A Guest Post by Islandboy
The EIA released the latest edition of their Electric Power Monthly on July 24th, with data for May 2019. The table above shows the percentage contribution of the main fuel sources to two decimal places for the last two months and the year 2019 to date. In April, the EIA in their Short-Term Energy Outlook projected that the contribution from All Renewables would exceed that from Coal for the first time ever in April and possibly in May. While that turned out to be the case in April, in May electricity generation from coal was slightly greater than the amount generated by All Renewables and the EIA expects Coal to generate more than All Renewables each month through to April 2019.
The Table immediately above shows the absolute amounts of electricity generated in gigawatt-hours by the main sources for the last two months and the year to date. In May, the absolute amount of electricity generated increased, as is usual for the month of May when compared to April for the period covered by the charts, January 2013 to date. Coal and Natural Gas between them, fueled 57.13% of US electricity generation in May. The contribution of zero carbon or carbon neutral sources declined from 43.73% in Aprl to 41.85% in May.
The 10.874 GWh generated by Solar in May, is a record, slightly exceeding the previous record of 10.869 GWh set in June 2018. It can be expected that this record will again be exceeded in June 2019.
The graph below shows the absolute monthly production from the various sources as well as the total amount generated (right axis).
The chart below shows the total monthly generation at utility scale facilities by year versus the contribution from solar. The left hand scale is for the total generation, while the right hand scale is for solar output and has been deliberately set to exaggerate the solar output as a means of assessing it’s potential to make a meaningful contribution to the midsummer peak. In May 2019 the estimated total output from solar at 10,874 GWh, was 2.79 times what it was four years ago in May 2015.
The chart below shows the total monthly generation at utility scale facilities by year versus the combined contribution from wind and solar. The left hand scale is for the total generation, while the right hand scale is for combined wind and solar output and has been deliberately set to exaggerate the combined output of solar and wind as a means of assessing the potential of the combination to make a meaningful contribution to the year round total.
The chart below shows the percentage contributions of the various sources to the capacity additions up to May 2019. In May Natural Gas contributed 85.12% of new capacity, with 2.74% of new capacity coming from Solar and Wind contributing 11.64%. Batteries contributed 0.25% with Conventional Hydroelectric contributing 0.17% and Landfill Gas the remaining 0.07% of new capacity. Natural Gas, Solar and Wind made up 99.5% of new capacity in May. Natural gas and renewables have made up more than 95% of capacity added each month since at least January 2017.
In May 2019 the total added capacity reported was 1974.2 MW, compared to the 3329.7 MW added in May 2018.
The chart below shows the monthly capacity retirements up to May 2019. In April among the retirements reported were 750 MW of Coal fired capacity at the Conesville plant in Ohio, owned by AEP Generation Resources Inc, consisting of two steam turbines. Entergy’s Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station in Massachusetts retired 677.2 MW of capacity. Of the remaining retired capacity 21.9 MW consisted of five hydroelectric units retired by the Portland General Electric Co. in Oregon The only other capacity retired was a 15 MW Wood/Wood Waste Biomass fueled plant owned by Northern States Power Co. in Minnesota and a pair of 10 MW natural gas fueled combustion the Southern Indiana Gas & Elec Co. in Indiana.
Below is a chart for monthly net additions/retirements showing the data up to May 2019, followed by a chart showing the net additions/retirements year to date.
Below is a table of the top ten states in order of coal consumption for electricity production for May 2019 and the year before for comparison
For the worse than expected (alarmist) file:
“This week alone, Greenland will lose about 50 billion tons of ice, enough for a permanent rise in global sea levels by about 0.1mm. So far in July, the Greenland ice sheet has lost 160 billion tons of ice — enough to cover Florida in about six feet of water. According to IPCC estimates, that’s roughly the level of melt a typical summer will have in 2050 under the worst-case warming scenario if we don’t take meaningful action to address climate change. Under that same scenario, this week’s brutal, deadly heat wave would be normal weather in the 2070s.
Xavier Fettweis, a polar scientist at the University of Liège in Belgium who tracks meltwater on the Greenland ice sheet, told Rolling Stone in an email that the recent acceleration of these melt events means the IPCC scenarios “CLEARLY UNDERESTIMATE WHAT WE CURRENTLY OBSERVE OVER THE GREENLAND ICE SHEET” AND SHOULD REVISIT THEIR PROJECTIONS FOR THE FUTURE”.”
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/greenland-ice-sheet-melt-865803/
You guys working yourselves up to an ulcer or stroke need to work on your sense of humor.
https://www.newyorker.com/cartoons/daily-cartoon/monday-december-11th-trump-administration
I HOPE all the more literal minded members will at least consider the possibility that I’m engaging in a little sarcasm.
Yeah I agree Mac, over 15,000 square miles of Siberia are currently on fire. That should be good for a good old belly laugh? Did you hear the one about elephants going extinct? It’s a real hoot!
If you love mosquitos, you ought to really love wildfires up that way. With the blackened landscape being more or less saturated, and probably at least half covered by puddles, it ought to be boom times for mosquito lovers.
Maybe Fred or somebody can figure out a way to use them to feed chickens or maybe ducks, since ducks like puddles better, and get rich.
This would be a great way to expand and diversify his Miami snow removal business.
In the meantime, I will research the possibility of growing fast maturing cool climate rice.
Then go ahead and laugh at this!
https://www.iflscience.com/environment/the-terrifying-reason-this-5yearold-weather-report-is-going-viral/
It’s not often that a weather report goes viral. It’s even less often that a weather report from five years ago goes viral. Weather reports are generally not known for their longevity.
However, one weather report from TF1 in France has been doing the rounds over the last few days, and you aren’t going to like the reasons why. In 2014, weather reporter Évelyne Dhéliat teamed up with the World Meteorological Organization to create a fictional weather report imagining what the weather would be like in 2050. At the time their predictions were deemed far-fetched.
Then, in June, the below happened.
.
I’m on the floor laughing. Yeah, heat waves are a hoot. I’ve got another one for you, methane spikes at Barrow Alaska or even better, the one about disappearing coral reefs. You’ll simply die when you hear it.
Another whopper; Vaquita porpoise almost extinct (only 10 of the left) so, your last chance for Vaquita sushi.
We shouldn’t use old offensive place names from colonial times. The citizens of Barrow, Alaska voted in 2016 to change their city’s name back to the original Utqiagvik (UUT-kee-AH-vik). That is now the correct name of the city.
Interesting, tks. Utqiagvik (Barrow) is among the oldest permanent settlements in the US, hundreds of years before the European Arctic explorers showed up. — Wiki.
I bought a “real” parka (caribou hide) from a native woman there many moons ago. She wanted 50 dollars, so I gave her 200. Thought that was a bargain until I figured out the thing was only comfortable in the minus 50s. So, wound up giving it to a sea captain who had to go on deck in winter occasionally. He thought it was the cat’s meow.
Thank you CameronB.
Anyone know the correct name for the williamette valley?
“This week alone, Greenland will lose about 50 billion tons of ice, enough for a permanent rise in global sea levels by about 0.1mm. So far in July, the Greenland ice sheet has lost 160 billion tons of ice — enough to cover Florida in about six feet of water. According to IPCC estimates, that’s roughly the level of melt a typical summer will have in 2050 under the worst-case warming scenario if we don’t take meaningful action to address climate change. Under that same scenario, this week’s brutal, deadly heat wave would be normal weather in the 2070s.
See my reply to OFM above about fictitious viral French weather report for 2050.
Hee Haw!
.
Yeah, time to send Greta a tweet: “Get a life kid, let your elders deal with the REAL world. You just don’t understand.”
So fellow mammals, are you ready to exit this scene?
I think it is kind of a moot point. Whether any of us have made personal peace with our pending exits or not, we all know that sooner or later we will be exiting. Though it does seem a tad unfair to those who are just starting their lives.
And who knows, maybe the future will be wonderful and we are all just a bunch of curmudgeonly old worry warts.
In any case either take it or leave it or just go with the flow. Here’s one way to deal with it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ke1PCgiM3V4&vl=en
Because it’s not a drill: talk by Jem Bendell at European Commission
Peace!
Greenland measured 60% surface melt on July 31, up from 57 ish from the day before.
http://nsidc.org/greenland-today/
The three day 2M max temp forecast is looking very warm all over, so likely worse and more of it.
https://climatereanalyzer.org/wx_frames/gfs/ds/gfs_arc-lea_t2max_3-day.png
As per Paul Beckwith as of 25 min ago
https://youtu.be/34A-bsXDYII
I suspect increased polar warming due to sea ice loss is really gonna kick Greenland ice melt into high gear.
This link has some good forecasts and regions. My eyes are on Greenland for a few days!
https://www.tropicaltidbits.com/analysis/models/?model=gfs®ion=namer&pkg=T2m&runtime=2019080112&fh=-72
This link is an interesting jetstream forecast. It’s only a matter of time until we eventually get a blocking pattern set up over Greenland for a few weeks.
https://www.netweather.tv/charts-and-data/jetstream
Eight of the top ten coal burning states are down, with West Virginia essentially flat, and only Georgia showing a big increase. Gas plus wind plus some solar power accounts for this good news, in the eight.
Does anybody know why Georgia is up so sharply? And why Illinois fell off so dramatically?
Duhh, natural gas is a bigger warmer than coal and it’s increased use suppressed renewable growth. Also, down is not gone.
Maybe you need to think about what minimum carbon burn would be needed to keep the temperature rising on the only planet we have. Or maybe talk to Fred about the pH of the ocean.
Now good news would look something like this for 2029.
Congress has just banned the burning of fossil fuels. After a long and hard ten year maximum effort, the US is now carbon free. The carbon drawdown program is now accelerating and there has been a huge increase in protected natural areas. The efforts of the US are spreading around the world with China and others now down below half of what they burned in 2018.
Could we do it? Sure.
Will it happen? No.
But, but….
THE LARGEST SINGLE-RESOURCE DEVELOPMENT IN AUSTRALIA’S HISTORY
“The Gorgon Project is one of the world’s largest natural gas projects. With total daily production averaging 2.6 billion cubic feet of natural gas and 18,000 barrels of condensate in 2018, the Gorgon Project will continue to be an important pillar of the Australian economy for decades to come. Unlocking this energy puts Australia in a prime position to meet future demand and provide a clean-burning fuel, both at home and overseas.”
And,
“Alaska LNG will use clean, energy-efficient, and safe production methods to deliver a stable supply of natural gas for commercialization and for in-state distribution. North Slope fields are expected to deliver on average about 3.5 billion cubic feet of gas per day, much of it for an international market.”
It’s so wonderful it almost isn’t even a fossil fuel (or so they say).
https://alaska-lng.com/
I’m all for pedal to the metal renewable energy policies, but I don’t think we could go carbon free in ten years even if we were to go on a wartime economic footing, and STAY on it, for that very purpose, rationing and all.
(There must be a specific reason why a given state changes either up or down so fast as Illinois did. That much NEW wind and solar power ? Plus maybe new pipelines bringing in enough new gas to cut back that far on coal in one year? )
The jobs just too big, there would be too much new investment needed to get it all built imo in that time frame. Not enough capacity to manufacture the necessary stuff, not enough skilled manpower to build the stuff needed to build the new stuff, not enough skilled manpower to deploy it.
But I think we could get more than halfway there in ten years, WITHOUT an actual rebellion and people hanging environmentalists from lamp posts.
I’m sure it can be done, given more time, but I’m not willing to bet on it happening in less than two or three decades, even if we get the necessary wake up bricks upside our collective head in the form of super storms, super droughts, killer heat waves, and such.
Agree entirely.
1/2 way there in ten years will take a Herculean effort.
We’re talking not just electricity, but the whole of energy consumption.
LOL —
EIA PROJECTS 48% INCREASE IN WORLD ENERGY CONSUMPTION BY 2040
And, mostly from oil and gas of course!
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=26212#
You guys are probably both right! Which pretty much means our fate is already sealed. We’re going away folks, pack your bags! It is looking more and more like we are on track for 5°C of warming in that time frame. That is just about guaranteed extinction for all life forms on the planet.
http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2019/07/arctic-sea-ice-gone-by-september-2019.html
Arctic Sea Ice Gone By September 2019?
If anyone can tell me why that won’t happen, I’ll be glad to listen!
Cheers!
“But I think we could get more than halfway there in ten years…” — OFM
Well, lets look at natural gas (methane).
“New surge in gas production in 2018 (+5.2%, which is twice historical trend), propelled by the US. Meanwhile gas production also surged in Russia (+6.7% in 2018), spurred by a strong growth in domestic demand, and in Iran, following the start-up of new phases in the South Pars fields projects. Australia’s gas production continued to ramp up (+15%) thanks to the commissioning of new LNG trains in 2017 and 2018. Gas production grew at a very fast pace (+20%) in Egypt, as new phases of the West Nile Delta project are started up.
Which, as a wise man once said: “pretty much means our fate is already sealed.”
We’ve said it before, humanity is on an inevitable path towards running the carbon experiment at full speed.
I am not predicting a 50% decline in carbon emissions by 2030. 2040 perhaps.
We aren’t Hercules in our efforts, nor are we wise.
Doug is right, as usual.
What I should have said is that I believe we have the knowledge and opportunity to cut fossil fuel use in half within ten years, if all the cards fall right, considering the near miracles happening on the renewable energy front, the electrification of transportation, etc.
I DON’T think we have the technical and economic capacity to give up fossil fuels entirely with in ten years, even here in the USA, without causing economic and political disruption to the point of widespread and uncontrollable violence erupting as a result.
Getting even halfway in ten years would require going on a wartime economic footing, and staying on it, with this goal in mind.
The odds are ninety nine percent that THAT won’t happen. ” Our fate is sealed” sums it up, as practical matter, barring miracles.
Nevertheless,
I strongly urge each and every one of us to pray to the ROCK, MOUNTAIN, SNAKE, BEAR, or SKY DADDY or SKY MOMMY of our choice for my oft mentioned series of WAKE UP bricks upside our collective head.
One thing about religion that most of us tend to overlook is that prayer or worship is effectively a form of meditation and can lead to serious critical thinking.Lots of our better leaders in past times have taken their religion as seriously as the proverbial heart attack. Prayer changes PEOPLE, and people change THINGS.
The odds aren’t good, but it’s not a forgone conclusion that industrial civilization is finished. Some of us, maybe even some some larger parts of the world such as North America, might possibly pass thru the coming bottleneck and crash without reverting all the way back to an animal powered society.
LEVIATHAN, the modern technological nation state, IS capable of cranking out miracles. The problem is not whether such miracles are possible, but whether LEVIATHAN will awaken to the magnitude of the problem and thus be self motivated to go flat out pedal to the metal to prevent it’s own extinction.
We Yankees could be getting fifty percent of our electricity from renewable sources in ten years and replace nearly all of our older cars and light trucks with newer electric vehicles in that same ten years, etc.
And in ten years we can probably get by fine with one half as many new cars, given the coming of the robotaxi. In twenty years, one quarter as many?
We would be wealthier and healthier if we cut back our consumption of meat by fifty percent, and that’s easily doable, we could do that within a year or two.
A forty or fifty percent reduction in the amount of land and other resources devoted to agriculture is probably technically within reach in the USA, if we are willing to pay the price, and change the way we live, within a ten year time frame.
Technical realities are one thing. Political realities are another thing altogether.
I’m entirely opposed to Trump type politics, but never the less, if the world REALLY IS headed to hell in a hand basket, as most of the regulars here seem to believe, if the ship of industrial civilization is sinking, then just MAYBE it’s time for us as individuals to give some thought to looking at our own countries as our own LIFEBOATS.
Here in the USA, the more liberal elements of our society are adamant that we should be accepting LOTS of immigrants. I’m not personally opposed, because more people are a GOOD thing, for me, personally, and I won’t be around too much longer.
Western European countries aren’t all that eager to take in immigrants in large numbers, especially if they are refugees that don’t speak the language, or believe in local cultural norms, or have skills enabling them to earn a living without displacing their own less well educated workers.
Environmentalists are in a tricky spot, politically. I can’t remember seeing anything written by a prominent biologist or other scientist in favor of controlling population in part by limiting immigration, but on the other hand…… the fewer people, the easier the job of achieving a sustainable economy.
I foresee a time when national borders in Europe and Asia, and quite possibly in the America’s , will be protected with fences and troops who will turn away immigrants using as much force as necessary.
People by the tens of millions will be migrating once the shit is REALLY well and truly in the fan, rather than by the tens of thousands as is the case today.
Nothing less than fences and guns will stop them, because they’re just as dead if they stay put as they are shot trying to climb over a fence.
This is NOT going to end well. Avoiding discussion of such matters by using only polite language ( ” Our fate is sealed” ) is not going to help at all. Polite language isn’t effective in motivating people, it’s too easily ignored.
Coarse language works MUCH better, if it’s factual.
Some of us, maybe even some some larger parts of the world such as North America, might possibly pass thru the coming bottleneck and crash without reverting all the way back to an animal powered society.
I think that is a delusion akin to suggesting that the captain’s quarters on the Titanic will be just fine, even though we know the ship has just struck an iceberg and the hull has been breached. The captain’s quarters is going down with rest of the ship!
This is NOT going to end well. Avoiding discussion of such matters by using only polite language ( ” Our fate is sealed” ) is not going to help at all. Polite language isn’t effective in motivating people, it’s too easily ignored.
Coarse language works MUCH better, if it’s factual.
Ok, try this: We are all “FUCKING SCREWED!”
The following post contains multiple links to peer reviewed scientific papers. Granted, by the authors own admission, it also contains his personal opinion, interpretation and beliefs. All of which may yet turn out to be wrong! Though not necessarily in the direction that one might hope…
Keep in mind that a 3°C rise in global average temperature is a death knell for civilization as we know it due to sea level rise alone. A 5°C increase means a global biological extinction event, and the author cites arguments for the possibility of a runaway 10°C warming! Which means that even the venerable 300 million year old cockroach is a goner!
https://www.fasterthanexpected.one/too-late-climate-change/
If anyone thinks that such a scenario is not already baked into the cake, then please provide the peer reviewed literature that contradicts those assumptions. And if that isn’t enough then spend some time reading the comments on the petroleum side of this blog! It’s drill baby drill and burn baby burn! Atmospheric CO2 continues to trend up for the foreseeable future. Tipping points and feedback loops, anyone?!
Cheers!
“I think that is a delusion akin to suggesting that the captain’s quarters on the Titanic will be just fine, even though we know the ship has just struck an iceberg and the hull has been breached. The captain’s quarters is going down with rest of the ship!”
I think you should allow OFM his little delusion, which is what it is, of course. 😉
I think you should allow OFM his little delusion, which is what it is, of course. ?
Far be it from me to begrudge anyone his or her delusions! I have plenty of my own…
It’s only when I take a hard, cold, sober, look at the data, connect the dots, and think about the implications, that I wonder what the hell people are thinking.
As Sarah Palin used to say: “How’s that hopey changey thing going for you?!”
Cheers!
No peer review literature.
But there is some uncertainty.
Especially around the positive feedback mechanisms that would result in greater than 3 degree C warming. We really don’t know how that will play out. Maybe more/faster, maybe less/slower.
We also can’t predict if a major geo-engineering experiment will be undertaken. And if it would be at all effective. It will be a presidential debate topic in 8 years, if not 4. [please limit your comments to 12 seconds, and rebuttal to 6 seconds]
And much depends on the speed of change. Consider, we will be running out of coal, oil, and nat gas in the next 20-50 yrs. Maybe faster. And perhaps wood as well. Will there be enough carbon and methane floating around, sustained.
I think so, but I don’t think the certainty is 100% for achieving 5 degree C. Near certainty for 3 degree, I guess.
And as OFM has repeatedly pointed out, some areas will do better than others.
For a young person, Calgary looks better than Miami.
I think so, but I don’t think the certainty is 100% for achieving 5 degree C. Near certainty for 3 degree, I guess.
And as OFM has repeatedly pointed out, some areas will do better than others.
For a young person, Calgary looks better than Miami.
Yep, I agree with all your other points as well!
However, I have already posted this a number of times…
https://thebulwark.com/what-changed-my-mind-about-climate-change/
How are we supposed to figure out which side is right?
The answer is that we can’t be sure. And that’s okay. Because in life you rarely know for certain what’s going to happen next. You plan for a range of outcomes and try to mitigate your exposure to the worst possible risks. There’s an entire economic discipline on this subject. It’s called risk management.
Risk management is not about discerning the optimal response to the most likely outcome. It is about discerning the appropriate response to the most likely distribution of possible outcomes. That means incorporating the possibility that climate change, either by a bad roll of the geophysical dice or a large and unexpected societal vulnerability to warming, turns into a bigger problem than we expect.
I have long been of the opinion that we are currently not properly assessing the risks of climate change and that we are fooling ourselves that the worst case scenarios are highly unlikely! Would anyone willingly board a flight that had only a 67% chance of safely reaching its destination?!
Cheers!
Agree Fred.
Risk management.
Acknowledgement comes first.
Hi Fred,
You’re right , as usual, we are fucking screwed, collectively.
Sea levels WILL rise, if not the full three hundred feet, enough at least to submerge vast tracts of land, nearly all of it heavily developed or farmed.
But I maintain that some people in some places have a shot at maintaining an industrial civilization, if they manage to mount a sustained, coordinated response of the sort I outlined.
Success is not guaranteed, obviously, but neither is failure fore ordained.
Industrial civilization does not NECESSARILY require huge territories and huge numbers of people, or even huge amounts of nonrenewable resources.
A hundred million people living at locations three hundred feet or higher above current sea levels in North America would be more than enough to maintain a viable industrial civilization, and we already know how to make it work, in principle, from an economic point of view, and technically, from an engineering and life style point of view already, today, for the most part.
Giving up is not an option, as I see things. Insisting that there’s NO HOPE, even if you really do believe there is none, and I mean NONE, is not a wise move, politically.
As Gandalf said, paraphrased, it is not given to us to determine the actions of those who come after us, but rather to do what we can, in the time that is allotted to us.
Five or ten years ago, I was convinced that a catastrophic global crash and burn scenario IS indeed baked in.
But I have changed my mind, because the renewable energy industries have grown many times faster, and gotten to be many times cheaper in terms of energy produced per unit of investment, than I believed they would. Ditto our ability to USE energy and material resources of all kinds two three four even five or ten times more efficiently than we do now. Because birth rates have fallen faster and farther already than I dared hope, and are still falling.
I don’t know what may be possible, what what will be commonplace, fifty years down the road.
Maybe the population will have fallen off to half or less it’s current level in the USA and Canada.
I don’t have the foggiest idea how good batteries will be in fifty years, or how much they will cost, but our grandchildren they will be happy to ride in self driving two seater fore and aft oriented robotaxis if they must, as a matter of necessity.
We may be able to grow twice as much food on half as much land, and have to feed only half as many people as we do today.
Genetic engineering is after all just about now at the toilet training stage of development.
And I do believe that most of the people of the world will die hard sometime within the next half century or so, maybe a little longer, but that doesn’t mean we ALL have to die or even revert to a pre industrial live style.
This is why I say we may need to feed only half as many people fifty years from now. Maybe only a quarter as many.
Hi OFM.
” in favor of controlling population in part by limiting immigration, but on the other hand…… the fewer people, the easier the job of achieving a sustainable economy. ”
It is a valid point. There is a distinct hypocrisy, or blind-spot, with a different version on the right and left about this.
Many ‘progressives’ want relaxed border security and generally would like to avoid discussing comprehensive immigration reform.
On the other hand, many republicans want economic growth without immigrants, which hasn’t happened yet in America.
‘Secure America and Orderly Immigration Act (“McCain-Kennedy Bill,” S. 1033) was an immigration reform bill introduced in the United States Senate on May 12, 2005 by Senators John McCain and Ted Kennedy. It was the first of its kind… in incorporating legalization, guest worker programs, and border enforcement components.’
Too bad the bi-partisan bill was never even voted on in the congress. Poor government.
I had a discussion with a young progressive voter. He said immigration wasn’t a big problem.
Well, I think that is a naive view. Its a huge problem when it gets someone like trump elected.
And it will be an increasing problem as climate change turns central america into a much drier/hotter zone.
And no political figure or organization has even broached the idea of de-growth. No one wants to discuss this. It is poison. And in a contracting economic environment, what then with immigration?
Hi Hickory,
Your words should be carved in stone, and prominently displayed on the campus of EVERY environmental organization in the USA, and in other countries as well.
EVERY member of the D Party establishment should be forced to don a dunce cap, and stay after class, and copy them on the chalkboard one hundred times.
THESE words:
I had a discussion with a young progressive voter. He said immigration wasn’t a big problem.
Well, I think that is a naive view. Its a huge problem when it gets someone like trump elected.
And it will be an increasing problem as climate change turns central america into a much drier/hotter zone.
I’ll fix one line of it for you.
THAT IS A NAIVE VIEW, no thinking about it.
I have pointed out numerous times here in this forum that the D’s probably should back off a little on some particular issues, in terms of the RHETORIC, because gays, lesbians, people of color, etc are ON BOARD anyway, and will vote D no matter WHAT.
They don’t need to abandon any principles, just talk less about them and MORE about the problems EVERYBODY is dealing with, such as health care, cost of living, job security, etc, as I see things.
It’s the same sort of naive thinking that allows people to badmouth religious voters or potential voters, without stopping to wonder why so many of them voted for Trump, and will vote for him again.
I am acquainted with numerous people who THINK of themselves as Christians, although it’s been YEARS since they entered a church, except for a funeral or wedding, people who DESPISE liberals for talking about them that way….. don’t forget that sort of talk also applies to their parents, and their grandparents….
There’s no better way to make enemies than to accuse people of being backward, ignorant, superstitious, racist, etc….. even if the accusation IS objectively true.
The thing that OUGHT to be on one’s mind, speaking about such things PUBLICLY, is whether it helps his IN group to win, or his OUT enemy group to win, next election.. and the one after that.
There is an OLD saying to the effect that one best leave rabid dogs alone, because even KILLING the dog does not cure the bite.
