect in a fourth turning. Wintertime is upon us and death is arriving for most institutions along with social and religious structures in their current forms. As the phoenix they will rise again but organized in ways very different from the current versions. The unraveling is upon us and I hope to experience the Spring.
An education system that preys on young students, subjecting many of them to debt slavery to the tune of several hundred thousand right out of the gate.
Bullshit! Our educational system does not do that. It is the government who is so goddamn afraid of “socialism” that does this. We could have an educational system that is like most of Europe where education is free to everyone. That is if it weren’t for those goddamn Republicans who shout “socialism” every time someone mentions free education.
An education system that denies peak oil…
Oh, more bullshit. Our educational system does not deny peak oil. You just made that shit up. You lose all credibility when you just make up pure bullshit.
An education system denies the nutritional value of grass-fed animal products and instead promotes wheaties and canola oil.
Goddammit, how on earth do you come up with such pure bullshit. You are so full of bullshit that it is pathetic.
An educational system that is churning out the most delusional economists our nation has ever had.
Errr… exactly what delusional economics are they churning out. You just make up sheer nonsense and think you can slide it bye because you think everyone else is an ignoramus. You just make up stupid nonsense. And that last paragraph of yours is just too stupid to quote. You spout stupid nonsense and think it is the product of intellectual genius. At least you are good for a good laugh, but nothing else.
We could have an educational system that is like most of Europe where education is free to everyone. That is if it weren’t for those goddamn Republicans who shout “socialism” every time someone mentions free education.
Actually, it’s much worse than that: the wealthy (or, at least, a large fraction of billionaires) are defunding education because they see it as a threat to their power and money.
You see, reality has a liberal bias, and the more education you have, the more you tend to see that. For example, my father wanted me to take some economics courses in school but he was stunned when I came home spouting socialist ideas like the idea that monopolies tend to charge higher prices than markets with many suppliers…
Ron I’m a fanatical Socialist myself, especially at the family level. I also acknowledge that the net benefits of socialism diminish the larger the network becomes. K-12 is all socialized and much of community college. Isn’t that about enough? Why not just go full on communist?
Whether the student pays or whether society at large pays, does not change the fact that the education system overcharges so much for their services that given some time it will destroy even the US economy. The economy that is sucking the life blood
out of the rest of the world thanks to its ability to print the world’s reserve currency.
Nick Governments with Libertarian policies encourage markets to multiply while governments with socialist and communist policies encourage monopolies.
Farmlad, all that is well and good. But nothing you said in your post even addresses the fact that, among college professors and college faculty members, Democrats outnumber Republicans by over 10 to 1.
You had no explanation for that fact so you did a scattershot against the educational system in general, Other than the fact that your scattershot contained nothing but bullshit, that is a poor debating technique.
Farmlad,
I was being a bit ironic in my use of “socialism”. Free markets are, of course, a classic liberal idea. Corporate monopolies, on the other hand, are a favourite of conservatives, who are always in favor of things that give the wealthy more power.
This is the difference in one chart
“On a side note, I’ve been thinking lately. What are the reasons that the Republicans currently rule in the country side and the Democrats in the cities?”
More reasons-
There is no Fox news in the cities.
People in rural areas have a much greater tolerance for bullies, and being lied to.
People in the cities hear much more varied viewpoints, and are thus mentally enriched.
People in the cities have much better things to do than listen to Rush Limbaugh.
What’s been written here so far in response to that question is kind of a lazy analysis. In reality, the current rural/urban divide is rooted in a significant and profound political shift in the 2008-2010 time frame. Before then, Democrats could still win with broad enough support in majority white rural areas outside of the Deep South, but afterward, Republicans began easily racking up 60+% of the vote in most of these areas. I personally live in a predominantly rural area of the Midwest where, as recently as 15-20 years ago, Democrats routinely won state races, but now they’re stuck getting about 35% of the vote, maybe 40% if they’re lucky. As I see things, the following happened to cause the shift:
1. Cities bounced back faster economically from the 2008 recession.
2. Obama’s stimulus and Obamacare were both successfully portrayed by Republicans as being giveaway programs to (mostly) minorities in big cities.
3. The New Deal coalition that still had personal memories of the Great Depression died out or became too small to make a difference in elections.
4. Following the 1980s Midwestern farm crisis that Republicans took the brunt of blame for, rural Democrats were getting a fair number of socially conservative (but not evangelical) voters who preferred Democratic economic policy. However, once Democrats fully endorsed gay marriage in the early 2010s, these voters could no longer overlook the Democrats’ social platform and stopped voting for them.
I’ll add to what you said Geoff.
Many rural voters have swallowed the false story told by the NRA that the democratic party wants to ‘take away your guns’.
The reality is that the democrats do want to take away military assault rifles and other tools of warfare. They don’t want people to have the ability to inflict mass civilian causalities, or to out-gun police officers.
Like so many issues, it is not an all or none answer.
This chart shows the global source of greenhouse gases.
There is no single target for reduction, other than ‘human activities’ in general.
Its going to take a long time to roll emissions back.
The two biggest mechanisms to roll back emissions will be
-depletion of oil
-widespread deployment of solar
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/a-global-breakdown-of-greenhouse-gas-emissions-by-sector/
HICKORY —
Unfortunately, climate scientists seem to agree, the scale of actions for development of energy based on renewable sources, development of electromobility and recycling is far too small in relation to what is needed. In other words, too little, too late. At least now, the world won’t have to fight against Trump insanity as well.
Unfortunately, climate scientists seem to agree
renewable sources, development of electromobility and recycling is far too small
I’d say that’s not accurate. You can certainly find some climate scientists who are feeling pessimistic about our rate of progress; it’s true that there are other important sources of climate change besides FF; and it’s likely that some carbon sequestration will be needed once we stop stuffing carbon into the air; but the idea that eliminating fossil fuels is “far too small” is highly misleading, and I don’t think you’ll find many climate scientists who would frame the problem in that way.
Eliminating FF emissions is big. It’s important. It’s an essential first step to dealing with climate change.
Dismissing renewables and EVs is a climate denier talking point. If we want change we need to encourage it.
Hi Nick, I did not mean to be dismissive about the attempts to reduce emissions, such as solar or EV or retrofitting building for energy efficiency, eating less meat, for example.
The chart I linked is good visual presentation of the fact that there is no particular sector of economic activity in the world that serves an easy target. Rather it is the sum total of activities ranging from cement manufacturing to cargo shipping to fertilizer production…
For example road transport across the world accounts for [only] 11.9% of total GHG emission.
Even by 2040, the degree of emission cut in transport is not going to make a big dent in the warming trend we are experiencing.
I am moving north.
Well, I was more replying to Doug’s framing of things than yours.
Anyway, overall fossil fuel burning is 73% of the problem. The nice things about that: there is a single strategy that will work pretty well across all these industries: a carbon tax combined with efficiency standards. The tax is the really simple part, but pretty much all of these industries have developed efficiency standards.
Doug is just BSing and disagreeing for the sake of disagreeing, as usual.
It’s part of a general strategy to encourage hopelessness. It’s a way to make people accept the status quo, while still pretending to “care”.
Alimbiquated , interesting observation .
Hi all,
A scenario for future energy use below, see
http://peakoilbarrel.com/hurricanes-impact-us-august-oil-production/#comment-710921
for somewhat of an explanation and also
http://peakoilbarrel.com/hurricanes-impact-us-august-oil-production/#comment-710920
and
http://peakoilbarrel.com/hurricanes-impact-us-august-oil-production/#comment-710892
Dennis,
From this projection, and assuming the fossil fuel supply represents the actual consumption out to 2060, can you give a rough estimate of the percentage of fossil fuel GHG emissions still to come [relative to the the GHG emissions prior to 2020]?
Thank you.
McDonald’s may be getting serious with fake ground beef. Fake chicken nuggets too.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/09/mcdonalds-to-test-mcplant-which-includes-its-own-meat-free-burger-next-year-beyond-meat-shares-fall.html
Americans eat more than five million head of cattle a year at McDonald’s alone.
The question is whether the same thing could happen to the beef industry that is happening to the coal industry. Cattle eat protein rich feed to build animal protein, but are only about 3% efficient. 97% of the protein gets wasted. A technology that converts feed grain directly into fake meat could easily do twenty times as well.