I would highly recommend severe carbon burn cutbacks before the Arctic Ocean goes mostly ice free in the summer. Once that happens, which triggers more permafrost melt and ocean heating, our window of control will be lost.
“The jobs just too big, there would be too much new investment needed to get it all built imo in that time frame. Not enough capacity to manufacture the necessary stuff, not enough skilled manpower to build the stuff needed to build the new stuff, not enough skilled manpower to deploy it. ”
Maybe your are right, but I don’t think it is because we cannot do it, it will be because we refuse to do it.
So let’s compare.
You say that producing 20 billion pounds of silicon, glass and aluminum(mostly aluminum and glass) each year is a Herculean task, yet do not compare it to the herculean task of mining, moving, refining, transporting, maintaining and burning the 8.82 trillion pounds of oil, 16 trillion pounds of coal and who knows how much natural gas each year along with all of their subsidiary industries to keep them and the consumer products running.
The world is now installing 123 GW of PV each year. The globe uses 3000 GW of electric. So it’s not a big leap to convert all global power to PV (and wind) in ten years.
The industries would have to increase output by about 5 times, which would bring them to about a terawatt a year.
Due to the efficiency advantages we only need about 10 terawatts total to replace all energy on the planet.
So give it 15 years to replace all of it if we really tried.
I would like you to look over the Military production during World War II Wikipedia page. That was all done in less than ten years. Then ask yourself if making a bunch of solar panels and wind towers even compares to that Herculean task.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_production_during_World_War_II#Major_weapons_groups
But we don’t have long to wait to find out if civilization is capable of real action other than wars on themselves and nature. Just a few years, one half of a generation, will tell all.
This should help some. Tesla just announced their megapack utility-scale storage system.
“Each Megapack comes from the factory fully-assembled with up to 3 megawatt hours (MWhs) of storage and 1.5 MW of inverter capacity, building on Powerpack’s engineering with an AC interface and 60% increase in energy density. Using Megapack, Tesla can deploy an emissions-free 250 MW, 1 GWh power plant in less than three months on a three-acre footprint. Megapack can also be DC-connected directly to solar, creating seamless renewable energy plants.”
https://teslamotorsclub.com/blog/2019/07/30/tesla-introduces-utility-scale-storage-system-called-megapack/
Hi GF,
You may be right. I won’t argue that we couldn’t HYPOTHETICALLY, at least in the USA, and some of the other richer countries, manage the transition in such a short period of time. I just can’t see it happening, within ten years, even under a wartime economic scenario.
It would work out easier and faster, in the end, and at MUCH less cost, in terms of political stability, to continue to run the fossil fuel industry for the entire ten years, and longer, simply to enable the faster build out of more solar farms, more wind farms, more HVDC transmission lines, more electric trucks, heat pumps, super efficient appliances, subways, etc.
Even more genetically engineered crops would be GREAT, because the same technologies that are killing us are ironically our only real hope of surviving thru the short term to medium term, personally and as viable societies.
If some bright young woman manages to come up with corn, wheat or rice that’s a true perennial, but still produces well, etc, we could cut back on plowing and irrigation substantially. If her boyfriend manages to add on some nitrogen fixing bacteria, we could get by with far less manufactured nitrates, etc.
The upside potential of GM crops in my estimation as a professional in my field exceeds the downside by at least an order of magnitude, maybe even two orders of magnitude.
Super weeds are mostly hypothetical possibilities, where as resource wars are well established realities.
It doesn’t REALLY matter very much if a weed evolves resistance to any given herbicide. When we quit using that herbicide, that resistance will be essentially a waste of resources, in terms of that weeds own survival. It won’t contribute a thing to the spread of the weed.
If we give up herbicides altogether, we can still farm the way we did before we invented them, IF we have oil and tractors.
We could still produce food enough, given time enough for the transition, if we have to go all the way back to horses and mules, but going back THAT far means something along the lines of one of Chairman Mao’s FIVE YEAR PLANS.
Such a transition could only be forced at gun point, literally, and tens of millions of people even here in the USA would literally die in the process, there wouldn’t be any possible way to avoid it. Horses and mules don’t exist in adequate numbers, and moving urban office workers into non existent rural housing and turning them into peasants grubbing in the dirt would be equivalent to the old Soviet practice of sending dissidents to prison factories and mines in Siberia, except that doing so would involve forcing this fate on hundreds of millions of people.
Yes, we may find that GM corn is a health hazard, and a SERIOUS health hazard.
We KNOW that starvation is a DEADLY serious health hazard, pun intended, and one that can easily trigger epidemics and war.
Starting from a larger base is always desirable, when you are looking at such a problem, and for now, the renewable energy infrastructure is NOT big enough to bootstrap itself quickly, NEVER MIND big enough to displace ESSENTIAL uses of fossil fuels, such the production and delivery of food etc.
I am after all the ONE forum member of this forum who has often and consistently pointed out that modern industrialized countries CAN work miracles if once motivated to do so.
I’m glad to see you taking notice of this fact, and repeating this it!
And incidentally, insofar as your comments are concerned, I agree with you pretty much across the board, on technical points.
The only time I part ways with you, to any real extent, is a matter of my estimation of the political situation. You tend to focus on the technical side of the issues, where as I tend to focus to a greater extent on what I see as the political (also economic) factors involved.
So I pray that you pray to your own personal favorite ROCK, SNAKE, MOUNTAIN, BEAR, or SKY DADDY or SKY MOMMY to bust us upside our collective head with the WAKE UP bricks which are the only POLITICALLY possible source of the MOTIVATION necessary and essential to our nation state, and others, getting SERIOUS about going renewable and sustainable.
As bad as it would be, considering that it might kill a few million people, directly, and result in the death of millions more, indirectly, a nice hot little oil war would be such a brick, one result being that we would see NUMEROUS electric trucks on highways within three or four years, rather than maybe ten or twenty years. ETC ETC
Generals often find it necessary to send SOME men to their deaths in order to preserve the lives of most or all of their men a little later.
I believe we are in an analogous situation today, in terms of our entire civilization. Some of us will have to die, hard, and often, in order to get the attention of the rest of us. Nothing less will serve.
And LOTS of us WILL be dying, hard, and often, no matter what we may try to do to prevent it.
A hard crash and burn collapse IS baked in, and it will be global in nature.
Nevertheless, I maintain that SOME people, in some places, may manage to pull thru while preserving an industrial civilization.
Yes, many people want to keep fossil fuels going and that will be the most likely reality. However, most people did not see WWI or WWII coming either, or the effects of all that carbon burn, so I don’t ride with most people’s ideas.
I do not think that most people realize the true magnitude and role of global warming and ecosystem collapse. Right now global warming gives the appearance of being an amplifier, making bad things worse. Soon it will be the overriding system as cool world goes to warm world, entropy and chaos will rise to the point where farming may become impossible or at least highly unreliable in many places. Storms will increase in size and magnitude, temperatures will fluctuate greatly, some regions will get colder at times while others get vastly hotter. Extreme change will be the order of the game, once more tipping points are crossed. Things might settle down in a few thousand years as the temperatures equilibrate and the earth slowly starts to reabsorb the CO2.
There is so much water on this planet that it can swing in temperature by more than 24C in certain regions. We now have 100 to 200 watt/m2 changes in the Arctic. The Arctic is a storehouse of carbon and biological activity. The tropics are already well into the first stages of change, aided by massive human destruction of ecosystems.
Where the soils are best, will come some of the worst. Although people have done their best to deplete the soils.
It’s not the result that is the danger it is the pace and energy of the changes that cause the problem. The only way people are going to survive is to become mobile and migratory. Our culture of property and nationalism will kill anyone who stays with it.
Technology will give humans the delusion that they can fight these changes and cause even more eco-destruction along with much more suffering. The best way is to shed the old ways and learn the new ones, which will be changing rapidly.
Maybe in a few thousand years we can settle back into a thoughtful and more sustainable high culture again. Or we will repeat history, or just fade away.
I know this all sounds fantastic, but when one quickly adds energy to a volatile, phase change dependent, ultra-complex system such as exists on earth the changes can become maximized, especially since we are near a cusp of the Ice Age period.
The ice and oceans are minimizing the effects, but the ocean will cease it’s ability to sequestrate/moderate and the ice will go away. That leaves only one way to go, back to warm world.
In the meantime, human tricks will continue on and the delusions of control and hope will linger well into the chaos.
Or we could get smart, rather than just clever. But that is a low probability.
One thing to remember, when the European explorers and colonists first set foot upon the Americas it was a vibrant ecosystem full of wildlife, mature forests, vast living plains with a huge diversity despite humans having lived there for at least 12,000 years.
A few hundred years after the European invasion and it’s a domesticated wrecked shade of it’s former self. An image of a dystopian human paradise/feudal system that was carried over the seas.
One thing to remember, when the European explorers and colonists first set foot upon the Americas it was a vibrant ecosystem full of wildlife, mature forests, vast living plains with a huge diversity despite humans having lived there for at least 12,000 years.
A few hundred years after the European invasion and it’s a domesticated wrecked shade of it’s former self. An image of a dystopian human paradise/feudal system that was carried over the seas.
Yeah! Welcome to the great American Paradise…
.
Back atcha GF
I absolutely do understand that you may be entirely right, and that I may be entirely wrong.
You can rest assured that if I ever manage to get a site of my own up and running, I will be posting many of your comments here, THERE, with credit of course.
But I don’t think nationalism will disappear. If it does, it will be replaced by tribalism, one level of organization down. I expect that no matter how desperate we are, so long as we have SOME remaining ability to do things on an organized basis, one of the things we will do is defend the borders of our respective countries.
When tshtf, smaller and weaker countries will be overrun by larger and more powerful ones, because war WILL THEN be a good survival strategy for countries that are POSITIONED to win, and thus can expect to win.
In the case of the USA, we don’t have any neighbors capable of overrunning us, and we are for now, and probably for a LONG time to come, more than capable of defending our borders. If the shit really and truly does get so bad that there isn’t any border, we are so well armed, at the personal level here in this country that there won’t be any real problem with immigrants unless they show up in the form of a REAL military force, well equipped in every way, well lead, well organized and ready to kill as many people as necessary, without any second thoughts at all.
I can’t see any country south of us being capable of maintaining and sending such a force longer than we Yankees can maintain an equivalent force to defend against it. Any actual invasion as such will be pointed south, rather than north.
Whether we can continue to work together, as societies, when tshtf, is an open question. I think the answer depends mostly on how the cards fall, on how we react early on, once things are REALLY falling apart.
If we Yankees go to an authoritarian system of government, run by people who have a good grasp of what MUST be done, we MIGHT run our country the way a general losing a war runs his army, pulling back making such sacrifices as MUST be made to preserve the bulk of his men and equipment, until the enemy is finally exhausted, and must cease to attack.
Maybe some of us Yankees will survive in the northern reaches of the country, and at higher elevations elsewhere. Maybe we won’t.
Maybe even if we do go carbon free within the next few years, it’s all over anyway.
But IF you REALLY BELIEVE it’s all over anyway, then why should you advocate going ff free?
Obviously enough, we BOTH want to believe there is some reason to believe there’s at least SOME hope of a less than worst case outcome being at least a theoretical possibility.
I believe in the possibility of such a less than worst case outcome.
Maybe you only want to believe likewise, but have better sense.
If there’s one thing I know about naked apes, it’s that we believe what we WANT to believe, and I’m just one more worn out old ape.
I don’t see any reason to unnecessarily fret myself for the few years I hopefully have left, so I’m planning on hanging on to my delusions, lol.
“But I don’t think nationalism will disappear. If it does, it will be replaced by tribalism,”
Good point. People do like to gang up.
The disaffected, young, lonely, computer gaming male is one such tribe. They have a term- Incel
“Incels, a portmanteau of “involuntary celibates”, are members of an online subculture who define themselves as unable to find a romantic or sexual partner despite desiring one, a state they describe as inceldom”
So now we’re getting about thirteen percent of our electricity from wind and solar.
Does anybody have any figures on the elasticity of demand for gas and coal which can be used to calculate the loss of revenue to these industries due to lower prices and additionally to lower total sales volume?
Something tells me that such figures would blow away any arguments about solar and wind power subsidies costing the collective tax payer money out of pocket due to higher electricity prices and a bigger tax bite.
Everything that involves the use of coal and gas from steel manufacture to fertilizer production to home heating fuel costs less when coal and gas cost less.
Thank you Mr Island, for the once again great summary.
Looking at the first chart with squinting eyes, I see that in past 6 yrs April to April, the Non-Hydro Renewables [purple line] has doubled in percentage up to 15%.
Fast forward 6 more years to 2025- if the same rate of wind/solar growth were to continue, we would be up to 30% of electrical gen for that peak month of April. The growth will likely increase in this period, rather than staying stable.
This is good, if not a decade or two late in coming.
Hopefully we will see some acceleration if the democrats nominate someone (moderate) who can beat trump, and work with congress on good policy/funding.
And I suspect coal will be at or less than 10% by then. [It won’t completely disappear for a long time since some areas have a lot of invested money in the whole coal chain, from mines to transport to huge coal fired plants.]
Speaking of good policy and funding-
$1 B of funding for energy infrastructure looks close to reality, with a bipartisan bill-
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/senate-committee-unanimously-approves-1-billion-for-ev-natural-gas-and-hy/559873/
“S. 2302, the America’s Transportation Infrastructure Act, earmarks $1 billion in funding for competitive grants to support the development of fueling infrastructure for electric, natural gas and hydrogen-powered vehicles. The bill also directs federal agencies to transition their vehicle fleets to hybrid-electric, electric and alternative fuels within a year of enactment”
That will either get squashed or diverted to NG only.
NAOM
Mr Island-
I don’t see why Battery should be a category of electricity generation in these tally’s.
If anything it is an energy consumption mechanism since there is always loss in the process of storage turnaround.
Storage, whether from batteries, pumped hydro, dry gravity storage (see below) perhaps would be better tracked as a separate item as the sector develops.
Thoughts?
Gravity Storage-
https://heindl-energy.com/
2nded, brought this up last time.
NAOM
And as I think about it more, to put batteries and other storage as an energy source is a double count. First you tally up the original generation, then you tally up the energy again as it fills up storage.
Exactly, that was my thinking.
You guys might want to take that up with the EIA since I’m basically summarizing some of their data and presenting graphs based on that data. 😉 There is another category called Hydroelectric Pumped Storage (HPS) that is listed in Table 1.1 Energy Source: Total – All Sectors which is very similar to Batteries in that it is not actually a generator but, a store of generated power. There is no column in 1.1.A Renewable Sources: Total – All Sectors for either HPS or Batteries.
The only table that contains information on Batteries is 6.3 New Utility Scale Generating Units by Operating Company, Plant, and Month and any new HPS wold also show up there but, there has been no new HPS over the period for which I have been looking at the data. I guess that the EIA is counting any source which is capable of supplying electricity to the grid, regardless of it’s nature.
The column for HPS in Table 1.1 contains only negative values which may be a reflection of the fact that storage always incurrs a net loss, in that what is released from storage is always less than what was put in.
Thanks for the explanation. As energy storage capacity grows, this strange categorization will increasingly skew the analysis.
I wonder if the government counts tax revenues twice as well?
The EIA categorization makes sense: they’re showing capacity, not energy produced. Batteries are probably the most reliable source of either peak capacity or backup capacity.
Utilities are very focused on peak power capacity, and backup capacity – it’s a whole different category from “energy produced”.
Sorry Nick, but that is not what is displayed in the charts derived from the EIA data.
Charts, with batteries included as an an item, are titled (for example)
-US Net Generation Capacity By Fuel Source
-2019 US Monthly Share of Capacity Additions by Fuel Source
Simple, batteries are not a fuel source. They don’t generate electricity.
Its a double count, and gives a false impression to the naive reader.
I know you are smarter than to be fooled by that once you think it through.
But a brief observer / naive analyst likely will be fooled by this.
Well, I’d say the EIA made a poor word choice. They probably just left the old title alone, while adding batteries.
It’s a chart of capacity, not energy. Gigawatts, not Gigawatt-hours. In the utility world, those are completely different things.
The fascinating thing about batteries is that they have a unique ability to exceed their ratings. I suspect that these 10 to 100MW batteries have the ability to produce 50% to 100 over their ratings for perhaps 60 seconds. That’s a long time in the utility world – enough to prevent a major blackout.
The double-counting is trivial now, but will become a problem later, as energy storage grows.
And then they will backtrack, and fix the error.
But where is the double counting? If you add a battery, you add more power. You have more ability to produce megawatts when they’re needed. If a nuclear plant crashes, you can replace it’s power, temporarily, while another plant spins up. If you have a peak in demand one evening, you can handle it.
I think that the fact that a battery doesn’t doesn’t add energy – megawatt-hours is clear to most users of the EIA tables. These tables have other problems, such as not correcting for capacity-factor. People understand the limitations.
For now, and for sometime to come, it’ reasonable, as a practical matter, to count batteries as part of the production infrastructure, because their primary purpose, for now, and sometime to come, will be to help manage peak loads.
Later on their primary job, when deployed on the grand scale, will be to store clean cheap surplus wind and solar juice so as to avoid using so much expensive and dirty coal and gas.
Batteries are already good enough, and cheap enough , and being deployed in large enough numbers, to reduce the need for peaker plants to some extent.
https://insideevs.com/reviews/362810/stark-drive-electric-fat-tire-bicycle-review/
This company is apparently for real, but it is also having some problems.
I’m thinking that within another year or two it will actually be possible to buy an electric bike that will last a reasonably long time, battery and all, for a couple of thousand bucks or less, from a local dealer, at least in larger cities, with the dealer actually having parts available…… LOCALLY. The warranty on my cheap cell phone is basically worthless.. even though it includes FREE replacement in case it fails…. because it takes three weeks to get a new one delivered. That means I just buy another one the same day.
The NEXT step should be standardization of components, at least to the extent automobile parts are standardized. You can get a replacement battery overnight, from lots of different companies, for almost any conventional car on the road, and one that works in ninety five percent of all conventional cars in any small town the same day. Ditto tires, lights, etc.
The people who are the CORE potential market in the USA at least are HARD UP. Anybody who can afford a five thousand dollar bicycle can afford a cheap used car, which will get him to work rain or shine, slick roads or no, etc, plus get his kids to school functions, and maintain minimum legal speeds on any public road. Sure it will cost a lot to insure it and put gas in it and maintain it, but it will nevertheless be considerably cheaper than taking cabs.
I will probably buy an electric bike myself when I’m reasonably sure I can get one in the thousand to 1500 dollar price class that will last at least five thousand miles without needing repairs or a new battery, preferably ten thousand miles. That means it will be to my personal financial advantage to own it. Otherwise, I will just spend that same money on more gasoline for my conventional car, because I CAN’T get by without a car or truck. It’s going to be a car, if the choice is EITHER a car or an electric bike, ninety percent of the time here in the USA.
MOST of us don’t actually drive in heavy city traffic on roads that are suitable for bicycles, and most of us don’t have a problem parking our car at home or at work. Most of us do have to go to work in the rain, or on blistering hot or freezing cold days.
Once electric bikes are cheap enough, and dependable, tens of millions of YOUNGER Yankees will buy one, because doing so will save them a lot of money, and in many cases allow a couple to get by with one car instead of two.
If you haven’t ridden one before, be ready to smile.
Here’s one that a neighbor bought – they like it enormously.
https://www.radpowerbikes.com/
Spot on OFM.
The concept of driving the front wheel with a hub motor is taking off around here.
A standard bike can be converted in a couple of hours and they are apparently getting twenty kilometers of electric only range from a battery that fits into the standard water bottle bracket . . . not putting the extra torque through the chain makes sense to me.
If I electrify a bike it will be to boost uphill power especially with a heavy load/trailer. On the level there would be little need for it but I have a few short, sharp climbs to my house. A front wheel drive would risk loosing traction while a rear wheel drive would be fine.
NAOM
I can’t see any reason a back wheel hub motor is any bigger an issue than a front motor, except integrating it with a chain drive so you can also pedal will cost a little more.
There has been a lot of experimentation with electric motor positioning- with various pros and cons. Traction, steering, center of gravity, braking, and flat tire propensity.
Mid-Drive is my preference.
here is a good review of the options, pros and cons-
https://electricbikereport.com/electric-bike-motor-comparison/
The problem with mid-drive is that it is, pretty much, a manufacture option and not an add on which is where I need to go. The article confirms my concern of losing traction when going uphill, the time when I need it if pulling a trailer. For my situation a rear hub makes more sense but I still need to figure out where to put the batteries. A different option is to buy an old bike, with rear suspension, and turn the front end into a trike which would give me ample battery space.
NAOM
I first had read drive bike (Giant), and it was prone to ‘pinch’ flats resulting from all the extra weight. Battery was on the back rack as well. You need very strong tires and rim for that configuration.
More recently, I took a regular bike that I had and installed a mid-drive motor. Just remove the central crank shaft and replace it with the motor shaft. Works great. The battery goes where the water bottle normally does. DIY like this saved me about $1000.
If money if no concern, then I’d purchase a premade mid-drive version from a major manufacturer. They are awesome.
Also radpowerbikes out of seattle is very good. They ship anywhere for free.
here is the mid-drive DIY installation
And here it is fully installed. Pretty inconspicuous.
The large ‘water bottle’ is the battery.
This bike has no throttle (my deliberate choice).
Rather, it provides electrical motor assist depending on the strength of your pedaling effort. The harder you pedal, the more assist you get.
You can adjust the strength of the assist level on the fly, with a 5 level handlebar control.
Its all pretty seamless.
Thanks for that, do you have a link for the motor. That looks like a normal axle that can be changed but the one on my mountain bike is built in and cannot be changed. The second problem is where to put the battery. Both these issues may go away if I go the trike option but I would have to look for a rear suspension bike with a normal axle (suspension is a must around here). I don’t need much range but a boost on short hills when carrying cargo, front and rear gears being a must.
My MTB
https://www.walmart.com.mx/deportes/ciclismo/bicicletas-de-montana/bicicleta-de-montana-benotto-kiev-21v-r26-negra_00750153733761
Typical hill
https://www.google.com/maps/@20.6505816,-105.2117358,3a,75y,90t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sFx8x1OHaoGC5WXtY1MF4Xw!2e0!7i13312!8i6656?hl=en
Doesn’t really show how steep it is but it is a push job when I have a load on board (eg 20Kg++)
NAOM
Here is a link to the one I used on an e bike site. There are a lot of good choices out there.
Take some study time to know what would be best for you. New things have come along in the two years since I installed mine.
When I opened this link I was surprised to recognize my bike as the second picture. I can’t recall sharing the picture anywhere?
https://www.electricbike.com/tsdz2-750w-mid-drive-torque-sensing/
btw- your bike is awesome. I wouldn’t mess with it.
Thanks for the link, that chainring gears are limited may be a negative as I use all 3 a LOT. This may be better if I go to a trike configuration. Given our roads, the dual suspension on my MTB is awsome but various bits of the workings are too cheap. The rear derailleur got trashed the first day as it overshot the gears and caught in the wheel, the brake levers are totally crap and the twist to change, while Shimano, are tricky. I may switch to an 8 speed cassette on my road bike moving the 7 speed kit to the MTB.
Our roads
https://www.google.com/maps/@20.6493225,-105.2131518,3a,75y,270h,90t/data=!3m5!1e1!3m3!1st7_Q0Dmyduo95RzNCHAduQ!2e0!6s%2F%2Fgeo3.ggpht.com%2Fcbk%3Fpanoid%3Dt7_Q0Dmyduo95RzNCHAduQ%26output%3Dthumbnail%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26thumb%3D2%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D358.1215%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100?hl=en
That bit is deadly when wet.
NAOM
I haven’t missed the triple chainring config on my bike. But for a high performance bike it could be an issue. I’m sure various forums discuss the issue in great detail.
I’d like to have an electric tadpole, along the lines of this beauty
https://www.electricspokes.com/products/electric-demo-sun-seeker-fat-tad-recumbent-trike-with-1000w-bbshd-mid-drive?variant=39517402766&utm_medium=cpc&utm_source=google&utm_campaign=Google%20Shopping&gclid=Cj0KCQjwkK_qBRD8ARIsAOteukDxErgnGDLC4OBBhgYXJ3BJVT3ZnV-1iJU-wM9XA-NXtnGoef1q66oaArPnEALw_wcB
No sense of humor?
“As the Arctic enters an “unprecedented” state of warming, a new study shows emissions of a potent greenhouse gas from thawing permafrost in the planet’s northernmost region may be 12 times higher than previously thought.”
“This needs to be taken more seriously than it is right now.” — Jordan Wilkerson, lead author.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/greenland-ice-sheet-melt-865803/
IF the whole world doesn’t fall apart before old farts such as yours truly are safely recycled, there’s SOME hope at least.
Young people tend to put a LOT more faith in publications such as The Rolling Stone than than in Fox News, etc.
The kids generally get it. Old farts, excepting those of us with at least an intro university level technical education, all to often DON’T.
Also
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/07/31/gop-retirements-1442783
It seems to me that this is the bike design that would help the average customer keep more weight upright on the wheels and not lying on the ground.
https://www.bennetts.co.uk/bikesocial/reviews/bikes/yamaha/yamaha-niken-review
Does anybody know if any EVs are showing up with similar bike/ultra light vehicle ideas? I’m thinking more vehicle weight than your average bike due to lots of batteries. But sure a lot lighter than an electric car.
EW!
Lightweight as in electric motorcycles?
https://www.zeromotorcycles.com/
https://electrek.co/2019/07/31/review-zero-fxs-electric-motorcycle-commuter/
There are plenty of electric bicycles.
And tricycles:
https://www.pedegoelectricbikes.com/product/trike/
Or like the 450 kg (992 pound) two seater, 4 wheel Renault Twizy?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renault_Twizy
“Does anybody know if any EVs are showing up with similar bike/ultra light vehicle ideas?”
You mean like Arcimoto out of Eugene,OR
https://www.arcimoto.com/
Another one bites the dust
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/aug/01/german-utilities-firm-rwe-to-close-its-last-uk-coal-plant-in-2020
NAOM
The second to last coal plant in Austria was shut down permanently today.
https://noe.orf.at/stories/3007102/
The last one will see the end of it’s life in 2020. Used for district heating and electricity it will be turned on some time in September and shut down in March or April.
I do not want to be seen as a supporter of the coal or gas industries, but it’s worth noting that district heating plus generation has the potential to come fairly close to doubling the overall energy efficiency of fossil fuel fired electricity generation.
But it only works well in places where winters are long and cold, and where the population density is really high, because it costs so much to build it.
Since the infrastructure is already in place, it might be worthwhile to convert this particular plant to a gas fired plant…… because the people there may already be burning gas to heat their homes and offices. In that case, they might actually use LESS TOTAL gas.
I think maybe we will see a lot of home owner sized gas and possibly oil fired generating plants in the future, because the cards may fall such that such residential plants, or apartment or office building sized plants will prove to be practical and RELATIVELY clean.
Consider let us say a five kilowatt plant, super insulated, with nearly all the otherwise wasted heat of combustion and friction captured for space heating via a hot water reservoir, or by running the engine coolant thru a stone slab floor or wall. The engine itself could be used to drive a generator to either top off batteries which are MOSTLY charged with wind or solar power, or to drive a heat pump, or to power some household loads directly, at times, when PEAK power load is the big problem.
Up until recently it would have been prohibitively expensive to design a reliable and affordable digital control mechanism for such a genset, but nowadays, such electronics are dirt cheap, if the buyer wants the standardized product in quantity.
So say your unit burns a gallon of diesel, on a cold night, with fifty five percent of the heat generated captured and used for domestic hot water and space heating, and thirty five percent converted into electricity, used in turn to drive a heat pump getting a two for one return on that thirty five percent.
There’s less need for utility owned peaker plants, and the home owner or landlord could use any battery storage capacity more efficiently, with the generator automatically kicking in for a little while as needed when running mostly or solely on battery power, especially in cold weather. Somewhat smaller battery installations would serve as well as larger ones, in terms of reduced reliance on grid sourced juice, renewable OR fossil.
We aren’t going to build enough wind and solar farms, and enough batteries or other storage to give up entirely on oil and gas for quite some time, my guess being at least another twenty years. We will probably be using some oil and gas for another half a century, in my estimation.
Such a system would REDUCE total fossil fuel consumption over a ten to twenty year service life, which is about the usual life of most HVAC equipment.
It’s no problem at all to build a small super long lasting IC engine to drive such a generator, it’s just a matter of using premium materials and a robust design.
Such a system would be quite costly, including installation, if built and sold only in small numbers…… but if it were built to a STANDARDIZED design, and in large numbers, it would probably be a no brainer, saving more in purchased electricity and heating fuel than it costs to own and operate.
This seems pertinent to recent developments in the arctic:
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2019GL082914
Radiative Heating of an Ice‐Free Arctic Ocean
During recent decades, there has been dramatic Arctic sea ice retreat. This has reduced the top‐of‐atmosphere albedo, adding more solar energy to the climate system. There is substantial uncertainty regarding how much ice retreat and associated solar heating will occur in the future. This is relevant to future climate projections, including the timescale for reaching global warming stabilization targets. Here we use satellite observations to estimate the amount of solar energy that would be added in the worst‐case scenario of a complete disappearance of Arctic sea ice throughout the sunlit part of the year. Assuming constant cloudiness, we calculate a global radiative heating of 0.71 W/m2 relative to the 1979 baseline state. This is equivalent to the effect of one trillion tons of CO2 emissions. These results suggest that the additional heating due to complete Arctic sea ice loss would hasten global warming by an estimated 25 years.
Greenland ice sheet >50% surface melt today, again. Three days running straight with >50%.
I think I read somewhere that in July Greenland shed 160 billion tons of ice.
Talk about faster than expected!
Miami will soon be a snorkling destination, as soon as all the toxins get washed away from the ruins.
I’m keeping positive!
Absolutely!
And all nukes could be dumped into the ocean! Water is a great radiation shield! ‘u^
The fauna might be a little different though…
.
Always look on the bright side…
https://youtu.be/SJUhlRoBL8M
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjmxZKrV7vE
Climate System “Getting Unhinged” as Massive Heat Wave Causes Record Melting of Greenland Ice Sheet
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXpJTFX8gTg
Climate Scientist Jason Box: “Our Economic System Is Crashing With Reality”
None of that matters because according to the democrat party human species is going to be gone in 12 years, that’s what they said during the debates. So we should just eat, drink and party without worry.
“So we should just eat, drink and party without worry.” ~ LL
Yes, that’s appears to be what most of folks in affluent nations are doing- lots of drugs, sex, hedonism (Trump), entertainment and junk food going on. Though it’s not as bipartisan an act as you claim. You’re childish conceptual framework holds no weight when analyzing world issues, hence you don’t understand them. It’s perhaps likely your brain cannot fathom the complexity of the world we live in.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conceptual_framework
“So we should just eat, drink and party without worry.”
What? We’re not already?
LL,
Not sure what the democrats have to do with it. Nor do I think they have a 12 year end of the species platform. Probably be better if they did.
Politics is just choosing someone who is likely to misrepresent and disappoint you. So it is a stupid system with very limited choices, mostly, one very vulnerable to control by rich people for rich people.
However you have hit upon it. I enjoy each day, spend time thinking about and finding ways to make the world better and help living creatures. Watch nature and be thankful for all of this great world of which we are a part.
Most evenings and some afternoons I party with friends, eating and playing games.
I drink water and herbal tea, once in a while coffee. No alcohol.
Yes, one can think about the world but worry does little good. So don’t worry and have pleasant days.
Spend as little time frustrated and angry as possible. It is really not worth it and mostly makes one look stupid and ineffective.
Yes, sadness and grief will happen, but that is natural and a part of life. Spend no more than 5 minutes a day feeling sorry for yourself. Then move on.
I stand corrected
197 billion tons in July
“More than 10 billion tonnes of ice was lost to the oceans by surface melt on Wednesday alone, creating a net mass ice loss of some 197 billion tonnes from Greenland in July”
https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/greenland-ice-melt-1.5233597
Continued from here…
Do installations trail investments? Lag-times?
What curve? The one you posted? It doesn’t look exponential and Wikipedia says, “Worldwide growth of photovoltaics has been close to exponential between 1992 and 2018.”. Is that what you mean by ‘track’?
That timeframe dovetails with my previous comment as well as the question behind its quoted references– i.e. stalling renewable growth.
It would appear that something is wrong with Caelan’s vision. If one looks at the graph showing investment versus new capacity addition below it should be fairly obvious that despite flat to declining investments, capacity deployments are still increasing, especially when it comes to investments in solar. Bloomberg New Energy Finance published an article explaining this on January 18, 2019:
Want More Bang for Your Buck? Go Solar
Wind power’s return on investment might not be as thrilling, but investors in clean energy should be very excited about the two technologies.
It would appear that Caelan has a problem with the reality that, investors in renewable energy getting more bang for their buck. I am still waiting to hear him critique investments in NG or other FF powered technology. He only appears concerned about the technology that is threatening to disrupt the status quo and his argument that, “For the sake of balance, and time-constraints, I have to pick my poisons, and so I do.” rings very hollow to me. Never a word from Caelan about the fact that billions of dollars have been “spirited” away in the US in pursuit of Light Tight Oil. That money has been spent, the hydrocarbons resulting from said expenditure have largely been consumed, the CO2 is now released into the atmosphere but Caelan is not concerned in the least. Apparently, neither is he concerned about the build out of new coal fired electricity generation capacity that is being driven largely by Chinese financing. No siree, no comments on those fronts. Instead his poison of choice is the stuff that threatens the FF industries.
Just to reinforce the point about the declining costs of solar, I posted a link to the following close to the end of the previous non-petroleum thread but, to add some context here it is again:
Portuguese auction attracts world record bid of €14.8/MWh for solar
The Crony-Capitalist Plutarchy Superset & Sickness
The crony-capitalist plutarchy is its superset, along with what you peddle.
I’m saddened that people who, despite everything, are upholding– and on my home too– what I feel is terribly wrong.
The continued burning of fossil fuels, used to also build out non-renewable renewable technologies at this arguably too-late stage-of-the-game, and in dubious circumstances as to whether they will work at all or as promo’d, seems wrong in more than one way, some of which of course I’ve mentioned.
You’re part of the sickness, Alan, the sickness being the crony-capitalist plutarchy.
Caelan, you don’t get it, do you? For going on a century poor folk in some countries have been sold kerosone lamps for lighting, with all the attendant health issues. Once the lamp has been sold, fuel must be bought if lighting is to be supplied, a perfect deal for producers and sellers of oil. In more developed countries, consumers have been sold the concept of buying electricity from a company that generates enough for entire regions at large centralized plants.
Along comes a technology that has the promise of allowing millions of “consumers” to become producers, earning money from the sale of electricity rather than spending it and you lump it with the the legacy industries, calling it “The crony-capitalist plutarchy” You seem incapable of identifying the real “crony-capitalist plutarchy” unfolding before our very eyes. Let me spell it out for you, Charles Koch, “Moscow Mitch” McConnell and Donald Trump. Could it be any clearer?
You really do seem to like to insult me and yourself, Alan, and the planet you live on. To me it just underscores the deep infection of the status-quo that’s steamrolling the planet and everything on it.
Kerosene lamps? Do you know anything at all about Africa? Do you know what has happened and is currently happening to it in the name of profit, say, or colonialism? Slavery?
I’m not a ‘consumer’ and don’t want to be. I am a human being. Fossil fuel and pseudorenewable outfits, governpimps, etc., are all part of the same technoindustial system clusterfuck– call it what you will– that has to go and that have some people so physically/intellectually/ideologically by the balls that they can’t even seem to think straight, such that anything I or others might say in its critique doesn’t register or matter.
As if we can’t be any more fucked than we already are.
Oh! Boo hoo\! Woe is me! We are all screwed and they’ve got me by the balls! Maybe I should just go and throw myself of the top of a tall building! Then again, maybe not!
Greenwashed Fruits of The Current BAU Paradigm
But non-renewable renewables and EVs are the fruits of the current BAU paradigm.
Green Autarky: Self Sufficiency Against the Growth Based Model of Industrial Capitalism
From The Archives
How about directing the idea of de-growth to the Chinese auto market where for the first time in decades the market declined to roughly 28 million vehicles in 2018? It is expected that in 2019 volumes will be similar, with estimates that 23,700,000 of these vehicle sales will be “passenger vehicles” and of that amount, less than 5% will be electric. How come continued sales of 23 million plus vehicles in China is not a major issue but, the EV market in China growing to over a million vehicles sparks calls for de-growth?
Similarly, construction of coal fired electricity plants is continuing apace but, it is “renewable energy, that is deployed on an industrial scale in order to supply a ‘growth’ based model of industrial capitalism will ultimately destroy the ecology of the planet”. Again FF is getting a free pass from this type of criticism and it seems commentary such as this would rather see FF go unchallenged than face disruption. It seems to have escaped some people’s attention that BAU is just what it is, no signs of any de-growth anywhere that I am aware of.
I’ve already suggested that fossil fuels are being burned to produce– sometimes, if not often, by fossil-fuel-burning companies– renewables that are not even renewable.
I’ve also written, with references, that we need to power down, not continue on with the status-quo of burning fossil fuels.
Lastly, others hereon often mention AGW and other issues surrounding the burning of fossil fuels, so it’s already sufficiently covered– unlike concerns with so-called renewables.
As I write this comment, it is now the first Monday in August the day selected for the Jamaica to celebrate “independence” from Britain, which was “granted” on August 6, 1962, less than a year after I was born. This follows another holiday, Emancipation Day, celebrating the emancipation of slaves in British colonies on August 1, 1838. Contrary to what you believe, I do not yet earn a living from solar PV or advocacy thereof but, by providing services to the entertainment industry on the island. As such, I had a reasonably busy weekend and had the opportunity to observe quite a few of my fellow island residents enjoying the holidays.
By and large they do not know about Peak Oil and thus do not care (How does one care about something one is ignorant of?). By and large they also do not appear to be too concerned about global warming either, the response to the hot weather being to roll up the car windows and turn on the AC or to install AC in their bedrooms for those that can afford it. For those that can’t afford AC, staying hydrated is top priority. My advocacy of renewable energy is probably viewed as “cute” or worse “wonky” by those of my acquaintances that are aware of it but, I don’t think anyone takes it seriously. I was pleasantly surprised to encounter a young man who shared my interests in EVs having observed him showing keen interest in a conversation I was having with someone a week ago Saturday. It was the first time I have encountered someone who visits the same EV oriented web site I do and is absolutely up to speed on all the latest developments, making me feel just a little less isolated in that regard.
You think I should start espousing some of your ideas? How about we wean the sheeple off FF and the idea that one’s value lies in how much crap one is able to consume first? Even if that were to happen there will still be people who have to show off that their solar array is bigger than everybody else’s but, at least that will be sort of good for the environment. If these “high net worth” individuals were also to drive Tesla’s instead of ICE powered European luxury sedans and SUVs that might also be considered positive as well. Right now all I can see around me is BAU on steroids so I remain convinced that your ” concerns with so-called renewables” are counter productive. I will leave it at that!
“renewables that are not even renewable.”
I do not understand where you are coming from in that remark I seems very obscure, please explain it.
“I’ve also written, with references, that we need to power down, not continue on with the status-quo of burning fossil fuels.”
Ok, I can agree with that.
NAOM
I’ll let you look it up for yourself. If you return after having done so reasonably and challenge me if you think it’s incorrect, I’ll take a look at it then.
My time is limited, especially for those like you who write things like in the previous thread, which seem to belie someone who appears less interested in facts or truth and more in ‘twisting’, ironically.
While I’m at it, about your ‘yawn’ remark, hey we can all get a little dozy sometimes, but ultimately, it helps to follow our own advice, such that we like to dispense to our cronies, who nevertheless can’t seem to follow it.
Incidentally, since I provide references in my comments, technically, there is no or less decontextualization, since anyone who might be interested in the context can look it up. That’s a distinct difference from making offcolor remarks about people and without that kind of support. As if there is a care about science in the face of making armchair declarations about reality from behind a computer screen. Makes me think of those religious who can of course look over the shoulder of science in order to support their own religious convictions, while the rest of it, of science, can be handily discarded.
Well, if your time is so limited a simple answer to my polite question would have been a lot quicker.
NAOM
Not if it has the potential to save me some time.
Notanoilman,
Caelan has all the time in the world, as I do, at present, to post comments on the net. I’m retired,and staying inside to look after an invalid.
It’s obvious to anybody who cares to pay attention to what he says, and analyze it over a period of a few days that he is interested, and ONLY interested, obstructing, delaying, and deflecting the conversation here away from any USEFUL discussion of the problems and issues.
He so seldom posts anything constructive that I once actually congratulated him for doing so.
He’s our Chicken Little.
He never tires of telling us that the sky’s falling, and that the ONLY way we can keep the sky from falling on us and crushing us is to give up all our technology , all the way back to sticks and stones, and freeze and starve or die of exposure RIGHT AWAY, so as to avoid the sky falling on us a LATER.
If the Koch brothers aren’t paying him, they should be.
If he REALLY wants to try a little bid of PERMACULTURE hands on, he’s welcome to come visit me. I will show him, cheerfully, how we did it back when I was a kid… staying warm chopping wood, eating corn bread only we hoed the corn all day in a hot river bottom under the July and August sun, working, working working. having beans in the winter because we spent long days in the spring and summer planting, hoeing . picking, drying….. to the point we had calluses on our calluses.
He can use one of the scythes hanging in the barn to mow the weeds and saplings growing up in the apple trees…..That used to take me only a week, twice a year, back when I was young and tough. He might manage the job once between now and cold weather, lol, if he’s not past say fifty and in good health.
good luck getting any useful work out of him
Ya, totally.
A Weird Black Hole, Featuring OFM
(With special guest appearance by Nick G)
“Glad to see your Mommy hasn’t taken away your phone, HB
Yep, as far as sex goes, I’m pretty well dickless, as is the case for the vast majority of men my age.
But it still works quite well as a drain hose.
And I do HAVE one, even if it’s only semi functional these days, and I have lots of happy memories, lol.
You wouldn’t last an hour in the real world, where young men play the games young men play, and have played, since our first ancestor apes appeared on the scene.
But old as I am now, I can still go in a biker’s bar and shoot some pool, and nobody fucks with me. That’s because the old local bikers know me from way back when… when we were young.
Just about everybody who’s old enough to know shit from apple butter about getting old knows that testosterone peaks in your early years, and gradually declines from then on out, as you get older and older.
That’s what getting old is all about,the various bodily organs and systems wearing out and shutting down, but given that the height of your intellectual achievements seems to have been selling work trucks, I’m not surprised that you don’t know even this much.
I know more about trucks than you do, and that’s just incidental knowledge to me.
You’re not smart enough to even come up with a good insult.”
Tipping points are often discussed here. A tipping point is a point of instability in a system that if the system is pushed even slightly in a direction it will, of it’s own forces, proceed to a new position without further outside agency.
The region just before the tipping point can be described as a threshold. India has reached a threshold.
The India’s water crisis and a way to step back from the threshold.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkI131KSlOA&t=1601s
On the topic of tipping points — snips from IPCC (leaked) report:
GOING VEGETARIAN AND CONTROLLING LAND USE ARE KEY TO CLIMATE CRISIS
“Attempts to solve the climate crisis by cutting carbon emissions from only cars, factories and power plants are doomed to failure. Humans now exploit 72% of the planet’s ice-free surface to feed, clothe and support Earth’s growing population. At the same time, agriculture, forestry and other land use produces almost a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions. We are now getting very close to some dangerous tipping points in the behavior of the climate – but as this latest leaked report of the IPCC’s work reveals, it is going to be very difficult to achieve the cuts we need to make to prevent that happening.”
Methinks it’s human population that has passed a tipping point? But, too late on that one.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/aug/03/ipcc-land-use-food-production-key-to-climate-crisis-leaked-report
Ahhh, the herd is getting nervous. They smell trouble.
Much different tone now than a decade ago.
Unlike in the movie “the graduate’
its not all about Plastics.
One word-
Black Eyed Peas.
They grow well in so many countries, and are among the easiest (less energy input) bean/pea to cook. 25 minutes in my pressure cooker. Easy to digest.
Make them your friend.
What is the Question?
https://www.agronomy.org/science-newsy/cowpeas-are-answer-whats-question-
I got a “page does not exist” message when I clicked on your link.
What did you think of the tree planting scenario presented in the video I posted above?
Hmmm- me too.
This one works.
https://www.certifiedcropadviser.org/science-newsy/cowpeas-are-answer-whats-question
Regarding the video, well, I think I watched the wrong one-
Sadhguru and Venkaiah Naidu in UpaRashtrapathi Bhavan
on Life and Happiness
The title should read: Sadhguru and Venkaiah Naidu in UpaRashtrapathi Bhavan | Cauvery River, Life, Happiness
The first twenty minutes, he explains the how the hydrology of India operates and the major cause of rivers going to sand. Next he presents how to engage the farming system to replant the forests while improving the lot of the dying farms and farmers in India.
If one looks past the surface on this plan it is a real gem, benefitting many species way beyond just humans.
Blasphemy And The New Church of The Greenwash
So says a member of congregation of The New Church of The Greenwash, where ‘forked tongue‘ is ‘worm tongue‘; ‘witch‘ or ‘devil’ is ‘troll‘; and we get comments like this; “I really do wish you and some others would tone down the anti religious rhetoric, because it doesn’t help AT ALL…” and masterpieces like this:
All hail WORM TONGUE aka Caelan, lol.
It’s perfectly obvious that his real agenda is to dilute and confuse the conversation here, to whatever extent he can, as is now being pointed out by several long term members of the forum who have post useful links and comments that ADD to our understanding of our problems, and possible solutions.
Taking comments out of context is a favorite trick of Worm Tongue. Fred, if his words are read in context, means he believes that janitors and scientists, as individuals, are of equal worth before the law and according to his own personal ethics.
Now if either Fred or I were responsible a lot of people, with two people of us in danger of dying, and one of them happens to be a physician, and the other a janitor, both of us, everything else equal, would try to save the physician, FIRST, because the physician is far more likely to help save other members of our party, maybe even ALL of us. Janitors typically don’t know how to set bones, or isolate people with contagious diseases, or deliver babies, etc.
And I am not suggesting that Caelan should be banned from this forum, because it’s easy to just X him out.
When I made the comment he quotes, I had in mind in mind something along the line of an email round robin, or an exclusive ADDITIONAL forum, separate from this one, where in anybody who habitually posts obvious bullshit or displays obvious and willful ignorance would be unable to post comments after a couple of warnings.
Taking comments out of context is a favorite trick of Worm Tongue. Fred, if his words are read in context, means he believes that janitors and scientists, as individuals, are of equal worth before the law and according to his own personal ethics.
Jesus H. Christ! WTF?! I have no idea what the quote refers to or when I may have said it and I’m not going to bother reading the post that contains it.
I will only say that OFM’s is a pretty accurate assessment of how I might feel about human beings in general, whether or not they are highly educated and well off, or semi literate and of humble circumstance. Regardless of a human being’s background, origin, ethnicity, sexual orientation, personal beliefs, etc… they should be treated with dignity and afforded their basic rights and given the benefit of the doubt…
I would damn well hope that this is also how most people in the US still think.
Side note: It also underscores why I am so vehemently at odds with the way our current Worm Tongue in Chief, stirs up his base with his constant US against THEM baiting!
And it is thus, 2 members of the congregation of The Church of The BAU Greenwash hath spoke.
Thank you…
All be seated…
Please take out your bibles…
Most any context is transparently provided in the links or references, but are you telling us that you’re so ‘confused and diluted’ that you still cannot find the context, or accept any new ones?
In any case, you can keep your wonky ‘round-robin-email-club-of-misfits-that-don’t-allow-anybody-in-except-those-with-backgrounds-similar-to-theirs-and-yours‘.
Our house is on fire folks.
THE ARCTIC IS BURNING AND GREENLAND IS MELTING
“The Arctic is on fire. Record-breaking temperatures and strong winds are fueling an unprecedented number of wildfires across the region this summer. In Siberia alone, hundreds of wildfires captured by satellite images July 28 spanned about 3 million hectares of land. Across Alaska, as many as 400 wildfires were burning as of mid-July. And the heat is also melting Greenland’s ice at an alarming rate….
Total CO₂ emissions from the Arctic wildfires for July are estimated at about 79 megatons. That’s roughly double the emissions from the previous record-setting month: July 2004. That year also set a previous annual record, with total Arctic wildfire CO₂ emissions of about 110 megatons. 2019 has already smashed that record.”
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/arctic-burning-greenland-melting-thanks-record-heat
“July 2019 sea surface temperatures (SSTs) were the warmest for any July on record based on the ERSSTv5 data set. This was the 518th consecutive month where SSTs were warmer than the 20th Century average.”
Instead of trying to find more evidence for doomsday or pretending you can control something that is in God’s hands and not ours, I think the best thing you could do is begin preparing. Move inland if you are close to water or go as far north as you can. All species have been programmed to do just that over millions of years in response to changes within the environment, our own species included. Humans used to intrinsically want to move to vibrant places if their current place became undesirable, but it seems like in the past century or so we have become paralyzed to do what we have to do to better our lives.
Instead of trying to find more evidence for doomsday or pretending you can control something that is in God’s hands and not ours, I think the best thing you could do is begin preparing.
Why are all religious nuts so fucking stupid? We are destroying the environment, not god
Mossygrape is not a religious nut case.
Mossygrape is a TROLL, having a little fun.
Religious people don’t talk about evolution programming people over millions of years, etc.
Good catch!
Internet politics, by which I mean politics, has attracted a lot of attention from alt-right millennial incel gamer types. It appears POB has acquired a clique of “low energy beta cuck ‘s” who come here to shitpost under various monikers. Long story short- they’re angry cuz they can’t get laid (mostly due to their obnoxious politics, but they blame society) and they take it out on their keyboard cuz they don’t have much else to connect with (sad really). The objective is to degrade the comments section quality by initiating miles of low quality posts (shitposting) and irritating dialogue. A common interest amongst them is mass shooters and their manifestos, and they frequently attempt to inject the topic into comments section dialouge. Elliot Rodger is a hero to them because he killed a bunch of people and then himself when he couldn’t get laid (which is kinda ironic given that he was an eminently bang-able twink).
Oral contraceptive
Puts any potential partner off by topic of conversation.
it is religious nut cases that think that things are in gods hands.
Ridiculous.
pretending you can control something that is in God’s hands and not ours,
Hmmm. Do you smoke? If a smoker gets cancer, is that outside of their control?
Do you buy fire insurance? If you don’t, and you lose your house to a fire, was that outside of your control??
I Against I
Special Cases
I was a USAF pilot in the 70’s. We had to make sure we bundled up and wore mukluks when we flew in the Arctic because it was so cold there.
A buddy of mine was in the Air Force working the lines in Thule Greenland. He described the whiteouts to me. Weather can change fast!
Things are tough enough in the sub-arctic, let alone the Arctic.
I found “Thousand-Mile War: World War II in Alaska and the Aleutians” an interesting book where the men had to fight the weather more than the Japanese.
This part of the El Paso shooter’s manifesto is similar to many comments I’ve read here.
The American lifestyle affords our citizens an incredible quality of life. However, our lifestyle is destroying the environment of our country. The decimation of the environment is creating a massive
burden for future generations. Corporations are heading the destruction of our environment by shamelessly overharvesting resources. This has been a problem for decades. For example, this
phenomenon is brilliantly portrayed in the decades old classic “The Lorax”. Water sheds around the country, especially in agricultural areas, are being depleted. Fresh water is being polluted from farming and oil drilling operations. Consumer culture is creating thousands of tons of unnecessary plastic waste and electronic waste, and recycling to help slow this down is almost non-existent. Urban sprawl creates inefficient cities which unnecessarily destroys millions of acres of land. We even use god knows how many trees worth of paper towels just wipe water off our hands. Everything I have seen and heard in my short life has led me to believe that the average American isn’t willing to change their lifestyle, even if the changes only cause a slight inconvenience. The government is unwilling to tackle these issues beyond empty promises since they are owned by corporations. Corporations that also like immigration because more people means a bigger market for their products. I just want to say that I love the people of this country, but god damn most of y’all are just too stubborn to change your lifestyle. So the next logical step is to decrease the number of people in America using resources. If we can get rid of enough people, then our way of life can become more sustainable.