Yes.
This chart indicates the relative protein production/acre of various sources, with the information derived from USDA published data on average USA production data. Other sources such as turkey and goat for meat would fall between the chicken and pig protein output/acre.
This gives a rough indication of the huge gains possible by switching towards plant-based protein sources for the diet of USA. The potential gain can be applied to energy consumption, land use, environmental footprint of agriculture, and health costs .
The current products now on the market [ex Beyond Meat] have pea protein as the primary source of protein. This sector of the food science industry (conversion of plant protein into end use food products) is in early innings. The progress achieved in the early innings is impressive.
Do you happen to have a link handy?
Bloody clouds!
BETWEEN A CLOUD AND A HOT PLACE
“Low climate sensitivity has been ruled out, but the door remains open for alarmingly high estimates. Improved understanding of cloud feedbacks is vital for better constraining the upper limit of future warming. A new report in Nature Geoscience suggests that a worryingly high sensitivity is plausible due to the nonlinear response of clouds. Better understanding of how clouds may evolve with warming is therefore crucial for determining the extent of future temperature change. It has become clear that a climate sensitivity below 2 °C is extremely unlikely based on observations of how much warming has already occurred since pre-industrial times. This is further supported by our current understanding of individual feedback mechanisms, such as changes in atmospheric water vapor and surface albedo, which act to amplify warming. High-end estimates of climate sensitivity are less well constrained. Though ECS (equilibrium climate sensitivity) is likely to be below 4.1 °C, substantially higher values are still plausible. Many of the latest global climate models exhibit high climate sensitivities, with 10 out of 27 models having an ECS over 4.5 °C.
Tightening the constraints on climate sensitivity is crucial for designing and implementing effective mitigation and adaptation strategies. To narrow the range, we must quantify the extent to which nonlinear cloud feedbacks could amplify the global temperature response to carbon dioxide. Long-awaited progress in reducing ECS uncertainty is now being made, but there is still work to be done while the magnitude of future warming remains hidden by the clouds.”
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-020-00658-0
Joe Biden’s plans to tackle climate change bring much needed good news to environmentalists:
HOW THE PRESIDENT-ELECT PLANS TO TACKLE CLIMATE CHANGE
“More radical Democrats such as congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez have put forward a proposal called the Green New Deal, which would eliminate carbon emissions from most sources over a decade. The Biden climate plan is more moderate [more realistic]. If enacted, it would still be the most progressive climate strategy the US has ever attempted. There will be a big push on electric vehicles, a big push on efficient buildings, both residential and offices, a big push on creating a new kind of civilian conservation corps and doing a lot of nature-based solutions on climate change…
Joe Biden also knows better than many how navigate the upper house; he was elected to the senate six times before serving as vice-president under Barack Obama. If the president-elect can structure his plans so that they create jobs and new infrastructure, while also tackling carbon emissions, he may be able to find a way forward that works for both sides of the aisle.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-54858638
Meanwhile: Vice President-Elect Kamala Devi Harris joyfully emerged on the presidential stage Saturday night.
“God forbid a Black woman walk through the world filled with joy. Saturday’s historic moment was vindication, not that we needed it, as well as an affirmation that we will move through the world on our own terms. There was recognition—and great hope—that our daughters will have a smoother path, and that, as Harris notes, “while I may be the first woman in this office, I will not be the last because every little girl watching tonight sees that this is a country of possibilities.”
https://mail.yahoo.com/d/folders/1/messages/ACcBl6I8a8MWX6mdmAs3GHqfY00
The childhood home of Vice President elect Kamala Harris, as seen on Sunday in Berkeley, CA
She and her mother lived upstairs, above the Montessori School on the first floor.
Finally,
The Arctic Refuge is facing a serious threat. Drilling proponents are attempting to push through legislation that would turn this incredible, wild landscape and vital bird habitat into an oil field and may even use backdoor budget tactics to force it through Congress. Having run seismic surveys in the arctic I was fortunate to be able to visit the Refuge, on occasion, and see for myself this majestic region. I also know that seismic surveys, all by themselves, would/will seriously damage this rarely seen reserve. I pray [not literally] Biden and the newly elected Democrats will be able to stop the needless degradation/exploitation of the priceless Arctic Refuge. Fingers crossed!