As far as I’ve seen the manifesto has not been released and the accounts that have been given for it are VERY different to this. DJ’s comment appears to be entirely fictitious.
NAOM
What I copied is directly from the 4 page manifesto posted to 8chan this morning, in advance of the shootings, and reported on at https://www.bellingcat.com/news/americas/2019/08/04/the-el-paso-shooting-and-the-gamification-of-terror/.
Link to download manifesto.
https://media.8ch.net/file_dl/7e1363f7757dbaa81b0be29cedfb854dbdd7c3559b1c5afa0e15d63402d39934.pdf/The_Inconvenient_Truth.pdf
Drudge posted the manifesto also, but the formatting is a little off.
https://drudgereport.com/flashtx.htm
DJ’s comment appears to be entirely fictitious.
Correct, NAOM! Digital Jake and Bruce Grano are both despicable hate mongering right wing trolls! I suggest both be summarily banned from this site, ASAP!
This part of the El Paso shooter’s manifesto is similar to many comments I’ve read here.
No. it absolutely is not!
https://www.bellingcat.com/news/americas/2019/08/04/the-el-paso-shooting-and-the-gamification-of-terror/
A number of social media profiles for the arrested shooter have been found on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter. These profiles are consistent with one another, and align with details that police have released about the shooter. His Twitter profile, left fallow since April 2017, suggests that at that time he projected the image of a relatively normal Trump-supporting Republican.
Bellingcat (also rendered bell¿ngcat) is an investigative journalism website that specializes in fact-checking and open-source intelligence (OSINT).[1] It was founded by the British journalist and former blogger Eliot Higgins in July 2014. Bellingcat publishes the findings of both professional and citizen journalist investigations into war zones, human rights abuses, and the criminal underworld. The site’s contributors also publish guides to their techniques, as well as case studies.[2]
Source Wikipedia
If the passage posted by Digital Jake is in fact part of the alleged shooters manifesto, then he is somewhat correct that it could have been written by any number of members on this site, except the last three sentences, especially the penultimate one. To my certain knowledge, no member of this site has ever suggested that an individual or group of individuals, right up to the level of nation states, take any action to “decrease the number of people in America using resources”, certainly not those who have already been born.
What we have said is that the population of the planet is in overshoot and that in light of that there is a very real risk that there will be real and sometimes deadly, violent confrontation over resources should scarcity arise. The whole point of us discussing Peak Oil and Global Warming is to try and figure out how likely scarcities are and in what sort of time frame they can be expected. Unless renewables and EVs can be ramped up at an unimaginable rate, it is quite likely that Peak Oil will usher in a period of scarcity (a shortfall in the production of required goods, particularly food) the likes of which are unprecedented in human history.
Suggesting that the outcomes of Peak Oil and Global Warming will be very unpleasant is a far cry from suggesting that living human populations should be “culled” through individual action.
Suggesting that the outcomes of Peak Oil and Global Warming will be very unpleasant is a far cry from suggesting that living human populations should be “culled” through individual action.
That, and the fact that most of us here do not sympathize with White Nationalists, and outright racists, which is mostly what that manifesto is about and we are mostly not in favor of a border wall between the US and Mexico… This guy swallowed Trump’s line that all of these problems we face are the fault of Mexican immigrants, he picked up a rifle drove a couple hundred miles and killed a bunch of innocent people.
So yeah, other than that minor insignificant detail, his manifesto could have been written by any of us!
There is a lot of blood on Trump’s and the GOP’s hands right now and I expect this kind of escalate!
Whoa there buddy! Let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves there! You wrote “So yeah, other than that minor insignificant detail, his manifesto could have been written by any of us!”
DJ wrote, “This part of the El Paso shooter’s manifesto is similar to many comments I’ve read here. “ (bold mine)
I wrote, “If the passage posted by Digital Jake is in fact part of the alleged shooters manifesto, then he is somewhat correct that it could have been written by any number of members on this site, except the last three sentences, especially the penultimate one.”.
I now realize that my sentence was not clear in stating that the passage/part from the manifest, excerpted and quoted in DJ’s comment,
is the it that could be seen as similar to some comments posted here, not the whole manifesto. I did not read the whole manifesto and doubt I ever will but, to be clear, I never meant to imply that the whole manifesto could have been written by any one of us. I was specifically referring to the first fourteen sentences of the excerpt quoted by DJ. Sorry for any misunderstanding.
Sorry for any misunderstanding.
No worries, I think we both know where each of us stands!
Digital Jake is a trouble maker and a Troll! And Trump and the GOP have blood on their hands! The mass shooting in El Paso is a direct result of What Trump has been doing and saying and tweeting for the last two and a half years!
Peace!
And now we can add Dayton Ohio mass shooting. Apparently young white guy targeting mostly black victims. Three mass shootings in three days. Coincidence? I think not… Fuck Trump!
Let me start by conveying my deepest sympathy to the thousands of surviving victims of this weekends needless gun violence.
The El Paso shooter clearly brought up some subjects that are discussed here regularly. It’s also clear by reading the manifesto the shooter was ignorant and poorly educated on the details of the subjects discussed here. Manipulated by racism, religion, privilege and hate.
Island friend, I found your original post clear. When 300 millions weapons(guns) are put in the hands of 300 million humans. Nothing good is going to come of it. Killing is part of human nature and killing machines shouldn’t be in the hands of the public in a civil society. Yes, the “planet is in overshoot” and most can’t see the forest for the trees.
This coming Tuesday will be the 8 year anniversary of the loss of my sister to gun violence.
Peace
Sorry for your loss!
No one should have to go through that.
Peace!
It’s absolutely disgusting and terrible how many people turn these horrific shootings into a chance to push a political agenda. All it does is simply continues to further divide us into left and right camps.
IMO, we all own the thoughts and choices we choose to act upon. People who choose to do these unbelievably awful acts of violence do not represent all Republicans, all Democrats, all Christians, all pro-Trump allies, all whites, all blacks, all Hispanics and, most certainly, not myself. It’s the person, not the people!
It’s evident that our world has forgotten and lost the ability to:
-Respect
-Follow rules & laws
-Be humble
-Be grateful
-Serve others
-Value human life
We have been transformed into a sickening society that has moved so far away from faith and the Golden Rule. We excuse our children’s awful behaviors and are so permissive that we have become friends with our child instead of parents. We blame something or somebody else for our children’s misdeeds. Nope!!! Parents, you need to embrace the windows of opportunity to teach and mentor your child!
We allow children to play violent videos games and watch violent and/or sexually suggestive movies. What are they learning to value? What are the powerful messages that are forever planted in their brains?
We created adults who are immune and desensitized to violent acts and, most importantly, have zero respect or regard for human life. The belief comes to be, if you don’t like someone or want them out of your life…just kill them.
Listen, everybody allowed this to happen, you included. And what’s worse is that we continue to create more and more adults with this same mindset! Because of the “but my kid isn’t like that” thing that parents convince themselves of.
I really wish it was as easy as a change in the White House that could fix this mess, but it most certainly isn’t. The change has to start at home, at your weekly place of worship, at school, in the stores, on the road…in short, it starts with YOU. Be a positive, contagious impact. Don’t be afraid to smile and say hello to EVERYONE. Look for ways to be a positive and helpful presence. Remember, if you go looking for it, you’ll more than likely find it!
Oh, spare me the bullshit Stanley. We have a president who has no respect, does not follow rules & laws, is not humble, grateful only to those who will kiss his ass, serves only himself and shows no value to human life.
We have been transformed into a sickening society that has moved so far away from faith and the Golden Rule.
Yes, and hate radio and hate television that has turned so many people to hate that they have elected a hate-filled president who continues to spew hate and racism.
Hi Ron,
We do part company once in a while, when it’s down to details such as whether we all die in the coming crash, or some of us survive, lol, but we’re always pretty much on the same page, in respect to ethics and to Trump, etc.
So let me fix one line of your seven twenty eight.
” grateful only to those who will kiss his ass” should read ” despises and betrays even those who kiss his ass” .
Trump grateful to anybody for any reason?
Not on your life!
“We allow children to play violent videos games and watch violent and/or sexually suggestive movies. What are they learning to value? What are the powerful messages that are forever planted in their brains?”
You can condemn Playboy magazines and ignore AK-47’s.
You are the problem Stanley because “but my kid(gun) isn’t like that”
Vote for fruitcakes, get your just desserts.
It is a small extract from the manifesto but is being taken out of context. The main target of the manifesto is migrants to the USA and he makes it clear they are his target. That paragraph is his justification for killing migrants to enable ‘citizens’ to enjoy their lifestyle. Less migrants more for the rest, the migrants being the ones creating the issues in that paragraph.
NAOM
Because I read Drudge, I shouldn’t be allowed here?
bruce. i speak for myself.
i come here to find out what other people have to say about issues of energy, environment, innovation, and related topics.
fact based information, or well formed opinion i attempt to share and take in.
but i have no interest, or tolerance for that matter, in belief system theology, partisan bullshit, sensationalized ‘news’, conspiracy theories, or hate mongering.
i suggest you consider studying this chart of rankings of media for partisanship and truth. you want to be well-informed- stick to the green box sources.
you want brainwashing, drift elsewhere.
https://www.adfontesmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Media-Bias-Chart_4.0_8_28_2018-min.jpg
feel free to use the ignore button on me, as will with you, if you tread on my sense of truth and correct intention
Fred,
Done.
Good job Dennis.
Thanks!
BTW! Someone did the right thing here as well!
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/08/05/1753252/8chan-goes-dark-after-hardware-provider-discontinues-service
8chan Goes Dark After Hardware Provider Discontinues Service
Internet hate forum 8chan has gone dark after web services company Voxility banned the site — and also banned 8chan’s new host Epik, which had been leasing web space from it. From a report:
Epik began working with 8chan over the weekend after web services giant Cloudflare cut off service, following the latest of at least three mass shootings linked to 8chan. But Stanford researcher Alex Stamos noted that Epik seemed to lease servers from Voxility, and when Voxility discovered the content, it cut ties with Epik almost immediately. “As soon as we were notified of the content that Epik was hosting, we made the decision to totally ban them,” Voxility business development VP Maria Sirbu told The Verge. Sirbu said it was unlikely that Voxility would work with Epik again. “This is the second situation we’ve had with the reseller and this is not tolerable,” she said.
Isn’t that roughly the idea of the villain Thanos in the latest Marvel movies, whose plan is to kill every second person in the universe to make things more sustainable?
Personally, I have no interest in reading the manifesto of some
Coward White Nationalist Asshole.
We get enough of that from the white house already.
Trump teaches hate.
https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=i+could+shoot+someone+on+5th+avenue&&view=detail&mid=9776E65D329F92BB03B89776E65D329F92BB03B8&rvsmid=0DDCAFAFE6A3320A40600DDCAFAFE6A3320A4060&FORM=VDQVAP
He knows exactly what he is doing ?
Yes he and his handlers know exactly what they are doing. And this commentary from Nigel Farage should really make your skin crawl!
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/uk/nigel-farage-describes-trump-s-go-back-remarks-as-genius-1.3976608
Nigel Farage describes Trump’s ‘go back’ remarks as ‘genius’
Brexit Party leader praised Trump’s words as being politically shrewd, despite saying they made him uncomfortable
Nigel Farage has described Donald Trump’s “go back” comments aimed at four congresswomen of colour as “genius”.
The US president’s remarks were widely condemned as racist after he told the four Democrats known as the Squad to return to the “broken and crime infested places from which they came”.
But the Brexit Party leader praised Mr Trump’s words as being politically shrewd, despite saying they made him feel uncomfortable.
In an interview with The Times, Mr Farage compared watching his ally’s “pretty brisk style” to being a child watching daleks on Doctor Who.
Mr Farage added: “I thought, ‘Dear, oh dear, oh dear’. You realise, 48 hours on, it was genius because what’s happened is the Democrats gather round the Squad, which allows him to say, ‘Oh look, the Squad are the centre of the Democratic Party’.
“He’s remarkably good at what he does.
There are some very sick puppies in both the UK and the US right now and I don’t see things ending well for either nation … Time to learn Mandarin, the next international language! Though if for nothing else, I hope they save English for ATC,
Cheers!
Better to be thought a fool now than known for one later.
What does ATC mean, Fred?
ATC = Air Traffic Control.
For which the Anglo Saxon Vernacular happens to be the internationally accepted standard.
Anyone who voted for trump has in effect said
that I too am a white supremacist, or
I tolerate them without pause.
Disgrace to the nation. In bed with the ideology of nazis, kkk, and the like.
Please Jake, let’s all do our best to keep anything to do with 8chan Shitposting away from POB. I can’t believe that even needs saying. Fuckin’ Millennials!
I hope these links will work. I copied them from QUORA.
Somebody posted them there, all nicely sorted out, in response to a question about whether Trump is really in deep doo doo, legally and politically.
Some or all of them are highly relevant to the overall discussion here of energy and the environment, and the politics associated therewith.
[1]Trump Sues Deutsche Bank And Capital One To Block Records’ Release
[2]Deutsche Bank fined for $10 billion Russian money-laundering scheme
[3]Trump’s oldest son said a decade ago that a lot of the family’s assets came from Russia
[4]What we (and the Mueller investigation) now know about Donald Trump Jr. and Russia
Walking off into the sunset must be looking pretty good to Sen. McConnell.
[1]2020 Senate Election Interactive Map
[2]Shifting demographics are the biggest threat to Republicans’ long-term viability
[3]Registering By Party: Where the Democrats and Republicans Are Ahead
[4]Explaining the stats behind the rise in reported hate crimes
[5]16th Street Baptist Church bombing – Wikipedia
[6]Forecasting the Next Recession in 2019 or 2020 | Guggenheim Investments
[7]A Trip Down Donald Trump’s Bankruptcy Memory Lane
I guess they don’t but anybody who wants them to work can just google the entire list, and that will probably pull up the QUORA answer, and from THERE, they will work.
Time to seize the passports of the entire trump entourage, and freeze the financial assets.
I don’t care about impeachment.
“— least of all a racist failed businessman and television-huckster son of a slumlord from Queens and an immigrant from Scotland —”
Our Pres!
If you look at the posted posted by Mr Island, of the top ten coal consuming states of the USA,
seven of the ten have very good wind resource and could replace much of the coal consumption over the next 10 years if they so choose.
Texas, Missouri, Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin (in order of consumption)
Look at the map- Average wind at 100m
dull orange is and above is good, certainly feasible.
By the way, it is glorious to live where there is no coal smoke within 500 miles. Especially when the forest fires are dormant.
https://www.nrel.gov/gis/images/100m_wind/awstwspd100onoff3-1.jpg
should say ‘list posted’ on the first line. Edit function not working at the moment.
Fred, I expect you know this but….
OCEANS ARE WARMING FASTER THAN PREDICTED
Roughly 90 percent of warming caused by human carbon emissions is absorbed by the oceans. Now, new research suggests these oceans are heating up about 40 percent faster than previously estimated. And, interestingly, since the 1950s, our oceans have been absorbing at least 10 times as much energy annually as humans consume worldwide in a year.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/oceans-are-warming-faster-than-predicted/
Yeah, I was just reading a paper on the slow down of the AMOC…
And that’s just the tip pf the iceberg, (pun intended)
Cheers!
HARVARD SCIENTISTS, FUNDED BY BILL GATES, TO BEGIN SPRAYING PARTICLES INTO THE SKY TO DIM THE SUN
“If all goes as planned, the Harvard team will be the first in the world to move solar geoengineering out of the lab and into the stratosphere, with a project called the Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment (SCoPEx). The first phase — a US$3-million test involving two flights of a steerable balloon 20 kilometres above the southwest United States — could launch as early as the first half of 2019. Once in place, the experiment would release small plumes of calcium carbonate, each of around 100 grams, roughly equivalent to the amount found in an average bottle of off-the-shelf antacid.”
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-08-03/harvard-scientists-funded-bill-gates-begin-spraying-particles-sky-dim-sun
despite you referencing a sham info source (ok, perhaps slightly harsh),
there are many other sources of info on this story dating back to Nov 2018.
So its real.
But, who is the authority that consents to experimenting with the atmosphere?
I must have missed the global agreement on that.
I suppose its like pollution- anything goes.
‘And the idea of even doing a small-scale experiment unlikely to have significant effects faces opposition. “We have at least three powerful governments that want to tinker with the climate — USA, Russia and China — who would have no hesitation if they could unilaterally control the planet’s thermostat,” Silvia Ribeiro of the anti-geoengineering ETC Group said in a 2017 statement. “This is absolutely the wrong time for naïve scientists to give them the tools and the excuse to avoid their international commitments and conduct high-risk, unilateral techno-fixes that threaten everybody’s climate.”
“The Harvard team, led by scientists Frank Keutsch and David Keith, has been working on the SCoPEx project for several years and revealed in a recent article in Nature that it would launch the first phase of the experiment as early as the first half of 2019.
While geoengineering has long been controversial, the recent United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report highlighted its potential as a Plan B if global warming can’t be capped at a safe level of 1.5 degrees Celsius.
One of the panel’s chief concerns about solar geoengineering was the absence of global field experiments, so the progress of SCoPEx, the first such early stage test, will be closely watched.”
https://www.dezeen.com/2018/12/11/first-solar-geoengineering-experiment/
Plan B if global warming can’t be capped at a safe level of 1.5 degrees Celsius.
Thats way in the rear view mirror.
Geoengineering may be a last grasp for a fading species.
“Geoengineering may be a last grasp for a fading species.”
True but a desperate species (us) will try anything when pushed. Why wouldn’t we?
BTW — According to the Nature article, Keutsch and Keith are aiming to launch the experiment in the spring of 2019 but want an external advisory committee to review the SCoPEx project before the experiment goes ahead.
I think geoengineering will end up causing unforeseen problems.
What Could Go Wrong? 😉
I agree—
Oh, did I mention, almost all environmental problems, from chemical pollution to global warming, are the unexpected consequences of modern technologies.
Geoengineering may be a last grasp for a fading species.
While geoengineering may indeed be a last grasp, fading implies a slow and gradual process. I happen to think we are going to smash into a brick wall at full speed!
Yes, we have built many traps, boxed ourselves into a world that appears to crumble before our very eyes. A place where actions are met with anti-actions, where life is met with destruction and nothing seems to work. A limbo world of sardonic delusion.
The Hollow Men
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwcP3NOCeiE
Perhaps the our world will end with a whimper but only after crashing into the wall…
I remember years ago when I first moved to Florida driving home with my then wife, my mother in law and my infant son in the car seat and pulling up to a crosswalk on the beach. A guy carrying a gallon jug of water in one hand and his dry cleaning in the other stepped into the cross walk just as a van drove through a red light plowing into him. I’ll never forget the guy being thrown in front of our car and jug of water exploding! I jumped out of the car but it was obvious the guy was dead on impact but I got to hear his final burbling whimper of a breath. Then I started screaming at the guy in the van who had stopped a hundred feet down the road.
In hindsight, that was completely pointless!
Cheers!
Hello gang,
I’ve been an avid follower since TOD days but this is my first post. Was in deep water o&G for about 10 years and now run the Energy Efficiency and Demand Response business lines for an F80. I’ve found the experience of both production and conservation have given me a bit of a different perspective at times, I look forward to engaging more.
Interesting link of the day I found:
http://ev-sales.blogspot.com/2019/07/global-top-20-june-2019.html?m=1&utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app
Shows global EV market share YTD is about 2.4% and 3.4% in June’s, so appears to be accelerating with 67% annual growth.
I calculated the avoided BOPD using the approx. 1.1M EVs sold YTD with and estimated 12k miles per year and 35mpg of the traditional ICE fleet ( may be somewhat off, didn’t source this). I also assumed around 20 gallons of Gas per barrel (42 gal) of oil.
This led me to an avoided demand of 47k BOPD from the EVs sold this year. On an annualized rate that’s close to 100k BOPD and seems to be becoming a material source of demand destruction.. thoughts?
I don’t necessarily think all the assumptions in this report will actually pan out as predicted but it might be a starting point for a discussion.
https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/McKinsey/Industries/Oil%20and%20Gas/Our%20Insights/Global%20Energy%20Perspective%202019/McKinsey-Energy-Insights-Global-Energy-Perspective-2019_Reference-Case-Summary.ashx
That McKinsey report includes a projection for peak CO2 emission,
in the mid 2020’s.
I don’t see how that jives with their projection-
“Global total primary energy demand plateaus after 2035 despite strong population expansion and economic growth”
They expect CO2 emission to peak with coal consumption peak.
Is that likely?
I expect CO2 peak emission to be in the 2030’s, due more to depletion, than to renewable deployment.
On page 29 they show a carbon emission chart.
Even with their assumptions (which look a little optimistic to me, but I admit perhaps they are dead on), the chart shows that by 2050 the carbon emmisions are still about 80% of their peak values in the mid 2020’s.
Very interesting report.
Its a start Joe.
When it [demand destruction of oil by EV adoption] increases 10 fold,
we will have reached the amount of fuel produced by the corn ethanol industry (approx 1 mbpd).
40% of the corn acreage is devoted to ethanol consumption. Prime farmland.
Damn, we’ve got a long way to go.
From Canada’s very own Rex Murphy:
THERE’S NO HYPOCRITE LIKE A RICH, JET-SETTING ANTI-GLOBAL-WARMING ONE
“This week the richest of the rich, the famousest of the famous, the most pretentious of the pretentious, convened a three-day summit in a high-luxury resort on the island of Sicily to — discuss? bemoan? illustrate? — the crisis of climate inflammation wrought by fiendish fossil fuels. It was sponsored by the two founders of Google (personal worth, 2017, US$81 billion). How did this coven of illuminati get to Sicily? Did they walk and row? Come by Greyhound? Hitchhike? Nein. Official count of the private jets wafting into Palermo air for the “great consult” stands at 114. This for a maximum 300 people attending — three persons per jet.
Not all came from the carbon-rich sky. Some came by personal super-yacht. Eric Smidt, CEO of something called Harbor Freight Tools, came on a 69-metre luxury barge Intrepid (US$150 million); a New Zealand tycoon cleaved the Mediterranean on Andromeda ($US165 million); and David Geffen floated in on Rising Sun ($US400 million).
For a little sightseeing, high-fuel, 200-grand Maseratis were available for all. To their credit, there were no plastic straws.
https://mail.yahoo.com/d/folders/1/messages/AGFpx3dWMGWRXUck-AeVaPP3KFo?.rand=fsv4m092epts3
“Ad hominem (Latin for “to the person”[1]), short for argumentum ad hominem, typically refers to a fallacious argumentative strategy whereby genuine discussion of the topic at hand is avoided by instead attacking the character, motive, or other attribute of the person making the argument, or persons associated with the argument, rather than attacking the substance of the argument itself.[2] ”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem
“Rex Murphy is a vocal critic of arguments for anthropogenic climate change and proposed policy responses for it, such as the Green Shift.[6]”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rex_Murphy
“Conservatives who reject climate change action tend to use two “modes” of hypocrisy discourse. The first is an “individual lifestyle outrage” mode that cultivates outrage about the hypocritical behavior and lifestyle choices of climate activists to undermine the urgency and moral need for climate change action. ”
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2018.00049/full
“Being an asshole is not a logical fallacy” ~ Ben Burgis
What the Ad Hominem Fallacy Isn’t
https://youtu.be/eyBBMLPnNcQ
Rex Murphy has no real argument that I can detect, he’s just an opinionating asshole.
ROFL! Assuming that he has no real arguments, then perhaps we would not even be guilty of committing an ‘Ad Anal Orifice Fallacy’, should we gift him with a butt plug, just to shut him up. The question remains, would he get the point?! 😉
LOL Yeah, Rex is a contrarian, one who marches to his own drum.
it’s worth reiterating the main headlines, which are that Chukchi Sea ice is at record low levels for the time of year, and Arctic-wide sea ice stands a chance of breaking the record low from 2012.
http://ak-wx.blogspot.com/2019/08/sea-ice-update.html?m=1
Hell of a time to be alive, peak oil and climate change wise. Should be a hell of a ruckus I figure.
“Should be a hell of a ruckus, I figure.”
is that the American version of the old proported Chinese saying
“may you live in interesting times” ?
Summer 2019 July Arctic Sea Ice Outlook
https://youtu.be/Dda9agEL7Is
Worth a look, I believe.
Why is he so happy?!
Perhaps because the sooner this mass extinction murder suicide rampage is over the better?
It used to be thought that stupid people were stupid because they lacked access to information. The internet has shown that to be false.
Conspiracy theories like QAnon could fuel ‘extremist’ violence, FBI says
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/aug/01/conspiracy-theories-fbi-qanon-extremism
The new ‘stupid’ are those who fail to properly distinguish truth from false [information].
Who fail to be analytical, who fail to develop the knowledge of history and science to able to put things in proper context.
Who fail to identify a tyrant, even though all the warning signs are there.
We better improve rapidly.
Trump was easy to spot as an anti-democracy narcissist.
The next tyrant to come along , from the right or left, may not be so easy to spot, and may be much more effective than the current bozo.
PSEUDOSCIENCE IS TAKING OVER SOCIAL MEDIA – AND PUTTING US ALL AT RISK
“When it comes to shaping the online conversation around climate change, a new study suggests that deniers and conspiracy theorists might hold an edge over those believing in science. Researchers found evidence that most YouTube videos relating to climate change oppose the scientific consensus that it’s primarily caused by human activities…
Further rapid advances in digital technologies will also ensure that misinformation arrives in unexpected formats and with varying levels of sophistication. Duplicating an official’s letterhead or strategically using key words to manipulate online search engines is the tip of the iceberg. The emergence of artificial intelligence-related developments such as DeepFakes – highly realistic doctored videos—is likely to make it a lot harder to spot misinformation.”
https://phys.org/news/2019-08-pseudoscience-social-media.html
Grand Solar Minimum is coming. And..?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhNfOZ6YLbc
Researchers found evidence that most YouTube videos relating to climate change oppose the scientific consensus that it’s primarily caused by human activities…
Conversations such as this one might be an antidote.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Bx2JLVjBdM
The Arctic & Siberia is on fire, peat is burning- C02 is rising. Join the discussion.
And….
STOP ABUSING LAND, SCIENTISTS WARN
“Human activities have led to the degrading of soils, expanded deserts, felled forests, driven out wildlife, and drained peatlands. In the process, land has been turned from an asset that combats climate change into a major source of carbon. This land abuse must be stopped to avoid catastrophic climate heating.”
“Their report will say we need to make hard choices about how we use the world’s soil. And it will offer another warning that our hunger for red meat is putting huge stress on the land to produce animal feed, as well as contributing to half of the world’s emissions of methane — another greenhouse gas. The document’s being finalized this week among scientists and government officials on the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It will become the most authoritative report yet on the way we use and abuse the land. Scientists hope it will give the issue of land use greater prominence in negotiations on climate change. At its heart will be the paradox that the land can be a source of CO2 emissions, or a sink for CO2 emissions.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-49149761
Interview: Supporting the Soil Carbon Sponge
by Jessica Smith | Jun 19, 2019 | Voices Ad Channel | 4 comments
Microbiologist, climate scientist and founder of Healthy Soils Australia Walter Jehne discusses climate and soil health.
Interviewed by Tracy Frisch
WALTER JEHNE is an internationally known Australian soil microbiologist and climate scientist and the founder of Healthy Soils Australia. He is passionate about educating farmers, policymakers and others about “the soil carbon sponge” and its crucial role in reversing and mitigating climate change. His work shows how we can safely cool the climate by repairing our disrupted hydrological cycles. That project requires us to return some of the excess carbon in the atmosphere to the soil, where it belongs. In 2017, he participated in an invitation-only United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization conference in Paris aimed at bringing soil into the next Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report.
Jehne was an early researcher on glomalin, mycorrhizal fungi and root ecology. He grew up in the bush, surrounded by nature. At university he chose the field of microbiology because it encompasses all life processes in microcosm. As a young man he started his career working on forest dieback diseases in relation to soil microbial interactions. Later he “switched to the dark side” when he realized that the disease fungi were actually our friends because they’re involved with symbiosis, and disease serves to remove and recycle moribund organisms.
Of course, a new and emerging cult is the flat-earthers.
Yes, they actually believe that the earth is flat raher than spherical, and they have all kinds of you tube videos to convert you to their ‘science’.
And whats really cool- they have their own dating site.
https://flatearthsingles.com/
Lol wow. We are on the express way to idiocracy.
I was dumb enough to click the flat earth dating site link, just to see what sort of people hang out there.
I’ve met hundreds of nut cases over the years, and thousands of hard core Christians who believe in the literal interpretation of the KJB, but never yet have I met even ONE flat earther, so I wanted to look at the site.
It’s malware. Don’t go there, unless you have a good up to date antivirus program. I don’t, and it locked me up in a fake Firefox update download scam. I have shut down and tried Firefox three times, and it’s not going away by itself.
So now I’m using a different browser, which is still working. Off to the store tomorrow for a new antivirus program I guess. But there’s nothing on THIS old computer that really matters, no banking, no valuable files, etc. This one is my throw away hundred buck refurb. Anything that matters is on another one, and they are not networked.
Having read your warning, I opened the link using the option “Open Link in New Private Window”, which creates a “sand boxed” instance of Firefox. When you close a Private Window, nothing from that window is preserved. Nothing, you wont find it in history and any pop-up windows that are spawned are also “private windows” so nothing from them will be preserved either. The web site did pop up a widow with the following
Of course it wanted me to register to receive the phone and there was a small shipping charge ($1) that I would have to pay, no doubt requiring me to do a credit card transaction. How dumb do these people think people are? Anybody who can afford to give away a $700 phone, can afford to pay a dollar to ship it!
Anyway I digress. It also helps that I am not using Windows but Linux (Ubuntu 16.04 LTS). You really should give it a whirl! Ask one of your local whiz kids if they’ve tried it and if they haven’t, tell them an on line acquaintance told you it’s a breeze to install, a breeze to keep updated and a breeze to use! 😉 If you are not running any applications that specifically require Windows you should be fine.
They can download it (free) install it on a thumb drive and as long as your computer can boot from a USB device you should be able to run it off the thumb drive to try it out. If you computer is slow, there are versions that cater to slower computers. Ubuntu comes with Firefox and a free (open source) office suite (LibreOffice) and there are a ton of open source apps to choose from in the “software” app. Disclaimer: I do not have any financial interest in any open source or free software companies or organizations. 😉
Oops, so sorry OFM.
I had briefly opened it with no ill-effect, but I didn’t shop around.
No need to go to the store try these
https://www.clamav.net/downloads (scroll down for Windows version)
http://www.clamwin.com/
https://www.avg.com/en-us/free-antivirus-download
And to avoid virii
https://www.debian.org/distrib/
NAOM
I find it interesting, but not SURPRISING, that the author of this article studiously avoids mentioning peak oil, or the price of oil, as a factor in the transition from oil burner to electric cars.
https://www.businessinsider.com/can-tesla-survive-the-great-auto-disruption-2019-8
And for what it’s worth, I don’t see any reason why Tesla can’t compete with the big boys in building cars by the millions, eventually, given that Tesla management appears to be a decade or so ahead of all the conventional manufacturers in respect to doing new things new ways.
The conventional manufacturers are all locked into the conventional dealership model, and that alone is a big enough competitive disadvantage to allow Tesla to out perform them, given that Tesla may also have a patent firewall worth more than a big manufacturing infrastructure investment.
The article also studiously avoids mentioning that fully autonomous cars may well mean the end of the big manufacturers in any case, by reducing the market for new cars by as much as ….. who knows? Maybe as much as eighty or ninety percent over the next twenty or thirty years?
Once people get used to taking robotaxis, there won’t be much in the way of a real incentive to own a flashy car, and the only real reason there are hundreds of models, and thousands of colors,etc, is that cars are more about status and vanity than actual transportation.
Robotaxis can and will be built like heavy duty trucks…. fast, easy and YES, ALSO cheap to repair, so that they will last five or ten years running around the clock around the calendar, and then they can be and will be run thru a refurb facility to be mechanically reconditioned as necessary, and to restore the shine and new car smell.
Such robocars might last twenty to forty years before technical innovations render them obsolete, and not worth the cost of reconditioning them to be functionally new again. In that case, they can be sold into the used market, along with used solar panels, to poor people in poor countries who will be more than glad to have them.
Islandboy has for the last couple of years been telling us that China is the leader in renewable installations and is the country we should be emulating.
I on the other hand have been saying that China is run by a ruthless National Socialist dictatorship which is a master in propaganda. and that their green image is a very thin veneer to fool easily fooled people.
The facts speak for themselves.
China’s coal consumption has increased for over 2 years, removing most of the declines of the previous 3 years.
https://www.bp.com/content/dam/bp/business-sites/en/global/corporate/pdfs/energy-economics/statistical-review/bp-stats-review-2019-full-report.pdf
China’s gas consumption at the same time is increasing at phenomenal rates.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/08/reuters-america-update-1-chinas-surging-2019-gas-demand-will-require-better-integration-for-end-users.html
If China and India had opted for wind and solar 30 years ago, global warming could have been averted. Instead they opted to burn coal and gas. Instead of building mass electric transportation when they had the opportunity to do.
http://www.bjreview.com.cn/eye/txt/2011-08/22/content_385101.htm
They opted to fill their cities with cars.
https://www.thoughtco.com/chinas-traffic-troubles-687418
https://www.indiatoday.in/mail-today/story/delhi-traffic-congestion-police-ask-transport-commissioner-categorize-interstate-buses-terminal-points-963026-2017-02-28
Global warming is now coming down our throats and to avert it would take a diversion of man power, capital and government policies which realistically will not happen.
Hugo- “If China and India had opted for wind and solar 30 years ago, global warming could have been averted. ”
Same idea applies to places like USA and Britain.
Even more so.
And a big difference was that the richer countries could have spent the money on it, but didn’t.
In 1990 (30 yrs ago), the GDP per capita [in 1990 International Dollars] was
India $1,200
China $1,800
UK $16,000
USA $23,000
FOSSIL FUEL SUBSIDIES ARE A STAGGERING $5 TN PER YEAR
“A new study finds 6.5% of global GDP goes to subsidizing dirty fossil fuels. There are two key takeaway messages. First, fossil fuel subsidies are enormous and they are costs that we all pay, in one form or another. Second, the subsidies persist in part because we don’t fully appreciate their size. These two facts, taken together, further strengthen the case to be made for clean and renewable energy. Clean energy sources do not suffer from the environmental costs that plague fossil fuels.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2017/aug/07/fossil-fuel-subsidies-are-a-staggering-5-tn-per-year
Hickory
When the US and Europe industrialized there were no options to coal. The mistakes of ripping up public transport was also made and the lessons there for all to learn from.
China and India had golden opportunities not to make the same mistakes.
They also had plenty of money since 1990 and….
Yet they found the money for a space program.
https://www.space.com/topics/china-space-program
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISRO_missions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Armed_Forces
In 1980 Britain consumed 140 million tonnes of coal now it uses 15. In that time China consumption has gone from 600 million tonnes to 3,500,000,000 tonnes.
Hugo,
Point taken. And I would certainly applaud if they would hasten their retreat from coal.
But it pales in comparison to the weak effort of the developed and wealthier countries, to clean up their act. The USA and UK could have done so much more, so faster.
I take it you have never been to India, to see how ‘wealthy’ they are.
by the way- you don’t have to act like an ass when discussing these issues. Maybe try more fiber in the diet.
Hickory
You do not have to make silly irrelevant comments about how much money the average Indian has. I know how much they have.
The country spent it’s money on nuclear weapons, a space program, a huge army, vast amounts of investment in coal fired power stations, vast amounts of money building roads for cars. Just like China did.
What counts here is tonnes of coal burned and China being a 1/6 of the world population burns half the coal in the world.
It’s only in the last ten years or so that the wind and solar power industries have progressed, technically and in terms of costs, to the point that they were in a real sense of the word capable of SERIOUSLY contributing to displacing fossil fuels.
It’s pure holier than thou bullshit, moral preening and posturing, to criticize the Chinese on this point, considering that we ALL do what we believe we MUST do….
.There’s zero doubt in MY mind at least, that the Chinese leadership HAS been doing, in general terms, what THEY believe is best for China, and the people of China. Why? Because other than enriching themselves personally, a strong China is not only the best thing for the people of China, it’s the best thing for THEM, the leaders, as well.
I remember well reading a book written by a defector from the old USSR, a man who was involved in building aircraft who managed to get out. The MANAGER of the aircraft plant where he worked had a LARGE and well secured root cellar…… stocked mostly with potatoes and cabbages….. a man with a position that would have here in the USA at that time have put him on EASY STREET, with a big house, country club membership, trophy wife, luxury cars, exotic vacations…….. and money left over to invest.
Smart people in such positions understand that if they want to STAY on top, they had best be on top in a COUNTRY ON TOP, a country that’s industrialized, with a powerful military establishment..with cutting edge industries, with a well educated work force….. and China has been making incredibly fast progress on all these fronts.
This is not to say Chinese leaders haven’t enriched themselves along the way and trampled some people in and out of the country into the dirt, without a second thought, etc.
It takes a nincompoop to think they could as a PURELY PRACTICAL MATTER have spent the money they spent on industrializing across the board, and thus raising the living standards of their people, on renewables previous to the last ten or fifteen years.
Such a policy would have been political and economic suicide for them, as leaders, and as a nation.
I believe in staying pedal to the metal on renewables, but there WASN’T any pedal to put to the metal, as a practical matter, up until VERY recently.
The ONLY way wind and solar farms can be built on the grand scale is within the economic framework of an INDUSTRIALIZED country…….. and not just a little one, such as say Denmark or Norway. Such small countries CAN’T build wind turbines or solar panels….. unless they outsource so many of the necessary materials and parts that they just ASSEMBLE them.
Hugotroll totally ignores the massive installation of solar by China.
NAOM
In addition he has twisted whatever I said by saying that I have proclaimed that, China is “the country we should be emulating”. When Germany installed 3 GW in one month some time ago I also suggested that Germany is “the country we should be emulating”. Why not bring up that?
I have said before that solar PV is one of the closest things to magic I have seen. This “magic” is becoming more and more affordable for more people and is showing the promise of scaling up to the volumes required to make a significant dent in global carbon emissions. Any country that installs massive amounts of solar in a short time is an indication of what can be achieved if the will to do it exists.
The fact is that interests aligned with the FF industries basically own the US and Australian Federal governments and have significant influence over western media content. These interests are perpetuating subsidies to FF industries as pointed out by Doug above. China has the advantage of being less prone to direct FF industry influence and more inclined to plan over longer time horizons than western democratic election cycles tend to encourage.
islandboy
Why don’t you educate yourself and go to China and see what it is actually like.
bring a good supply of face masks.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/mar/12/china-smog-pollution-beijing
At the moment you are both ignorant and deluded.
Pray tell what exactly it is I am ignorant of and what makes you think I am deluded? Just because I do not constantly harp on rising emissions, rising global temperatures, increasing ecosystem degradation and other gloomy subjects does not mean I am not aware of them. I happen to want to focus on stuff that counters the gloom and doom around here and if that makes me deluded then I am guilty as charged. If by suggesting that it is technically possible for the world to go 100% renewable, I am deluded, then we can blame Mark Z. Jacobson and the good folks at Stanford University for publishing this study back in 2017. Why don’t you take it up with them and tell them to stop deluding people?
As for being ignorant, how many Chinese people do you know? In my neck of the woods there are hundreds if not thousands of Chinese people, mainly engaged in commerce of one form or another. Venture into any town in the island with a large enough population and you are 100% certain to find at least one “Chinie Shop” staffed by “Chinie people” as they are called in the local vernacular. All of the four major road improvement projects in the capital city are being done by a Chinese firm (China Harbour Engineering Company) and there are at least two Chinese construction firms engaged in a slew of multi-story commercial and residential projects in the city. The Chinese also operate a substantial number of restaurants in the capital city and I used to buy meals from a couple of them regularly but, have stopped because their smallest servings are too large for my liking.
Around here the Chinese are not known for engaging in leisure activities and are showing up locals when it comes to their work ethic, working long hours including holidays and weekends and nights when necessary. For example, a construction method they use is to enclose reinforcing steel networks in forms for walls, with all plumbing and electrical conduits installed and then pour concrete into the forms. This is done an entire floor at a time including the ceiling/floor and once they start pouring concrete, usually early in the morning, they do not stop until the job is finished. They regularly pour concrete way into the night, much to the chagrin of neighborhood residents with concrete mixer trucks passing back and forth the entire time. The result is that they have developed a reputation for completing their projects on time and within the budget.
The Chinese are also known for very affordable electronics and furniture with questionable quality but, increasingly as we all know “everything” is made in China. The Chinese are also known for counterfeit products and I can cite the example of an expensive, Swedish made audio power amplifier used for concert sound systems of the sort that might be used in the Wembley Stadiumthat has several Chinese outfits making very close copies (clones) at a fraction of the price ($700 as opposed to 4,500). The fact that one can easily source these products on Chinese e-commerce sites supports the idea that, Chinese government has not placed much emphasis on protecting the intellectual property of others.
Finally, I watched the Beijing Olympics. With Jamaica being considered the sprint capital of the world, with five out of the top ten, all time, best 100m times for both men and women belonging to Jamaicans and the island being home to the current men’s 100m record holder, there is hardly a Jamaican that does not watch the sprints at the Olympics. There was a ton of coverage of the smog issues in Beijing at the time. I am well aware of the issues of air pollution in China and in fact, one of the EV projects I have brought up here, the bus fleet of the city of Shenzen was partially a result of trying to improve the air quality of the city.
So I am left to assume that I am ignorant because I do not constantly remind people that China is “run by a ruthless National Socialist dictatorship” and is rife with pollution and degraded ecosystems. How about I leave that task to you? Happy now?
I believe a government that cares for people will almost surely care for the environment in which they live. It is impossible to care for human being and at the same time destroy the air they breath and the water they drink.
https://www.apnews.com/61cdf7f5dfc34575aa643523b3c6b3fe
This is the reality of China’s government, a vicious destroyer of people and the environment.
This is the reality of China’s government, a vicious destroyer of people and the environment.
Really?! Well, based on their population numbers alone, there must be something seriously wrong with the execution of their master plan!
The current population of China is 1,420,519,605 as of Sunday, August 4, 2019, based on the latest United Nations estimates. China population is equivalent to 18.41% of the total world population.
Though I have to admit, that that many people is probably not too great for the environment… Then again neither is this:
The current world population is 7.7 billion as of August 2019 according to the most recent United Nations estimates elaborated by Worldometers.
If we look at the Chinese per capita ecological footprint there are 80 countries in the world that are doing a much better job at destroying the environment than the Chinese!
https://www.zujiwangluo.org/ecological-footprint-results/
On a per capita basis, China’s Ecological Footprint ranked 81st in the world, at 2.5 gha. This is less than the world average per capita Ecological Footprint of 2.7 gha but still larger than the world average biocapacity available per person, 1.7 gha. If everybody lived like the average Chinese, we would need 1.5 Earths.
So in the final analysis, The planet has a big problem which is, global ecological overshoot coupled with the fact that all of industrial civilization is a heat engine. The Chinese are a major contributor to these problems but are far from being the worst offenders!
Too bad we only have one planet!
Cheers!
I doubt that a few EVs will solve this one.
HEALTHCARE INDUSTRY IS A MAJOR SOURCE OF HARMFUL EMISSIONS
“Climate change presents an unprecedented public health emergency and the global healthcare sector is contributing to the worldwide crisis, argues Jodi Sherman, M.D., associate professor of anesthesiology at the Yale School of Medicine in a commentary published Aug. 2 in the Journal of the American Medical Association…
The U.S. healthcare system contributes 10% of the nation’s carbon emissions and 9% of harmful non-greenhouse air pollutants. (Air pollution was associated with an estimated 9 million premature deaths worldwide in 2015 or 16% of all deaths.) Its rate of greenhouse gas emissions increased 30% between 2006 and 2016. The healthcare sectors of the US, Australia, Canada, and England combined emit an estimated 748 million metric tons of greenhouse gases each year, an output greater than the carbon emissions of all but six nations worldwide.”
https://phys.org/news/2019-08-healthcare-industry-major-source-emissions.html
It would have been nice if they had broken down where the emissions come from. I read one article where an anesthesiologist had switched from one anesthetic to another, both available on their hospital carts, and slashed GHG emissions. The substitute was also a lot cheaper and results just as good.
NAOM
Yes, one has to go to the references of references to get some numbers.
Here’s one ref on anesthesia, you’re correct – choice of agent makes 10 fold difference in global warming effect:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2542519617301626?via%3Dihub
From there one can get the pdf
Apparently some hope to move to Xenon, with no global warming potential
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenon#Anesthesia
Thanks, that was what I had seen though through a different source. As for Xenon, I find it strange that an ‘inert’ gas can have such interactions, interesting.
NAOM
Not to mention the millions of tons of disposable stuff that hospitals and medical facilities dump daily.
I have seen the electrical panels and cables that supply the medical imaging departments- they are massive.
Good luck training all the ER docs, surgeons, critical care docs, internists, etc, to stop ordering CT, MRI, US. Accurate diagnosis is invaluable. 24-7 depending on the size of the hospital. The volume of these studies is tremendous. These machines don’t just turn off and on at a whim.
If electricity was rationed to these machines, civilization would not end, but hospital survival outcomes from things like trauma and cancer would decline.
I wrote some related articles 50 or so years ago.Since that time medicine has become an even larger component of the US economy. In many towns and cities across the US the local hospital is the largest employer. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6023227
Robert, It’s nice to have you and your wealth of knowledge contributing to the blogs over the last several years. Thank you.
Found page 1. I am less concerned about radiation exposure today. https://www.jclinepi.com/article/0021-9681(67)90001-X/pdf
Hi Doug,
I also have doubts that EVs will solve all problems. It is a very easy straw man though to argue against, because nobody advocates for that position. 🙂
More forest raking required? Yup, that’ll fix it.
ECOLOGICAL LAND GRAB: FOOD VS FUEL VS FORESTS
“The overlapping crises of climate change, mass species extinction, and an unsustainable global food system are on a collision course towards what might best be called an ecological land grab. Coping with each of these problems will require a different way of using of Earth’s lands, and as experts crunch the numbers it is becoming unnervingly clear that there may not be enough terra firma to go around.”
https://phys.org/news/2019-08-ecological-food-fuel-forests.html
Great podcast! Lots of food for thought. Gives a small window into how science has been advancing with access to new tools such as big data and AI and how that is transforming the very process of science itself.
The historian of science may be tempted to claim that when paradigms change, the world itself changes with them. Led by a new paradigm, scientists adopt new instruments and look in new places. even more important, during revolutions, scientists see new and different things when looking with familiar instruments in places they have looked before. It is rather as if the professional community had been suddenly transported to another planet where familiar objects are seen in a different light and are joined by unfamiliar ones as well.
Thomas Kuhn
https://www.datacamp.com/community/podcast/data-science-ecology
Data Science and Ecology (with Christie Bahlai)
August 20th, 2018
MACHINE LEARNING
The intersection of data science and ecology and the adoption of techniques such as machine learning in academic research.
https://www.datacamp.com/community/blog/data-science-ecology-transcript
Data Science and Ecology (Transcript)
The intersection of data science and ecology and the adoption of techniques such as machine learning in academic research.
Same conversation on Youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4p3SX4cayR8
I guess Phys.org is just reporting some of what is going on…
To me the article just underscores the extent of our massive collective denial about reality.
There are at least a dozen examples in there that I would describe as classic examples of cognitive dissonance!
But this one stands out as a real doozy!:
Nearly all Paris-compatible climate models slot in a major role for a two-step process that draws down carbon by growing biofuels, and then captures CO2 released when the plants are burned to generate energy.
The amount of “bioenergy with carbon capture and storage”, or BECCS, required in coming decades will depend on how quickly we sideline fossil fuels and shrink our carbon footprints.
BECCS should stand for ‘Bullshit Energy Carbon Capture Scam!’ It is pure sci-fi fantasy, pixie dust and doesn’t scale. For the IPCC to include that in their modeling and scenarios is beyond disingenuous, to say the least!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5voJj0DMHiI&t=414s
Kevin Anderson & Hugh Hunt – A Rule Book for the Climate Casino
hear hear….
Flat Earthers: believe it or not, this is NOT a hoax.
500 YEARS ON, HOW MAGELLAN’S VOYAGE CHANGED THE WORLD
‘Ferdinand Magellan set off from Spain 500 years ago on an epoch-making voyage to sail all the way around the globe for the first time. The Portuguese explorer was killed by islanders in the Philippines two years into the adventure, leaving Spaniard Juan Sebastian Elcano to complete the three-year trip. But it is Magellan’s name that is forever associated with the voyage.”
https://phys.org/news/2019-08-years-magellan-voyage-world.html
No way in hell the Brits would allow a Spaniard to have credit for the 1st to circumnavigate the Planet. A pix I took of the JS Elcano “sailing” in Pensacola Bay for the 500th Anniversary of the Voyage this spring. Wind was too high for Sails that day.
Wow, Nasdaq down over 200 points.
Dow down over 500.
(600 now)
Everything not down. 😉
FIREARMS STOCKS RISE AS MASS SHOOTINGS RENEW GUN-CONTROL DEMANDS
https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/firearms-stocks-rise-mass-shootings-145154194.html
Everything not down.
VelocityShares Daily 2x VIX Short-Term ETN (TVIX)
21.21+3.56 (+20.17%)
As of 12:50PM EDT. Market open.
Yep—–
(but I would be very careful with that one)
With all the negative news floating around at least CO2 (and gun sales) showing healthy growth.
Daily CO2
Aug. 1, 2019: 410.51 ppm
Aug. 1, 2018: 407.53 ppm
Dow 30
25,720.27
-764.74(-2.89%)
Nasdaq
7,731.64
-272.43(-3.40%)
It seems like it’s the targets buying, El Paso gun stores are packed out by 1st time Hispanic buyers. I recall some comment along the lines that it isn’t just the right that can have guns.
NAOM
That’s great to hear. The more people able to take down the nutcase mass murderers, the better.
And what happens when someone thinks that the good Hispanic guy with the gun is the gunman because of his complexion?
NAOM
Damn! Is it just my imagination or has there been a massive spike in the number of trolls, bots, morons science deniers, hate mongers, etc, on this site recently! Many thanks for the ignore button, I seem to be using it with increasing frequency.
Indeed.
But please keep in mind that some of these posts are by people that need a reality check, and may actually hear a message of fact based information.
So I think its a mistake to immediately trash someone who seems ill-informed or hateful.
Some people come from a place where all they are exposed to is theology, anti-science, soundbite policy, etc.
Give it a shot when you can.
Ok, good points! Though I remain more than a tad skeptical.
It seems like a concerted coordinated attack of some sort.
Might just be a coincidence. Like rolling a dozen 12’s in a row.
I realize that I have learned some things [begrudgingly] here.
But not when people try to shove it down my throat.
That raises the ire, I suspect you know what I mean.
Expect it to get worse as we approach the UN conference, the San Diego conference and the 2020 election (much worse for the last one).
As for responding, correct the error and inform the 3rd party. Do not try to mud wrestle with pigs.
NAOM
(Ok Fred, I know you don’t need the last bit, just informing the 3rd party 😉 )
Greenland Ice Sheet Beats All-Time 1-Day Melt Record
https://eos.org/articles/greenland-ice-sheet-beats-all-time-1-day-melt-record
Especially for OFM 😉
WHICH SPECIES WILL SURVIVE?