Whether or not Biden is president next year there will be NO socialism of any kind in the United States! The senate with McConnell in charge will see to it, otherwise the Courts will. Patriots and conservatives are going to be so fired up to vote in 2022 that you dem’s heads are going to spin when you see how big the R majorities are and how many democrat governors get voted out.
Zooks, my condolences on your loss. You must be crying in your beer every night since the election. Your loss must seem unbearable. But you did lose. That is undeniable. The American people have spoken. End of story.
What happens in the next two years remains to be seen. Social security is a socialist program. It is the most popular program in the history of the Republic. Almost every American just loves it, including me.
But you seem to be fired up. You are against any more such socialist programs like Socal Security. Well, good luck with that one. But the Accordical Care Act seems to be very popular with the American public. So you are wrong on that one. So what gives you such confidence that you are correct on where the public sentiment will lie in the next two years?
Zooks, we know what you are against. But what are you for? What do you want for American health care? What do you want for the middle class of America? What do you want for racial justice? What do you want for our relation with out NATO allies? What do you want for Russia and Putin in our relationship with the Communist nation of Russia? After all, Russia is the most socialist nation in the world in which Trump has warmly embraced.
Just where do you stand on these issues? Have you given any deep thought to these issues?
Zooks-“there will be NO socialism of any kind in the United States! ”
So, you say McConnell is going to end Social Security and Medicare?
And he will end public schools?
No more agriculture subsidies?
No more child labor laws?
No more support to Veterans?
Wow, I hadn’t heard the news.
There is going to be a hell of lot of pissed off Americans.
Only The politically illiterate would perceive the Dims as left of centre.
L.P.D.: Libertarian Police Department
https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/l-p-d-libertarian-police-department
For anyone interested in geoscience news. More details are available in the applicable Earth and Planetary Science Letters journal article.
SCIENTISTS HAVE DISCOVERED AN ANCIENT LAKEBED DEEP BENEATH THE GREENLAND ICE
“Scientists have detected what they say are the sediments of a huge ancient lake bed sealed more than a mile under the ice of northwest Greenland—the first-ever discovery of such a sub-glacial feature anywhere in the world. Apparently formed at a time when the area was ice-free but now completely frozen in, the lake bed may be hundreds of thousands or millions of years old, and contain unique fossil and chemical traces of past climates and life. Scientists consider such data vital to understanding what the Greenland ice sheet may do in coming years as climate warms, and thus the site makes a tantalizing target for drilling. A paper describing the discovery is in press at the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters…
The researchers assembled a detailed picture of the lake basin and its surroundings by analyzing radar, gravity and magnetic data gathered by NASA. Ice-penetrating radar provided a basic topographic map of the earth’ s surface underlying the ice. This revealed the outlines of the smooth, low-lying basin, nestled among higher-elevation rocks. Gravity measurements showed that the material in the basin is less dense than the surrounding hard, metamorphic rocks—evidence that it is composed of sediments washed in from the sides. Measurements of magnetism (sediments are less magnetic than solid rock) helped the team map the depths of the sediments.”
https://phys.org/news/2020-11-scientists-ancient-lake-bed-deep.html
https://reader.elsevier.com/reader/sd/pii/S0012821X20305914?token=D15913AEE8BEE4804E616A70A2E3E8DE1F7B62CFDE2DBC627F172C00073CA426792D55FE2C15436552B4D7E0A396977B
Doug said “For anyone interested in geoscience news.”
Geophysics is ripe for analysis for people that want to simplify the science:
https://geoenergymath.com/2020/11/10/complexity-vs-simplicity-in-geophysics/
very cool. the biotic component will be most interesting to see
This is surprising, to me anyway. In spite of reduced activity arising from virus lockdowns, CO2 level seems to be increasing unabated. If so, not good!
Daily CO2 Nov. 10, 2020: 413.16 ppm, Nov. 10, 2019: 410.12 ppm
https://www.co2.earth/
Methane converting to CO2?