With one in every four species facing extinction, which animals are the best equipped to survive the climate crisis? (Spoiler alert: it’s not humans).
“I don’t think it will be the humans. I think we’ll go quite early on,” says Julie Gray with a laugh. Gray, a plant molecular biologist at the University of Sheffield, was asked which species she thinks would be the last ones standing if we don’t take transformative action on climate change…
Even with our extraordinary capacity for innovation and adaptability, humans, it turns out, probably won’t be among the survivors. The historical record does point to the tenacity of cockroaches. These largely unloved critters have survived every mass extinction event in history so far.”
BTW tardigrades, as Fred has pointed out on numerous occasions, are expected to come through fine. Because, they can survive the vacuum of outer space, extreme dehydration, and VERY high temperatures.
My own view is that some hardy humans might weather the storm: native people living in places like Madagascar, for example!
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20190730-the-animals-that-will-survive-climate-change
BTW tardigrades, as Fred has pointed out on numerous occasions, are expected to come through fine. Because, they can survive the vacuum of outer space, extreme dehydration, and VERY high temperatures.
It seems I may have been wrong!
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2157066-hardy-antarctic-tardigrades-may-be-threatened-by-climate-change/
Hardy Antarctic tardigrades may be threatened by climate change
They can survive freezing temperatures, total desiccation, and even being sent into space. But the world’s hardiest animal, the tardigrade, could have a hard time surviving climate change.
Tardigrades, also known as water bears, live in many environments. They are one of the few organisms that are abundant in Antarctica.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29242185
Will the Antarctic tardigrade Acutuncus antarcticus be able to withstand environmental stresses related to global climate change?
Abstract
Because conditions in continental Antarctica are highly selective and extremely hostile to life, its biota is depauperate, but well adapted to live in this region. Global climate change has the potential to impact continental Antarctic organisms because of increasing temperatures and ultraviolet radiation. This research evaluates how ongoing climate changes will affect Antarctic species, and whether Antarctic organisms will be able to adapt to the new environmental conditions. Tardigrades represent one of the main terrestrial components of Antarctic meiofauna; therefore, the pan-Antarctic tardigrade Acutuncus antarcticus was used as model to predict the fate of Antarctic meiofauna threatened by climate change. Acutuncus antarcticus individuals tolerate events of desiccation, increased temperature and UV radiation. Both hydrated and desiccated animals tolerate increases in UV radiation, even though the desiccated animals are more resistant. Nevertheless, the survivorship of hydrated and desiccated animals is negatively affected by the combination of temperature and UV radiation, with the hydrated animals being more tolerant than desiccated animals. Finally, UV radiation has a negative impact on the life history traits of successive generations of A. antarcticus, causing an increase in egg reabsorption and teratological events. In the long run, A. antarcticus could be at risk of population reductions or even extinction. Nevertheless, because the changes in global climate will proceed gradually and an overlapping of temperature and UV increase could be limited in time, A. antarcticus, as well as many other Antarctic organisms, could have the potential to overcome global warming stresses, and/or the time and capability to adapt to the new environmental conditions.
Bold mine.
Not sure if we can continue to accept that bolded part as a true statement. There are plenty of scientists who are claiming that climate change is already happening at rates that surpass the ability of most biological organisms to adapt to change!
Cheers!
And, for you Fred —
NEW STUDY: OCEAN TEMPERATURE ‘SURPRISES’ BECOMING MORE COMMON
“A new study published this week shows how marine ecosystems around the world are experiencing unusually high ocean temperatures more frequently than researchers previously expected. These warming events, including marine heatwaves, are disrupting marine ecosystems and the people who depend on them.”
“The researchers identified these “surprises” all over the world, including the Arctic, North Atlantic, eastern Pacific, and off of Australia. Moreover, these warming events occurred at nearly double the rate the scientists expected.”
https://phys.org/news/2019-08-ocean-temperature-common.html
Wunderbar! It’s like Christmas every morning. Though for some reason the stockings seem to be getting stuffed with lumps of coal. Maybe we have all been naughty as opposed to nice.
“lumps of coal” > “sacks of coal”
Fixed it for ya!
Hi Doug,
Thanks for the link!
It’s impossible to say just how bad things will get. I personally believe that there’s at least a fifty percent chance, probably greater, that the collapse of humanity will happen piecemeal, with substantial portions of us dying off, slow and hard, or fast and hard, but on a regional basis, rather than a global basis, over a period of a few years to decades.
My pro farmer big picture perspective is that die offs are nearly always regional, seldom global, in the natural world, except when conditions change globally to such an extent that the demise of a particular (globally distributed) species extends……… globally.
There have been only a very few global episodes of mass extinction.
In the past, global die offs have been the result of asteroid impacts, long periods of volcanic activity on the grand scale, ice ages that were partly the consequence of changes in the atmosphere due to the evolution of new kinds of organisms, ( photo synthesis freeing up oxygen ) in combination with orbital mechanics , weathering of mountain ranges removing CO2 from the atmosphere, etc etc.
Hot house climates wiped out countless species with ice ages wiping out others.
The fossil record indicates that given species and families, etc, have come and gone on a more or less continual basis, with a substantial number of species coming into being, and perishing, this being Mother Nature’s BAU model, for hundreds of millions of years. Most of them lived in limited to tiny ranges, compared to the current global distribution of naked apes.
I’m painting with a very broad brush of course, and I am not nearly as well informed about deep history as some others here, but I’m in the ballpark.
So now let us consider what’s happening to the global ecology as the result of human activity, and what will or MIGHT put a stop to it, with the caveat that I actually profess that there might NOT be a stop to it, even if every last naked ape perishes.
Sometimes events cascade, like an avalanche , like the snowball chasing the cartoon character down the mountain side on television. Even after we are gone, if every last one of us dies, the global ecology will take hundreds to thousands of years to stabilize to some extent, and more thousands of years, to come back into some semblance of stability such as prevailed for the last few thousand years prior to the invention of agriculture.
I acknowledge that we MAY ALREADY have passed tipping points that will necessarily lead to our own extinction, or that we WILL pass such tipping points. Maybe so, maybe no.
Suppose the climate in most or all of Africa turns nasty to the point that everybody in Africa either dies or emigrates. That would mean the end of any further air pollution, etc, as the result of human activity in Africa.
The industrial economies of various parts of the world will collapse ( with most of the people living in these places suffering and dying, slow or fast…..) resulting in an inevitable reduction in the use of fossil fuels, insecticides, industrial chemicals of all sorts, etc, ranging from maybe eighty percent all the way up to one hundred percent.
A regional collapse of this nature could be the result of climate change, depletion of soil and water, inability to pay for imported resources such as oil and coal, war, epidemic disease, or any possible combination of such factors. It need not necessarily encompass all of Asia, it could be limited primarily to India for instance. Other regions would also be experiencing collapse but not necessarily on the same time frame. Indonesia might go sooner, or later, etc.
So far as I can see, or discover by reading, there is no REAL reason to assume that economic and environmental collapse in Asia for instance or elsewhere NECESSARILY means that economic and environmental collapse must inevitably follow in the Americas or Northern Europe.
Some regulars here point out that if we cut our use of fossil fuels by fifty percent, within a certain time frame, and then give them up altogether, we have a shot at survival. Regional collapse, in one region after another, could result in a fifty percent reduction in the global use of fossil fuels, even without considering depletion, new technology, or environmental regulation.
If a scenario of this sort comes to pass, things will pretty much dead sure headed for hell in a hand basket in places such as North America and Western Europe, but I just don’t see that Yankees and Western Europeans are necessarily DOOMED. So long as the oceans don’t turn anoxic,meaning we all literally suffocate, and the climate doesn’t go ENTIRELY nuts, some of us will still be able to grow some food and survive after one fashion or another. I can’t possibly say how many of us, but people can and have lived on rather skimpy diets for generations on end.
In a place as big and geographically and climatically variable as North America, there’s an excellent change there will be some spots where there will be enough remaining wildlife, or where enough farming can be carried on, to support some people.
Naked apes really ARE incredibly good at surviving almost anywhere on this planet. A bunch of Inuit could probably learn to survive even in Antarctica, given time, by harvesting such seafood as they could obtain close to shore, and storing it for winter use.
Given a long life to be lived again, I could gradually switch from producing the crops and livestock common to my area,mountainous western Virginia , to producing a mix more like the one representative of Georgia, to one more like the one common in Louisiana, to one similar to the one that prevails in the tropical mountainous areas of Mexico, etc. I might not be FAT, but the odds are at least fair that I wouldn’t starve.
I haven’t seen any well reasoned articles that prove , to me anyway , that we’re headed for extinction, short to medium term at least. There may be naked apes around a hundred thousand years from now, or even a million years. We’re tough, we’re clever, and we’re almost infinitely capable of adapting ourselves to variable climates and food stuffs.
There will be some people in Madagascar, most likely, and some in Norway and Denmark, and some in Yankee Land, more likely than not, a few hundred years down the road.
There might even be a hundred million Yankees with running water and electricity. There’s no saying how much we can accomplish, collectively, if we go at it on the same basis as we went at fighting WWII, and STAY at it, for a few decades.
And we might do that, if we see enough indisputable evidence that if we DON’T , we’re toast like the fifty to ninety five percent of the world wide population already dead or soon to be dead.
Maybe I’m deluded.
But
I put my time in in a good university,with an emphasis on the study of the biological and physical sciences and their application to the field of agriculture, and I have read hundreds of books, thousands of books, over the last half century, a good many of them history and hard science books.
I maintain that we have a fighting chance as a species, and that some of us have at least a fair chance of maintaining an industrial civilization of sorts. It won’t look at all like the one we have now, but it will be better than going back to the way we lived a few centuries back.
There won’t be ten billion of us around very long, if we ever reach that number. But a few million of us, maybe even a few hundred millions of us , may be around for thousands of years yet.
The Planets carrying capacity was 100 million +/- 50% sapiens before the Steam Engine.
Did the steam engine really increased the carring capacity? Or were it developements in chemistry and medicine?
They are factors along side many scientific discoveries and engineering feats which have allowed for the exponential increase in carrying capacity. But as usual there is always unforeseen issues that arise.
For example advances in medicine such as antibiotics and vaccines seem very noble and effective from a subjective viewpoint. But objectively, they have contributed to the accumulation of deleterious genes in the gene pool. Not to mention surplus population.
Update on Photon Harvest Outfitting.
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4281797-enphase-energy-headed-mars?app=1
By Request – Evolution of LunchBox Systems – 12V Nonsense.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEb2Kt82YpA
We have the 1st Pallet of these “Any Grid” Systems Landing next week. https://www.phocos.com/na/blog/portfolio/psw-h/
5kW continuous without Grid, without Battery – Add Optional 50V Battery for Night, Sync upto 9 Units with ~Two Hundred 330 watt PV Modules for a Serious Village Stand-alone Micro-Grid. PV prices continue to fall, Resi Storage not. PV kWh’s .05 cents, Storage kWh’s 5 to 10 times Premium.
Add Storage as it becomes more affordable. 3kWh of PV in Winter can supply 90%+ of hot water for 2 people in most regions – Grid and Toxic Battery Free.
Green New Deal VI – Urgency and oil production constraint
http://patzek-lifeitself.blogspot.com/2019/08/green-new-deal-vi-urgency-and-oil.html?m=1
we’re also out of coffee
Along with coffee, it’s good to appreciate our wildlife.
Twisting Contexts and Psychological Projection
All from the same threads no less:
I actually feel sorry for POB. Makes me think of the term, ‘bottom of the barrel’.
Green Technology & Renewable Energy
Not so fast Jose! This quoted passage, while trying to give the appearance of being a balanced critique of renewables makes several broad sweeping claims that I find difficult to substantiate:
No. The majority of electricity that is generated by renewables is used in manufacturing, mining, and other industries that are destroying the planet. Even if the generation of electricity were harmless, the consumption certainly isn’t. Every electrical device, in the process of production, leaves behind the same trail of devastation. Living communities — forests, rivers, oceans — become dead commodities.
This is stated as if it is a set of facts when it is likely more of an opinion. It would be interesting to see the data on which these statements are based but alas, no real basis for these statements is given.
The emissions reductions that renewables intend to achieve could be easily accomplished by improving the efficiency of existing coal plants, businesses, and homes, at a much lower cost. Within the context of industrial civilization, this approach makes more sense both economically and environmentally.
This is a very questionable statement. The emissions reductions renewables intend to ultimately achieve are, zero emissions, impossible with any FF burning plant. This sound like the ideas that would be coming from FF funded think tanks i.e. FF industry propaganda. Again, where is the data to back up this claim?
That this approach is not being taken shows that the whole renewables industry is nothing but profiteering. It benefits no one other than the investors…
Again, an opinion masquerading as fact. Could be FF industry propaganda, such as has been adopted and is being propagated by the current right wing administrations in the USA and Australia, along with right wing media outlets in both countries. The fact that several PV module manufacturers have gone out of business or entered bankruptcy proceedings, makes the “nothing but profiteering” claim questionable.
Even this bullet analogy isn’t completely accurate, since renewable technologies, in some cases, have a worse environmental impact than fossil fuels.
Really? In which cases? How so? Where is the data to back up this claim? How does one establish a “worse environmental impact” in the context of global warming and ocean acidification?
More renewables doesn’t mean less fossil fuel power, or less carbon emissions. The amount of energy generated by renewables has been increasing, but so has the amount generated by fossil fuels. No coal or gas plants have been taken offline as a result of renewables.
This may have been true five years ago but, not now:
Cottam closure to take UK coal power plant count down to six (Feb 7, 2019)
RWE Will Close Wales Plant, Leaving UK With Four Operating Coal Units (August 2, 2019)
Western Australia to close Muja coal units – to lower power bills, stabilise grid (August 6, 2019)
Next:
It’s debatable whether some ‘renewables’ even produce net energy. The amount of energy used in the mining, manufacturing, research and development, transport, installation, maintenance, grid connection, and disposal of wind turbines and solar panels may be more than they ever produce; claims to the contrary often do not take all the energy inputs into account. Renewables have been described as a laundering scheme: dirty energy goes in, clean energy comes out.
Where is the data to back this up? Where are the studies and who funded the studies? This sounds like FF industry propaganda to me.
I will not continue this paragraph by paragraph critique but, suffice to say, astute readers should already be detecting several glaring weaknesses in this piece. While the author may not be knowingly supporting the FF industries, they have unwittingly propagated several memes put forward by FF industry supporters.
Also, people should note that DGR is a radical, feminist, anarchistic website that promotes sabotage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Green_Resistance
NAOM
Duly noted
Compare and contrast DGR with the (unmitigated disaster of the) crony-capitalist plutarchy.
Ya, ridiculous, exactly.
DGR is spot-on. Maybe a touch out of date or a little off with some details, but only if you’re splitting hairs or contorting…
Or selling your planet out.
Guest post: Why German coal power is falling fast in 2019
The established, decades old, crony-capitalist plutarchy must be quite upset with the new crony-capitalist plutarchy! Running industrial plants way below their rated capacity most of the time and not at all for the rest of the time cannot be very good for the bottom line. I’ll take the new zero emissions crony-capitalist plutarchy over the decades old, carbon emitting, polluting crony-capitalist plutarchy, thank you very much.
In the meantime, the real crony-capitalist plutarchy in India and Australia seem to be determined to continue to increase CO2 emissions. See:
https://twitter.com/7NewsSydney/status/1158664782037131266
It appears these folks haven’t seen the memo regarding falling costs for electricity from renewable sources and are ignoring the robust growth of renweables in India and Australia. They’re stubbornly trying to drum up more business for their crony-capitalist friends. So, who exactly is it that is “selling your planet out”?
Interesting, though the price of carbon has increased over the last 2 years something caused a sudden change at the start of 2017. Was it the prospect of the carbon increase or was there another factor that cut in at the beginning of 2017?
NAOM
“Right now, food and habitat for living beings are being sacrificed to feed electricity. The infrastructure, mines, processing, and waste dumping required for electrical generation is destroying forests and other natural places around the world. Ensuring energy security for industry requires undermining life security for living beings (that’s us).” O N P O I N T
But hay, it’s just not for the poles, wires and Disney. The whole Centralized debt Vortex that would make the Soviets Proud is eating up all the Planets Carbon Life forms. Catherine Austin Fitts points this out in: – Financial Calamity an Ongoing Process (#2) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCu0mLV2ZBE&t=198s
“Right now, food and habitat for living beings are being sacrificed to feed electricity.”
Agree 100 percent, if you’re referring to the prime land lost to hydro-electric dams around the globe. Here in British Columbia the only significant river habitat that hasn’t been destroyed for hydro power is the Fraser and that was saved by luck and the farsightedness of a small minority of individuals, just in time. Green is a relative term!
Why solar, wind and EVs will be the death of the petroleum industry
Interesting analysis.
If we assume that their assumptions and analysis are correct,
it would take oil to priced at about $10/barrel to equal the mileage cost of utility scale solar or wind fueled EV transport.
Nearly any analysis of the near term death of the petroleum industry fails to recognize that energy policy is inseparable from social policy. The biggest issue in green politics is that it often unwittingly harms innocent people by causing stocks included in retirement plans to drop. Many 401(K)s and other, similar plans are heavily tied into the petroleum sector. Further, keep in mind these plans are necessary because, we’ve mostly moved away from traditional company-funded pensions, not to mention Social Security is under constant attack. So, because their constituents are using 401(K)s and other retirement plans funded through the petroleum sector as replacements for pensions and Social Security, politicians will see to it they do anything in their power to keep this industry alive.
The cheese is moving, those funds need to move their investments. A fund manager who sticks with a falling stock while ignoring a new, rising industry is not worth his salary.
NAOM
George. Think about some analogies to what you have proposed.
Should people have not embraced digital cameras because Polaroid had a lot to lose, if they didn’t adapt?
Should we have stuck with paper maps, since the map makers union had so much to lose.
Think of all the guys who used to do horseshoeing before cars. Should Ford have ditched the model T in sympathy?
If petrol stocks don’t do well switch out of them. And switch fund managers who don’t adapt. Check out ENPH stock this year. They are an American company that makes solar panel inverters. There is a stock for you.
Just saying, that investment excuse is no reason for the USA and the world to avoid innovating. Petrol will start to run down soon. Better have a plan.
This has nothing to do with green politics, rather its simply rational industrial /economic planning.
A free market embraces ‘creative destruction’- Creative destruction can be described as the dismantling of long-standing practices in order to make way for innovation.
It seems that nickel will be the death of battery industries:
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Carmakers-Face-Supply-Bottleneck-Of-This-Crucial-Metal.html
The power of oil lies in carbon, element that is so reactive that it created the great book of organic chemistry almost by itself.
Now, metals are different animals, not so eager to join with others as carbon is. But they are conductors. So the forceful tinkering will start, one atom of nickle, 2 of lithium…. etc….how to make the best battery… But I would not expect that anything surprising will appear. The best battery probably still will be not good enough.
But I would not expect that anything surprising will appear.
Appears to be the case.
Lithium ion was first commercialized in the early 1990’s.
It has been a while comrades.
To suggest that there has been no improvement in Li-ion battery tech since the 1990s is tad disingenuous.
https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1803/1803.04317.pdf
A Brief Review of Current Lithium Ion Battery Technology and
Potential Solid State Battery Technologies
https://www.tdworld.com/energy-storage/evolution-li-ion-batteries-garage-grid
Evolution of Li-ion Batteries: From the Garage to the Grid
And as far as it having been a while:
On June 11, 1895, the first U.S. patent for a gasoline-powered automobile was issued to Charles Duryea of Springfield, Massachusetts…
In any case, as most of us here already know, renewables, EVs and battery storage alone will not solve our problems of overpopulation, over consumption and ecological overshoot but staying with fossil fuels is guaranteed to speed up our demise!
So we are damned if we do and damned if we don’t!
Cheers!
There have been “improvements”, but it is the same technology.
I’m just pointing out, it has been a while.
The best battery probably still will be not good enough.
Good enough for what?!
As they say: “Perfect is the enemy of good enough!”
Good enough for BAU, of course. BAU is the price of acceptance of EVs by the general population.
General population does not read peakoilbarrel.com.
There will come a time in the next ten years, where the price/mile for EV travel will be widely acknowledged by the general public as being much cheaper than petrol powered vehicle miles.
The general public will begin to see petrol travel as for the wealthy, or those who have not yet gotten around to retiring their old ICE vehicle yet.
I refer you to the study (by BNP Paribas) posted by Mr Island above, which indicates that oil would have to be at about $10/barrel to give you the same petrol vehicle mile cost as utility scale solar or wind powered EV miles-
https://docfinder.bnpparibas-am.com/api/files/1094E5B9-2FAA-47A3-805D-EF65EAD09A7F
I think it is called ‘perception managment’, or something like that.
Also, what is ‘utility scale solar’?
Functioning like fossil-powered electricty? Such renewable electricty does not exist. Fossil is constans and concentrated, renewable is intermittent and dispersed.
Fossil is constans and concentrated, renewable is intermittent and dispersed.
So what?!
Fossil fuels are finite, so much worse than merely intermittent, they actually run out at some point! Then if you have no plan B you’re permanently fucked! Game over, Capiche?!
There are plenty of ways to deal with intermittent and dispersed. Even before industrial civilization people knew to make hay when the sun shone! You just need to restructure how and when you do things and just go with the flow.
Whether we want to, or not, we will get off fossil fuels sooner or later. The longer we wait, the worse the inevitable crash will be!
Fred,
Always question the premise!
If an argument seems flaky, first check the basic assertion. In this case, oil is not concentrated! When found in nature, it’s in the ground. It takes hundreds of thousands of wells. The average well in the US produces what, 5 barrels of oil per day? That’s not concentrated. Think about oil in shale: it’s very diffuse.
It’s only when it’s brought up to the surface, refined and transported that it becomes “concentrated”. Well, solar and wind produce electricity: what’s more concentrated??
OneofEU- “Also, what is ‘utility scale solar’?”
I’ll take this a serious question. As opposed to rooftop small scale solar, utility scale is what big companies spend their money on to get max energy output/dollar invested.
And the price of electricity of utility scale solar in sunny areas is now excellent.
Look at page 2 of this 2018 report if you really want to see real-world info on this (rather than just opinions)
https://www.lazard.com/media/450784/lazards-levelized-cost-of-energy-version-120-vfinal.pdf
https://emp.lbl.gov/utility-scale-solar
get used to it. fossil fuel is running down (depletion)
I would be cautious about a fossil fuel oriented site highlighting problems with renewables. Nickle is widely available and new mining is opening up. Previously the metal was used in alloys such as stainless steels plus catalysts, plating etc. The demand for batteries is a new development and the industry is ramping up to supply that demand but, as always, there is a lag. One should note that solar cells overtook silicon supply until the silicon industry ramped up production. Tesla is the sort of company that would open up its own mine and refinery if it saw the need. As for Cobalt, battery manufacturers are reducing the amount required with a goal of 0%. Rare earths, not required.
NAOM
By some strange coincidence this popped up over at insideevs.com today:
Esteemed Tesla Battery Researcher Jeff Dahn Talks About The Future
Batteries have to be only SO good for us to get along ok, given time to adapt.
We are accustomed to using oil for transportation simply because it has been the easiest and most plentiful fuel to be used for that purpose. It’s no surprise that the modern world is more or less STANDARDIZED on oil as the primary transportation fuel, and that the vast majority of all our self propelled machinery of any and every kind runs on oil.
BUT…… if oil had NOT been plentiful……. well then……. what would have happened along about the same time the oil fired internal combustion engine was developed to the point trucks and tractors could displace horses and trains?
The answer, to me at least, is obvious. We would be using trains out the ying yang, as was the case in Merry Olde England between coming of trains and the coming of trucks and cars. Anybody who doubts me should read any of the literature of that time period which touches on transportation, such as Sherlock Holmes story. You could take a train all over the place, there and then, from the city to outlying towns and villages, the same way you can take a bus or subway in a city today, to get around IN the city.
The tracks would have been laid all, with horses or mules, or batteries and electric motors fed by overhead wires used to pull small light railroad cars short distances down spur lines to get stuff where it needed to go. Canals would be a BIG THING these days, as they were in some places back then.
You can still ride the canals, as a tourist, in some places.
Suburban sprawl would not be thing, as it is here in the USA today. We would be living mostly in densely populated cities and towns, and tight little villages, as is the case in Western Europe, to a substantial extent, with even the farmers living in the villages and walking out to the fields.
Mass transit aka public transit WOULD be a thing, in the USA, and a BIG thing.
There would be millions of short range electric cars on the road, and nobody would give a second thought to the fact that they are small, and slow, and don’t go very far on a charge. We would be ACCUSTOMED to such cars, and happy with them, just as we are with the cars we have today.
Batteries don’t have to be but SO GOOD. The ones we have NOW are good enough to get the job done, IF we MUST get along using them. We can get by with cars that go only forty miles, or even less……. once we ADAPT to using such cars, which WOULD take a while. We can get by without airplanes, as far as people transportation goes, as far as food and commercial transportation goes, and even, if fuel supplies are TIGHT ENOUGH so that our enemies don’t have planes to fight with, without military planes as well. Giving up airplanes would take a while too. An abrupt transition from lots of planes to none would be one hell of a problem…. but aircraft are not an ESSENTIAL part of a modern industrial civilization.
We can’t continue to live the way we do NOW in rich countries such as the USA without lots of oil.
But we sure as hell can and WILL adapt to living with only a LITTLE oil, because there’s a time coming when we MUST do so.
We can manage our industrial and commercial transportation needs using renewable electricity if we must, and eventually, we WILL, because we will have no other choice….. eventually. ( We might use renewable electricity to manufacture some synthetic liquid motor fuels, same thing. )
We simply do not HAVE to have unlimited supplies of electricity around the clock around the calendar to maintain an industrial economy OR a modern life style.We can and we will adapt to having only limited electricity at times, and only a VERY little at other times.
There will be much gnashing of teeth and rendering of hair and bureaucrats will be tarred and feathered and driven from office yea, verily…….
BUT
We we will GET USED TO IT…… just as I got used to living in an apartment, when I first moved to the city, after living free out in the country. The nicest possible apartment felt more like a jail cell than home. I couldn’t go outside and take a leak with my dogs, or play grown up games with my girl in the grass under the stars, but after a while, I got to the point I LIKED it.
Other than maybe the grid itself, and water and sewer systems, etc, we can deal with intermittent energy issues. Besides which, there are such things as WATER TOWERS. Almost everything else can be produced or managed one way or another using intermittent energy, with batteries of one sort or another used to maintain ESSENTIAL services such as communication, emergency vehicles, etc.
Take it from a farmer. We farmers have megabucks worth of equipment that sits around way more days than it’s ever used at all, and there’s still plenty of food in the supermarket. We plow and plant when the weather is right, we harvest when the weather is right.
We have a substantial window of opportunity yet remaining to us which we can to figure out how to live well with little or no oil and with only intermittent renewable electricity, etc.
We can do it, and we WILL do it……. some of us anyway.
Unless tshtf so hard it wipes us out sooner.
OFM wrote:
My 80 mile electric car range is plenty for my day to day needs, but 200 mile range cars are quickly becoming the floor for EV’s. I don’t think we’ll go back to lower range cars, but your point that we could if we had to is likely true. Your comment about planes though may be 180 degrees from correct. Electric VTO planes are rapidly developing, including autonomous ones. It may be the case before too long that folks won’t need cars with ranges over 100 miles, because beyond that we’ll take low cost point to point electric air taxis for distances between 100 and 400 miles.
Also, regarding OneofEU’s supposition about EV’s and BAU. As an EV owners, I won’t willingly go back to the inconvenience and displeasure of gas stations, slow acceleration, vibration, noise, and maintenance of combustion engine BAU, and I know I’m not alone in that sentiment. The transition will continue to accelerate as buy-in prices continue to drop, and people clue in to the pleasure and convenience of electric transportation.
Driving 300 or 400 miles without a 1/2 hour break increases the risk of accidents anyway, 200 is a good distance.
NAOM
Mammals, birds and some amphibians, reptiles did survive during the PETM but it must have been hellish for a long time. But then again, the GHG rate was 1/10 of the current plume.
Earth may be 140 years away from reaching carbon levels not seen in 56 million years
Total human carbon dioxide emissions could match those of Earth’s last major greenhouse warming event in fewer than five generations, new research finds. A new study finds humans are pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere at a rate nine to 10 times higher than the greenhouse gas was emitted during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), a global warming event that occurred roughly 56 million years ago.
The exact environmental consequences of PETM-like carbon levels are unclear, but the increased temperatures will likely drive many species to extinction with the lucky ones being able to adapt or migrate, according to Larisa DeSantis, a paleontologist at Vanderbilt University who was not connected to the new study. In addition, it will take thousands of years for the climate system cool down, she said.
“It’s not just about 100 years from now; it’s going to take significant periods of time for that carbon dioxide to make its way back into the Earth’s crust,” DeSantis said. “It’s not a short-term event. We’re really committing ourselves to many thousands of years of a warmer world if we don’t take action quickly.”
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/02/190220112221.htm
The exact environmental consequences of PETM-like carbon levels are unclear, but the increased temperatures will likely drive many species to extinction with the lucky ones being able to adapt or migrate, according to Larisa DeSantis, a paleontologist at Vanderbilt University who was not connected to the new study. In addition, it will take thousands of years for the climate system cool down, she said.
It’s not just the PETM-like carbon levels and the accompanying increase in temperatures that is the problem. A much bigger problem is the rate of change, which has no precedent in any previous event on this planet. As far as we know, ecosystems and individual organisms can only adapt much more slowly than the current rates of change impose on them.
This BTW, is precisely why Guy McPherson, professor emeritus of natural resources, ecology and evolutionary biology, argues that humans and most of the biosphere are facing near term extinction. He knowingly committed career suicide by coming out and publicly stating his conclusions!
Case in point, James Hansen, a great climate scientist, has publicly stated that McPherson is crazy because you can’t kill people that fast! While Dr. Hansen may have a deep understanding of atmospheric physics and chemistry he doesn’t really understand evolutionary biology and ecology…
The truth is if you exceed a certain rate of change, you can indeed surpass thresholds beyond which adaptation is no longer an evolutionary possibility!
But then again, the GHG rate was 1/10 of the current plume.
The question remains is the current rate of change too fast, therefore potentially causing the extinction of all life or just for most of it?
Come back in a million years to find out.
Cheers!
“The question remains is the current rate of change too fast, therefore potentially causing the extinction of all life or just for most of it?”
The Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, more commonly known as the Cretaceous–Tertiary (or K–T) extinction, was a sudden mass extinction of some three-quarters of the plant and animal species on Earth — 66 million years ago. Surviving mammalian species were generally small, comparable in size to rats. Further, it is thought early monotremes, marsupials, and placentals were semiaquatic or burrowing. Any burrowing or semiaquatic mammal would have had additional protection from environmental stresses. If you’re a water rat you might make out OK.
Even some of the rat like mammals went extinct. It appears to have come down to teeth and food supply. Those with molars were omnivores and survived, those with mostly cutting teeth such as pure predators ended with the K-T.
We’re so fortunate that scientists hundreds of millions of years ago kept such detailed temperature and CO2 records.
I don’t normally respond to idiots but the main cause of the K-T extinction is well documented — an unusually high number of extremely large asteroid impacts. Evidence can be seen in various parts of the world in layers of rock that can be dated to this time period. These rock layers have unusually high levels of iridium, an element not found in large amounts in the Earth’s crust but very common in space debris including asteroids, comets, and meteors. This universal layer of rock has come to be known as the K-T boundary. Some scientists believe that in the early 21st century, we are in the middle of the sixth major mass extinction event. This would be thermal, caused by high CO2 levels, not meteorites.
Troll alert.
Don’t waste your time.
The terrifying phenomenon that is pushing species towards extinction
The saiga – whose migrations form one of the great wildlife spectacles – were victims of a mass mortality event (MME), a single, catastrophic incident that wipes out vast numbers of a species in a short period of time. MMEs are among the most extreme events of nature. They affect starfish, bats, coral reefs and sardines. They can push species to the brink of extinction, or throw a spanner into the complex web of life in an ecosystem. And according to some scientists, MMEs are on the rise and likely to become more common because of climate change.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/feb/25/mass-mortality-events-animal-conservation-climate-change
I found this especially interesting:
The scientists on the ground pinpointed blood poisoning as the cause, but were puzzled as to why whole herds were dying so quickly. After 32 postmortems, they concluded the culprit was the bacterium Pasteurella multocida, which they believe normally lives harmlessly in the tonsils of some, if not all, of the antelopes. In a research paper published in January in Science Advances, Kock and colleagues contrasted the 2015 MME with the two from the 1980s. They concluded that a rise in temperature to 37C and an increase in humidity above 80% in the previous few days had stimulated the bacteria to pass into the bloodstream where it caused haemorrhagic septicaemia, or blood poisoning.
That sounds a lot like what might be happening with C. auris, that I posted about recently.
https://www.statnews.com/2019/07/23/the-superbug-candida-auris-is-giving-rise-to-warnings-and-big-questions/
A just-published study in the journal mBio theorizes that climate change may have contributed in part to the emergence of C. auris. The authors say that historically the human body temperature has acted as protection against invasive fungal infections — in effect, we’re too hot for them to be able to grow well in us. But as the globe has warmed, they’ve adapted.
If the theory is correct, other fungi may follow C. auris’ path, posit Arturo Casadevall, of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and his co-authors.
Regardless, there are fast moving changes that are really starting to effect organisms that may not be able to quickly evolve to adapt to them!
The bad news bolded below.
Kock is confident that climate change will lead to more MMEs – pushing vulnerable species closer to extinction and altering the food web. He believes that conservationists should be on the lookout for other mortality events in species such as reindeer and elk. “The tragedy is, we will probably see more events like the event that affected the saiga,” he says. “Evolution takes millions of years and if we have a shift in environmental conditions, everything that’s evolved in that particular environment is under different pressures. Microbes adapt and can respond to changes quickly, but mammals take hundreds of thousands of years or millions of years to adapt. That’s the real worry.”
On earth,
the most effective,
perhaps the only effective,
mechanism to extinguish
ignorance and cruelty,
is through an extinction
process that includes Homo sapiens.
Could be a good thing, on balance.
Never thought I’d say this but, I’ve finally seen some bad news for Tesla that could be the death of them!
Finnish Goods Inspection Finds Tesla Model 3 Paint Is Soft And Thin
Impressed By The Finnish Tesla Model 3 Paint Problems? Hold My Beer
Watching the videos, this is very bad news for Tesla. In 2019, with robotic paint jobs, every vehicle should be perfect and steel bodies are very unforgiving when it comes to inadequate coverage especially in hot, humid climates and/or where the vehicle is exposed to salt. If Tesla does not address this issue quickly to the satisfaction of the affected owners, it could result in the demise of the brand!
Then again it could be attributed to this (sabotage):
Ex-Employee Tells What It’s Really Like To Work For Tesla
Interesting but I certainly wouldn’t discount the possibility of sabotage. From the article it sounds like 500 or so documented vehicles have reported paint job issues. Given that Tesla has ramped up production to 7,000 Model 3s a week, so that isn’t a lot. I’ll hold back burying Tesla until there are more reports. Given that a lot of vested interests want Tesla to fail. I don’t think they will go under because of this and I’ll bet they fix it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7l-n45JCxz8&t=26s
Higher Ground | In Depth
Check out the commentary a little past the 13 minute mark.
Also check out this interview with Elon by Ark Invest Founder Cathie Wood!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8dEYm8hzLo
Elon Musk’s Full Interview with Ark Invest (2019, Audio) – Tesla, Autonomous Cars and Bitcoin
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/tesla-stock-price-ark-invest-bull-case-other-investors-flee-2019-5-1028242994
Ark Invest, the New York investment manager founded by chief executive and chief investment officer Cathie Wood, has a wildly bullish $6,000 price target over the next five years, which is way out of whack with the rest of Wall Street. Wall Street analysts polled by Bloomberg have a 12-month price target of $276.72. The firm does not compile a five-year target.
Yeah it’s probably a rogue cadre of short sellers who are infiltrating the company to sabotage it from within. I mean, what else could it possibly be?
“A self-sealing system is one that is closed in on itself, allowing no consideration of disconfirming evidence or alternative points of view. In the extreme, a self-sealed group is exclusive and its belief system is all inclusive, in the sense that it provides answers to everything.”
http://www.apologeticsindex.org/262-take-back-your-life-recovering-from-cults
You are probably right! And in the big picture, against a backdrop of catastrophic climate change, ecological overshoot and the sixth mass extinction, any discussion about Tesla’s long term survival is sure to be just a temporary distraction! 😉
Cheers!
If a LOT of new Tesla cars need a new paint job, the cars can be repainted in professional auto body shops for around three grand, not much more, and can be back in the owners hands in three or four days max.
So while this may be an expensive problem, it’s not beyond the company’s ability to make unhappy customers happy again.
Whatever is wrong on the paint line will be fixed.
Tesla is still barely out of short pants in terms of being a mass manufacturer of cars, and quality control problems are to be expected from time to time.
It may be easy to fix the paint job but, fixing the perception generated when the rep at the Tesla store in Finland says the paint defects are not covered by the warranty will not be so easy. Maybe Tesla should start by firing the rep that said that. This is a case of an obvious manufacturing defect and should have been escalated by the rep instead of attempting to deny liability. If these defective paint jobs are not a serious problem then what should have become public is how well Tesla confronted this issue.
With the amount of people who desperately want Tesla to fail, their employees ought to be better at handling issues like this than the rep in Finland did.
I had personal experience in my last job, of working with a company that was a supplier of equipment to the banking sector. My first sales call I was given a couple of brochures and a letter to take to one of the biggest banks on the island. Before I left for the call I noticed a packet of new brochures for a lower cost model that had not been included in the packet I was taking to the customer and when I asked my employer about he assured me that the lowest cost product would not be appropriate for a bank of that size. The person in charge of making the purchase at the bank let me know that they would be assessing whether to purchase from us as the local authorized dealer for the brand as opposed to purchasing the same items through their parent company in Canada. They took three sample units on trial and at the end of the trial they paid for them and kept them.
The next time we heard from the customer was about a year later when we discovered that they had bought nineteen of the lowest cost model through their Canadian parent company! It turns out there was a factory defect and all of them were failing. The manufacturer had issued a fix which involved replacing a couple of components on a circuit board and all of the units that been sold by us were repaired under warranty but, my employer was upset that the bank had bought the product through their parent company rather than buying from us and did not want to assist the customer in any way. I pointed out that we had not given the customer the option of the lowest cost machine and that we represented the brand and should do better than ignoring the customers plight. We came up with a solution where we would verify with the manufacturer that the units were eligible for the fix, the manufacturer would supply the parts free of charge but, we would charge the labor to do the repair since the units were not sold through us.
That solution meant that the repair would not be at our expense but, instead the cost would be shared by the manufacture and the customer without the customer having to go through the hassle and expense of shipping all the units back to Canada to be repaired under warranty. The result was that the person in charge of purchasing at the bank told my employer that given the choice they would place us at the top of the list for any future purchases based on how we had handled that situation. I was extremely proud of my role in that outcome and was rewarded some time later when the bank bought a very expensive piece of equipment from us. Making the customer happy, by not giving them the feeling that they have been screwed, can be worth far more than the cost of making them happy!
Making the customer happy, by not giving them the feeling that they have been screwed, can be worth far more than the cost of making them happy!
Couldn’t agree more!
I still do a bit of work now and then consulting for Multinationals in Brazi.l I’m currently tutoring a couple of executives of a global software company. One of the most serious shortcomings that severely affects their bottom line is a lack of really good customer service!
This is not just a Tesla problem it is universal! No company that refuses to address such issues will survive! I guess we shall see what happens.
Cheers!
CLIMATE CHANGE AGGRAVATING LAND DEGRADATION
“Our finite natural resources are under increasing pressure from a growing global population. Climate change will intensify soil erosion, compaction, loss of organic matter, loss of biodiversity, landslides and salinisation—many of which are irreversible.”
https://phys.org/news/2019-08-expert-climate-aggravating-degradation.html
Will the dreams of American EV be all wet or will they get so cheap that most people can afford them?
Sorry, but the money is going fast to the few who may own everything in a short time.
In 33 Years The Rich Will Own All the Wealth in America!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCbvSHG-vdI
33 years?! Good luck with that!
.
It’s a trend toward impoverishing more people in the US and making them more vulnerable and controllable. At the same time the consumer market will diminish. And as you so eloquently put forward, as have I and a number of others, there are other trends that will coalesce in the near future that will change this trend dramatically.
The 1980’s seems to be a starting point for sheer dogmatic wealth gathering and the derailing of progress in the USA. At least for the many. The few are doing well.
Fred, are you responsible for this? —
BRAZILIAN AMAZON DEFORESTATION SURGES
“Deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon increased 278 percent year-over-year in July.”
https://phys.org/news/2019-08-brazilian-amazon-deforestation-surges-embattled.html
Is it Ok for a grown man to cry?! Because as I look out at the world these days I often find my eyes literally welling up with tears. As a Brazilian born US citizen the compounding effects of Trump and Bolsonaro are taking a serious toll on my psyche! I think I may need to take a break from all the bad news!
Peace!
Fred, maybe you should turn your vast talent(s) to this and forget all the mundane negative issues we’ve (or some of us) been dwelling on.
THE COMPELLING MATHEMATICAL CHALLENGE OF THE THREE-BODY PROBLEM
https://phys.org/news/2019-08-compelling-mathematical-three-body-problem.html
LOL! While I wish I had vast talents, I agree that I do need to find something more productive to do with my time, other than commenting here or on other sites . It has been a good run and I have enjoyed the conversation with most of the people here but I am finding that I’m just getting increasingly frustrated. Time is growing short!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xs87FijgVaA
Why a cat always lands on its feet
Cheers!
Yeah, I’ve pretty much reached the same conclusion.
Agreed.
I can assure you that a cat does not always land on all 4 paws.
NAOM
I’m sure that is true but most of the time they do manage.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtWbpyjJqrU
Slow Motion Flipping Cat Physics | Smarter Every Day 58
ELECTRIC VEHICLE SALES ARE EXPLODING IN EUROPE
“For the first time ever, EV sales in Norway in March outstripped sales of gasoline and diesel cars combined, confirming the Nordic country’s undisputed global leadership in EV market share. The nearly 60-percent record EV market share in March was driven by two key factors—Norway’s consistent government policies in incentivizing purchases of zero-emission cars and a record number of Tesla Model 3 deliveries in March.”
https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Renewable-Energy/Electric-Vehicle-Sales-Are-Exploding-In-Europe.html
But, looking ahead, God’s intervention required! Prayers will be needed, lots of them. And, EVs won’t solve this. 😉
VENUS TURNED INTO HELL, THE EARTH IS NEXT
“Our sun isn’t done aging, and as it grows older, it grows brighter, with the habitable zone steadily and inexorably moving outward. At some point within the next few hundred million years, the Earth itself will approach the inner edge of the habitable zone. Our oceans will evaporate. Temperatures will spiral upward. Plate tectonics will shut off. Carbon dioxide will dump into the atmosphere. And by that time, our solar system will be home to not just one hell but two.”
https://www.space.com/venus-runaway-greenhouse-effect-earth-next.html
Yeah, but by then maybe Mars will have re entered the habitable zone and we can terraform it. Or maybe we can live in underwater colonies on Enceladus… /sarc!
“At some point within the next few hundred million years, the Earth itself…”
In the long span of life on earth, a few hundred million years is pretty quick.
When we are done here, will some other mammal come to be highly intelligent?
If so, I hope they are vegetarian, and have no clever hands.
yes- I am mammal biased, a mammal supremacist if you will
Want to really freak out? The fact is, globally temps are not rising nor falling, because regions are being affected, specifically. The main cause is a significant shift in undersea currents, about 112 miles east of the traditional lines. That’s a tell tail sign of a polar shift. We know that after many years of science at both poles. Polar shift is expected to be more disruptive than just a simple change in mean global temps would.
https://youtu.be/9a3eCHij4Vo
Ding Dong, school’s out!
So Jason,
Do you get paid for the disinformation campaign, or is it purely a volunteer con job?
I”m a independent citizen science researcher. I use many different resources to figure out what I believe.
In your ‘science research’, you may come find that
scientists do not decide what to believe,
rather they seek solid data to indicate the true nature of earth processes.
Like recordings of temperature done by standard methods.
But if you don’t want to be taken seriously, keep believing…
How bad can it get?
SIBERIA IS BURNING
“About three million hectares (7.4 million acres, or, over 1,000 square miles) have been affected, with the smog now reaching across the border to Mongolia.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-49196949
They should have followed Trump’s advice and raked their forests. It’s those damn dead leaves that causes the problem.
Aren’t we fortunate to have such an extreme stable genus for a president? 😉
Dang, and I always thought that a stable genius was the lad who could reliably tip you the winner of the 2:30 at Wincanton every week.
NAOM
It’s part of the propaganda, pushed by the liberal establishment and the capitalist pig community, which is NOT ALWAYS one and the same as the current day R party and Trump, that the USA lacks sufficient workers, and needs immigrants to fill jobs.
I posted a long rebuttal about this some time back about the farm worker situation. The reason we have a farm worker shortage is that farmers have everybody convinced there’s a shortage, and so long as they can get immigrant or seasonally imported labor cheap, they want to do so. I know, I used to be a farmer, lol.
I just copied this from The Nation, which is a well respected periodical, excerpting it from an article about the reputed shortage of nurses.
xxxx
But the nurses on the front lines of our health care crisis say that the idea of a “shortage” doesn’t tell the whole story, and the canard of a labor market crunch shouldn’t distract policy-makers from the more systemic gaps at work. The problem isn’t that there aren’t enough nurses; it’s that—given hospital budget cuts, increased patient loads, and the profit incentive of too much of our health care system—there aren’t enough sustainable nursing jobs, with living wages and supportive work environments.
ECONOMY
The Nation
Michelle Chen
Many clinics, hospitals, schools, and nursing homes are today chronically understaffed, and it’s clear that many deficits in today’s health care system tie into a lack of access to skilled nursing care. The American Nurses Association estimates that, from 2018 through 2022, registered nursing will have more job openings nationwide than any other profession. But there is a steady influx of nurses entering the field. When there are staffing problems, advocates say the real problem is that employers just aren’t willing to fund a fully staffed workforce.
I know a number of nurses, including about half a dozen who are relatives. All of them are underpaid and over worked in relation to the work they do, and the older ones have retired early, or gone to working on a part time basis, because they are too tired and too stressed out to work full time anymore, and don’t need the money badly enough to put up with the prevailing working conditions.
What we NEED is for the people at the top to get paid less, and the people at the lower levels to get paid more. My dentist probably nets three hundred grand, at least. He works forty hours, max. Monday to Friday. He makes enough from his techs who do nothing but clean teeth to pay all his office expenses, etc.They bring in six hundred bucks each per day for him,and he pays them only two hundred, plus the necessary SS and workers comp, etc. Three of them. One helper at his side, one receptionist clerk. His office is on the side of a rural two lane highway, and the building could be replaced, lot and all for no more than three hundred grand next month. He paid probably a third of that to have it built twenty years ago.
The work he does is no more sophisticated than the work my sister who specializes in the care of preemies in neonatal ICU does, and she put in almost as many years in training. She makes about sixty thousand.
I used to be able to survey, but I’ve forgotten the trig, it would take me a week or so to get it back. Took a class in it at school, taught by the engineering department, for civil engineers, but it was open enrollment if you had the math. He charges a thousand bucks a day, roughly, net, minus what it costs him to maintain his little side street office and an insurance policy, which is probably less than a thousand a month, as rent is cheap around here.
My lawyer is an old friend, and generally doesn’t charge me at all, or if he does, half his usual rate. So it takes him maybe two to four hours of actual work to close a real estate deal, and on good days, he closes three, plus he gets in an uncontested bankruptcy or something as well. So he makes a LOT of money, typically a thousand a day or more. MY mail carrier won’t tell me what she makes, but I know anyway, because I have a cousin that recently retired as a carrier. Including lifetime medical and pension benefits, days off, etc, he was paid about triple what it would have cost to fill his job with another local person who would have done it just as well.
We don’t have a worker problem. We have a JOB problem, which boils down to the simple fact that we have too many people competing for too few decent jobs. The people paying peanuts are getting away with it because they CAN, because there are too many applicants for each opening, and they will continue to get away with it……. forever?
A local apple grower could pay double the usual wage during harvest season, and passing along the extra cost would come to about two or three cents per pound, maybe a nickel at the most, at the super market.
At double the usual wage , I would go out and pick a few apples again myself, for the exercise as much as the cash.
People are gradually figuring it out, and one way to redress some of the imbalance is to go to a socialized system of medicine, where in the government negotiates the pay of the people in the field. Barring bad luck, I fore see this happening in the USA within the next ten to twenty years, possibly sooner, but I won’t put my money on sooner unless I get odds in my favor.
I know, automation has done away with more jobs than immigrants. I’m not anti immigrant, in the usual sense, because immigration is GOOD for me, personally. The more people, the more valuable my property, and I will have to sell some from time to time, if I live very long, because I don’t own stocks or collect a big pension, etc.
I just get tired of hearing holier than thou self serving rhetoric of any sort. I’m fine with immigrants comig here as the result of fleeing tyranny, etc, but not fine with justifying them coming because of a non existent shortage of workers, when I know dozens of people who either don’t have jobs, or else can’t find one that pays well, and are so compelled to work for peanuts.
The liberal establishment lies about this issue, and the business establishment lies about it. The working people of the country suffer for it.
What’s your dentist’s insurance like? Probably not cheap due to covering potential multi tens of millions of dollars negligence lawsuits. That means high prices and he would have to cover his workers out of what they earn too.
NAOM
I just get tired of hearing holier than thou self serving rhetoric of any sort. I’m fine with immigrants comig here as the result of fleeing tyranny, etc, but not fine with justifying them coming because of a non existent shortage of workers, when I know dozens of people who either don’t have jobs, or else can’t find one that pays well, and are so compelled to work for peanuts.
I wonder how many of those people you know would be willing to work in a poultry processing plant in Mississippi? I hear they are hiring and will now be forced to pay top dollar.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/ice-agents-raid-miss-work-sites-arrest-680-people-in-largest-single-state-immigration-enforcement-action-in-us-history/2019/08/07/801d5cfe-b94e-11e9-b3b4-2bb69e8c4e39_story.html
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents swept through seven work sites in six cities across Mississippi on Wednesday, arresting approximately 680 people the agency said were undocumented immigrants in what officials said is the largest single-state workplace enforcement action in U.S. history.
The raids targeted agricultural processing plants, part of a year-long investigation into illegal employment of immigrants in the state, officials said. They did not say how many individuals they were targeting in the operations, nor what proportion of those taken into custody were what ICE calls “collateral” arrests — those who were swept up along with those ICE was seeking.
The dirty little secret is that these businesses depend on the illegal immigrants and pay them peanuts but I suspect that not many citizens would really want those jobs even with benefits. Ok, maybe at $25.00 bucks an hour…. but that would kind of make chicken unaffordable for the average American.
Cheers!
Hi Fred,
Actually twenty five bucks an hour at a poultry processing plant wouldn’t be all that big a deal, in terms of the actual retail price of chicken. Meat processing plants of all kinds are highly automated, and you simply would not BELIEVE how many live chickens go in one end and out the other end per worker hour. I’ll look into it.
https://extension.psu.edu/modern-meat-chicken-industry The cost of processing a broiler is about $.18 per pound. The wholesale price for a whole broiler is about $.53 per pound.These numbers are from seven years ago. Eighteen cents was the TOTAL cost of processing, not just labor. A substantial part of that is recovered by selling by products, NOTHING except the squawk is wasted, EVERYTHING is sold.
Plus if they HAVE to, the managers will do things to make the jobs easier, safer, and less stressful. They would HAVE to in order to hire enough workers if there weren’t so many unemployed or marginally employed people.
I know the apple biz, and doubling wages for field workers, start to finish, wouldn’t result in the price of apples going up more than maybe ten cents a pound at retail, if that.
And for NAOM, the price of liability insurance for a general practice dentist in my state is typically about three thousand bucks, as best I can find out. Specialists probably pay a lot more, maybe double or triple.
ONE thing I really like about you, Fred, is that you generally GET IT, when it comes to the behavior of naked apes, and you understand that most people are NOT well informed, and thus CANNOT understand complicated theoretical arguments.
They think well, in relation to the DATA they have available, they think according to what they KNOW. They know there are lots of immigrants, and that the vast majority of them are NOT competing with YOUR kind of people, professional people, for jobs. They’re mad, they’re scared, they feel abandoned by the D’s, or simply taken for granted. They’re also proud, they don’t WANT food stamps or free lunches for their kids. They WANT good jobs, and they DO understand that supply and demand applies to wages and jobs.
They support Trump because they want CHANGE, and they thought that at least they had an opportunity to GET some change, when they voted for him. They gave up hope of getting any real change from either party ESTABLISHMENT, long ago. Let’s not forget that TRUMP WAS NOT an establishment R, he WAS an outsider. They WANT to believe he cares about them, so they all too often continue to believe he DOES. But quite a few of them are figuring out OTHERWISE. Maybe not enough, but some anyway.
All the younger better educated people I know went for Bernie Sanders, for that same exact reason,CHANGE, they were sick and tired of the D establishment not really standing for and fighting for what THEY wanted. They saw, and still see, the D party as being nothing more than the REPUBLICAN LITE party, more interested in the well off people and corporate interests than in the COUNTRY, as a whole. This is why the younger better educated and more idealistic ones are supporting ANYBODY BUT BIDEN.
And if you want to know why so many poor working class people all thru the South vote for R’s and Trump, you’re the last person I need to explain it to in detail.
But for the benefit of others:
ONE reason is that they KNOW those six hundred plus jobs WOULD HAVE OTHERWISE been filled by local people ( whose great grandparents or earlier ancestors were immigrants of course!) and that if only a hundred people show up for eighty openings, wages go up, because the employer has to pay better to cull out the twenty worst applicants.
When three or four hundred people show up for a hundred openings, the employer can pick and choose the BEST of them….. and still pay peanuts.
In a country where people buy ordinary houses that cost a quarter of a million and up and a typical new car costs forty grand, average, etc, that paying another nickel a pound for chicken is all that big a deal? Remember that when jobs are plentiful, and applicants few, wages HAVE to go up in order to fill the positions.
Bottom line, they’re focused on those jobs, which to them are equally as important as the gun issue is right now to the liberal establishment.
Again what I’m REALLY arguing about, is that INCOME INEQUALITY is the REAL problem, and we need to raise wages at the lower end, and cut them some , and cut investment income some, at the high ends, in order to have a viable, decent society.
Bottom line, when we get right down to the nitty gritty bedrock, it’s all about income inequality. Don’t expect the human herd to react rationally. We’re too easily manipulated, too ignorant, too poorly informed.
It’s always been US and THEM. It’s still US and THEM.
There are too many WORM TONGUES on both sides of every question for any real hope of change anytime SOON, but I do see the people of this country GRADUALLY growing towards being better informed, towards making better decisions, collectively, via the ballot box. When my generation is gone, and half the one following, if we dodge disaster that long, we will elect a federal government similar to the ones in today’s Western Europe. We will shortly after that elect such governments even in the deep south and rural areas in the rest of the country.
Thanks for taking the trouble to check the insurance. I hear a lot about the high cost of liability insurance in the medical business and it seems relevant when looking at the profit level of a dentistry business.
NAOM
On the oil thread today, the following statement was posted by a regular there-
“It’s a complete waste of time when people (and governments) should be preparing for the inevitable killing of people. War is the normal human condition. Oil scarcity will be the ultimate engine behind . . . what is normal. When war is inevitable, it’s a good idea to be the winner.”
I find this hard to digest. This guy often says things that are outright bizarre and easy to dismiss. But this statement has enough truth in history and human (mob) behavior to make off the cuff dismissal impossible for me. I happen to be reading a history book about WWII currently. People were faced with impossible choices, by the tens of millions. And enough cruelty to fill the universe for a billion years.
I like Timothy Snyder’s work on WW2 and the interwar period before it. Absolute horror from the Ural’s to the Baltic to the Black Sea. I feel perceptions of objective scarcity were at the root of much of the motivating ideology. Timothy Snyder’s analysis on the conditions necessary for the next holocaust are quite foreboding.
Here’s a sample. He’s quite brilliant!
https://youtu.be/32_cqhaSJLs
Yes, I have a deep respect for his work. I also have a rather extensive personal knowledge of that particular time and place in history due to my direct ancestors who were land owners and heavily involved in politics and were personally members of the political and ruling class of Hungary at about that time. Many of them wrote books that I have original copies of. And a lot of history was passed down to our family members and younger generations through word of mouth as well. And it is mainly due to this personal historical perspective that I watch what is happening in the US today with absolute abject horror! Most Americans do not have the slightest idea as to how bad things can get in very short order!
Yes Timothy Snyder is a great teacher.
I’m now interested to read his latest book- The Road to Unfreedom
Thanks for pointing him out to me/us.
Bloodlands is quite good.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodlands
I think that gentleman and many on the petroleum side of this blog are missing something very fundamental. The all are stuck on the notion that oil is an absolute necessity and that to be a winner in the game it will be had at any and all costs including war, genocide, mass murder, etc…
They are wrong, not because humans won’t kill each other for resources, of course they will, but because oil at this point is a losing game and most of the money invested, and all the existing infrastructure and supply chains that it requires will soon be stranded assets!
If you are going to fight a war it will be for water, grains, food, rare earths, lithium. cobalt, copper, nickle, etc…And by the way, guns and bombs might not even be the most efficient way to fight and win such a war. There is only one emerging super power in the world that gets this, Any guesses who that might be?
Side note: take a look at this site for a glimpse of what a profound waste of assets legacy military hardware is given that it is vulnerable to advanced tech such as cyber warfare, AI, drones, biological warfare etc…
https://citizentruth.org/us-and-china-drive-global-military-spending-to-highest-level-since-cold-war/
Cheers!
Fred,
As you know, one of the biggest consumers of oil is the military. So to fight those wars for water, food, rare earths, lithium etc they need oil.
It is a key resource, i don’t understand how you guys can’t see that. Again the data, oil consumptions is increasing.
It is a key resource, i don’t understand how you guys can’t see that. Again the data, oil consumptions is increasing.
Of course I understand and see that! And I am highly aware that oil is the life blood of the military industrial complex as currently configured just about in every corner of this globe. I guess what I don’t understand is how anyone who frequents this site continues to discount the consequences of peak oil on that very military industrial complex!
Though actually it is the militaries of many countries around the world that have been raising the highest level of alarm about peak oil. Just check with the DOD. It seems most people either haven’t read or have conveniently forgotten the Bundeswehr’s report that was accidentally on purpose leaked by Der Spiegel way back in 2010.
https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/peak-oil-and-the-german-government-military-study-warns-of-a-potentially-drastic-oil-crisis-a-715138.html
…The issue is so politically explosive that it’s remarkable when an institution like the Bundeswehr, the German military, uses the term “peak oil” at all. But a military study currently circulating on the German blogosphere goes even further.
The study is a product of the Future Analysis department of the Bundeswehr Transformation Center, a think tank tasked with fixing a direction for the German military. The team of authors, led by Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Will, uses sometimes-dramatic language to depict the consequences of an irreversible depletion of raw materials. It warns of shifts in the global balance of power, of the formation of new relationships based on interdependency, of a decline in importance of the western industrial nations, of the “total collapse of the markets” and of serious political and economic crises.
And if anyone should have a good grasp of the consequences of peak oil it would probably be the Germans…
And to be clear I’m not in any way discounting the very real conflicts that are already occurring due to peak oil but any country that isn’t investing heavily in alternatives and doesn’t have a back up plan is going to be on the losing end of this next round. I think the Chinese and the Germans both get this, The Americans not so much!
Cheers!
“And if anyone should have a good grasp of the consequences of peak oil it would probably be the Germans…”
Which nicely summarizes my occasional comments to the effect that neither the Russians nor the Germans have forgotten the Siege of Stalingrad, and in large part explains why the German people are so gung ho for going renewable….. without of course mentioning the nazi era in respect to energy security, unless in private, as a general rule.
And we should cut Joe and Suzy Sixpack a little slack, when it comes to understanding peak oil, etc…… because ten or twenty years down the road, to THEM, is approximately the same thing as the expansion of the sun resulting in the incineration of the Earth is to YOU.. some what interesting , but totally irrelevant to their own lives or to the lives of their children.
The ONLY people capable of seeing and caring about the far off future are scientists and their ilk. And so far as I’M concerned, MY opinion of THIS aspect of their beliefs is that it is basically a RELIGION, namely NATURE WORSHIP.
OBJECTIVITY is a bedrock principle in real science. No REALLY objective scientist really gives a shit about the Earth, for any reason, other than that he has a PERSONAL STAKE in it, SKIN in the EARTH Game, so to speak. That stake consists of his personal love of it, and his instinctive tendency to protect his immediate and extended family, right up to the entirity of humanity.
I haven’t generated any howls of outrage here for a couple of days at least. Maybe this remark will put stir up a couple of people who will enjoy telling me how dumb I am as much as I enjoy poking them with a sharp stick of this nature once in a while.
Definitely right about the German military report Fred. They done a great analysis. But how it actually plays out, no one knows.
I personally can’t see any kind of smooth transition to another energy source. But who knows. I think since globalism, countries are so dependent on trade for goods, if that is somehow interrupted, all hell might break loose.
The scariest thing is no one knows what will happen. We can do our own projections but the details is indeed murky.
What do you think? World war 3 might play out?
What do you think? World war 3 might play out?
I think that in many ways WWIII is already playing out as we speak. A lot of it doesn’t involve the guns and bombs. It is cyber and high tech in nature. Also political and economic manipulation. I think in the not too distant future we will start seeing the impacts on a global scale. That will include very high death tolls from famines and pestilence. Aircraft carriers won’t protect against any of it. So at that point they will be part of the stranded assets!
But no, I don’t pretend to know how the future will really play out.
It is important to cut the use of oil for driving to the 7-11 to pick up a case of beers to save it for uses that are not easily substituted. But remember, as use of oil is cut so the need for the military being everywhere declines.
NAOM
Thanks for link to Snyder, I will listen up tomorrow.
The idea that people won’t fight over oil as it becomes scarce, I think is wishful.
For example, China Japan Korea VietNam Phillipines Taiwan all import a great deal of fossil fuel. Of these countries, only China has significant amounts, and the depletion is already clearly seen on their chart. The oil comes in through the Strait of Mallaca near Singapore, from the mideast. These countries are not anywhere close to being able withstand a cutoff in oil. Maybe in 10-20 yrs they will be a little closer. In the meantime, war over the energy flow is certainly possible. Chinas action in the S China Sea and the belt/road initiative are primarily about keeping that oil flow viable, for themselves. It is rational policy for them.
This is just one example.
Overshoot of the world population to 7.8 B was accomplished on the shoulders of fossil fuel energy, and the dependency is no less today than any time in history.
Transition away from it, and towards lower population and global energy demand, has not yet started.
I agree with you Fred- “Most Americans do not have the slightest idea as to how bad things can get in very short order!”
Agree Iron Mike.
Here’s a short 8 and a half minute snippet from a talk by Snyder on Trump.
Disclaimer: it was put up by Bernie Sander’s campaign but it doesn’t take away from what Snyder is saying. And I am not supporting Sanders for president!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZ-bifYqK_Q
The Path to Authoritarianism: Historian Timothy Snyder
Then watch video of any of Trump’s rallies for a bit of a reality check! (pun intended) The worst of all is the latest video on Trump’s twitter feed, put out by the White House, of him visiting the hospital in El Paso. Goebbels would be very proud!
Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump
Incredible afternoon in El Paso, Texas. We love you, and are with you, all the way!
https://twitter.com/i/status/1159278905909399552
Anyone who doesn’t vomit after watching that is already too far gone to matter!
Peace!
A company has been experimenting with concrete formulations and design for coastal environment use (seawalls, piers, etc) , aimed at enhancing marine life colonization.
They’ve come pretty far with their products.
Its long overdue.
ECOncrete
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KanmayUa2ME
That’s cool, I wonder if they also might take a page from the knowledge the ancient Romans had about making concrete that when exposed to sea water becomes stronger over time!
https://www.upi.com/Science_News/2017/07/03/Seawater-makes-ancient-Roman-concrete-stronger/7591499107627/
The analysis of geologists at the University of Utah showed seawater encourages the growth of interlocking minerals that bolster cement’s cohesive bonds. The phenomenon explains why 2,000-year-old Roman piers and breakwaters are not only still standing, but stronger today than they were 1,000 years ago.
The Romans made concrete by mixing a mortar of volcanic ash, lime and seawater. They added chunks of volcanic rock to the mortar to strengthen and complete their cement mix. The aggregate cement was used in a variety of buildings, as well as marine infrastructure, including sea walls that protected harbors and the boats they sheltered from rough seas.
Fred —
RAPID CORAL DEATH AND DECAY, NOT JUST BLEACHING, AS MARINE HEATWAVES INTENSIFY
“The water temperatures are so warm that the coral doesn’t bleach, it dies,” says Tracy Ainsworth of The University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. “We still see the coral become white as the animal dies and its skeleton is exposed to the water, and then we see it very rapidly become overgrown by colonizing algae from both the inside out and the outside in. This process of rapid colonization and decay is devastating not just for the animal tissue, but also for the skeleton that is left behind, which is the three-dimensional framework of the reef.”
https://phys.org/news/2019-08-rapid-coral-death-marine-heatwaves.html
Meanwhile,
ALASKA’S HOTTEST MONTH
“The temperatures have soared as high as 90 degrees Fahrenheit, seals and other animals are inexplicably dying, and the once-dependable sea ice is long gone from the shores. Alaska just recorded its warmest July — and warmest month — on record.”
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/07082019/alaska-record-hottest-month-sea-ice-melt-climate-change-permafrost-species-die-off
However, on the other pole, in Antarctica, ice grows.
Also: there is a theory that behind Arctic melting are underwater volcanoes. That at least would explain why ice is melting only around North Pole.
Not true. Antarctic ice went from record high levels to record low in a short time. Reasons are unclear.
No, really, even Wikipedia says:
‘In contrast to the melting of the Arctic sea ice, sea ice around Antarctica has been expanding as of 2013.[4] Satellite measurements by NASA indicate a still increasing sheet thickness above the continent, outweighing the losses at the edge.’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctic_ice_sheet
Published July 2nd 2019
https://weather.com/news/climate/news/2019-07-02-antarctic-sea-ice-record-low-cover
And then there is that little glacier that is like a cork in a bottle…
https://www.pnas.org/content/116/30/14887
Marine ice sheet instability amplifies and skews uncertainty in projections of future sea-level rise
Significance
The potential for collapse of the Antarctic ice sheet remains the largest single source of uncertainty in projections of future sea-level rise. This uncertainty comes from an imperfect understanding of ice sheet processes and the internal variability of climate forcing of ice sheets. Using a mathematical technique from statistical physics and large ensembles of state-of-the-art ice sheet simulations, we show that collapse of ice sheets widens the range of possible scenarios for future sea-level rise. We also find that the collapse of marine ice sheets makes worst-case scenarios of rapid sea-level rise more likely in future projections.
Abstract
Sea-level rise may accelerate significantly if marine ice sheets become unstable. If such instability occurs, there would be considerable uncertainty in future sea-level rise projections due to imperfectly modeled ice sheet processes and unpredictable climate variability. In this study, we use mathematical and computational approaches to identify the ice sheet processes that drive uncertainty in sea-level projections. Using stochastic perturbation theory from statistical physics as a tool, we show mathematically that the marine ice sheet instability greatly amplifies and skews uncertainty in sea-level projections with worst-case scenarios of rapid sea-level rise being more likely than best-case scenarios of slower sea-level rise. We also perform large ensemble simulations with a state-of-the-art ice sheet model of Thwaites Glacier, a marine-terminating glacier in West Antarctica that is thought to be unstable. These ensemble simulations indicate that the uncertainty solely related to internal climate variability can be a large fraction of the total ice loss expected from Thwaites Glacier. We conclude that internal climate variability alone can be responsible for significant uncertainty in projections of sea-level rise and that large ensembles are a necessary tool for quantifying the upper bounds of this uncertainty.
Cheers!
Yep! And there is also a theory that the earth is flat! It is proposed by the same people who believe volcanoes are causing the Arctic to melt!
Often the same people hold both correct and wrong theories. Some hold only one. I, for example, do not believe in the flat earth theory.
Whatever, no long term global surplus water melting can be yet confirmed. And we are just entering the Grand Solar Minimum, which will probably increase albedo by increasing cloud cover. Have never understood this fixation that albedo totally depends on ice cover only.
What you should be worrying about now are the large tundra fires in Siberia.
And you are just a troll though I do agree about the fires.
NAOM
Stop gaslighting NOW.
I haven’t written one untrue thing.
what is the difference between ‘untrue’, and unsubstantiated, weakly conceived opinions?
You are very tricky with your words. Falsehoods disguised as suppositions. I smell no truth in your writing. I do smell crooked intentions.
Why don’t you try being straightforward,
if you have anything worth saying.
People might then refrain from using the ignore button to delete you.
What is untrue is provable.
Not that I am the only one guilty of unsubstantiated opinions….
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/145185/major-greenland-glacier-is-growing
Fred Magyar definitely excells in selectivity. I liked him much more at The Oil Drum. He has become extremely partisan, if not fanatical, now.
Magyar, I reckon you are bursting with energy of partisanship, so I don’t think the 3-body problem is for you…. but what about becoming a lawyer?! In the court your selectivity will count 😉
“Fred Magyar definitely excells in selectivity. I liked him much more at The Oil Drum. He has become extremely partisan, if not fanatical, now.”
Probably balls deep in Tesla stock.
” Have never understood this fixation that albedo totally depends on ice cover only.”
Only a complete idiot, or a troll, could possibly say something so stupid.
Even a half wit who has actually read anything about warming and albedo, etc, knows that people working in the field take clouds, bare ground versus plant cover, land covered over with concrete and asphalt, etc, into consideration.
OneofEU- Is that you Fernando?
No worries!
In 33 Years The Rich Will Own All the Wealth in the World!
And the Great Barrier Reef is just a low value asset in the big picture! Worth much less than all the oil wells… The global oil industry is worth what? about 2 Trillion? who cares about some stupid coral reefs!
$56 billion
The Great Barrier Reef is worth $56 billion. That’s the “total asset value” according to a new Deloitte Access Economics report that calculates the World Heritage site’s full economic, social and iconic brand value for the first time.
Does it matter if I say these idiots know the price of everything but the value of nothing?!
Good bye folks, pack your bags, we are going away! (with apologies to George Carlin)
EROI of renewables might be reasonably compared to EROI of tar sands oil, which is 3:1, if I remember well. Tar sands oil as of now is essentially a form of gas-to-liquids. There is no oil from tar sands without heating them.
Now, oil has one advantage over coal or metal ores (the latter being necessary for renewables production): since it is a liquid, it can be moved relatively cheap, mainly by pipelines and tankers. Ores CANNOT. Additionally, ores must be thermally processed to get metals. And to get metals from ores, you also must either move ores to coal/gas, or coal/gas to ores, to put them together. All that alone leads to EROI 3:1, if not less, I think.
I also think that financial analysis of “the renewables now 10% cheaper than fossils etc” kind only obfuscates the problem, since the true currency here is energy. However, given that in my lycee (high school in Europe) time I spent much more time investigating kinematics (which may reflect the eternal human fascination with machines, and all things moving) than thermodynamics, I don’t expect that the awarness of energy problem will really expand. There is a fundemantal difference between kinematics and thermodynamics, the former is best understood as a science of isolated systems, the latter teaches you the art of holistic framing. Humans have a natural tendency to analyse, namely, to isolate, so thermodynamics is actually more difficult mode of thinking for them. Also, kinematics, and mechanics in general, can be really well described with the help of mathematics, whereas thermodynamics not so, as its mathematical description comes from a level higher than in kinematics since thermodynamic processes have essentially statistical character in mathematical description.
Regardless, when fossil fuel becomes scarce as a result of depletion, you better hope that those around you were wise enough to deploy vast arrays of renewable energy production facilities. Or perhaps you should become fluent in Russian.
Well, already have passive knowledge of Russian 😉
Wonder when Russia closes its borders… However, recently Russians have tried to slowly equalize the internal and external prices of fuels, as the high external prices already brought about some shortages of fuels in Russia (!).
Apples to coconuts comparison. You totally ignore all the refining overheads and dilbit you require for tar sands while counting transport and refining for renewables. You also repeat the fallacy that renewables require coal/gas when much of the refining and construction only requires electricity and many of the other production and transport stages can be moved to electricity. The other thing you ignore is just try to burn that oil sand oil twice, renewables can produce energy for decades.
Like I said, you are a troll.
NAOM
I wrote MIGHT, NOT ‘must’ or ‘can’:
‘EROI of renewables might be reasonably compared’.
You must start building renewables with fossils, as of now there is no area when renewables would be reproduced by renewables etc, and everything would be electrified.
You must start building renewables with fossils, as of now there is no area when renewables would be reproduced by renewables etc, and everything would be electrified.
Actually there are! Here’s one of the more conservative ones. There is zero reason that renewables, and Evs can’t be produced with electricity produced by renewables.
https://www.ucsusa.org/clean_energy/smart-energy-solutions/increase-renewables/renewable-energy-80-percent-us-electricity.html
Renewable Energy Can Provide 80 Percent of U.S. Electricity by 2050
A comprehensive study by the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) shows that the U.S. can generate most of its electricity from renewable energy by 2050.
The Renewable Electricity Futures Study found that an 80 percent renewables future is feasible with currently available technologies, including wind turbines, solar photovoltaics, concentrating solar power, biopower, geothermal, and hydropower.
The study also demonstrates that a high renewables scenario can meet electricity demand across the country every hour of every day, year-round.
Not only that but it is highly likely that scenario will change even more in favor of renewables as fossil fuel companies start to be held criminally liable due to damages caused by climate change.
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/04042018/climate-change-fossil-fuel-company-lawsuits-timeline-exxon-children-california-cities-attorney-general
Fossil Fuels on Trial: Where the Major Climate Change Lawsuits Stand Today
Updated July 22, 2019, with a judge determining the Rhode Island lawsuit should be moved back to state court.
A wave of legal challenges that is washing over the oil and gas industry, demanding accountability for climate change, started as a ripple after revelations that ExxonMobil had long recognized the threat fossil fuels pose to the world.
Over the past few years: Two states launched fraud investigations into Exxon over climate change, and one has followed with a lawsuit. Nine cities and counties, from New York to San Francisco, have sued major fossil fuel companies, seeking compensation for climate change damages. And determined children have filed lawsuits against the federal government and various state governments, claiming the governments have an obligation to safeguard the environment.
Of course we may have to kick out the fascists and white supremacists currently running the US government and hope the environment can somehow hang on a bit longer. And that might be a long shot!
Cheers!
Europe coal generation collapsed by 19% in first six months of 2019
I have posted this as a counterpoint to the sub-thread started by Hickory further up, based on a comment on the oil thread suggesting that wars over oil are all but inevitable when it becomes scarce as it is destined to. I sense that a tipping point has been passed with regards to the use of wind and solar and gas for electricity generation. Wind and solar do not provide “dispatchable on demand” generation so they must be supported by adequate amounts of storage and/or sources that can be called up on at fairly short notice. Hydroelectric and NG fueled sources that do not depend on boiling water (steam) to produce electricity fit the bill while coal as a rule does not. As more solar and wind are added to electricity grids the value of flexible sources that can ramp up and down quickly increases and the value of less flexible generation falls. From the article linked to at the top of this comment, it would appear that in Europe coal is falling victim to renewables, aided by a price on carbon.
As highlighted by the lead post, coal is not faring well in the US either, although it’s sagging fortunes are attributed to cheap natural gas more so than renewables. However, falling costs for wind and solar are making it more likely that wind and solar will undercut not just coal but also NG going forward and there is an increasing likelihood that utilities will pursue lower cost wind and solar as a preemptive move to prevent what is happening in Australia, where that country likely has the highest proportion of households with PV systems on their roof of any country in the world (based on 2014 data). As prices for solar PV technology continue to fall, the risk of individual households reducing their electricity costs by installing their own systems will continue to put pressure on utilities to reduce their costs and retail prices. This is particularly true in areas with good solar resources.
So what does this have to do with the risk of wars as a result of oil scarcity when that occurs? This is a source of frustration for me. Tesla Motors is a clear indication of what can be achieved if the will exists to achieve it. It is pretty clear to me that Tesla is the only company that is displaying the will at this time, largely due to the fact that they are unfettered by any investments in ICE technology. All the legacy auto manufacturers have huge investments in ICE technology and thus have little incentive to invest in risky disruptive technology. The result is that in 2018 some 86 million light vehicles were sold worldwide down 0.5% from 2017 figures. Data from insideevs.com Monthly Sales Scorecard indicates that of that 86 million, just over 2 million (2.3%) were plug-in vehicles, that is, plug in hybrids as well as pure battery electrics. According to this page at the web site carsalesbase.com:
So, of the 86 million vehicles sold only 1.26 million or 1.47% were battery electric. For EVs to make a difference, more will have to be sold, a lot more.
I found an interesting graph with some interesting observations at the following web page:
Happy motoring: Global automobile production 1900 to 2016
Any regular reader of this website should realize that the trend shown in the graph (below) is patently unsustainable! This adds more weight to the comment that Hickory quoted but, is also essentially the source of my frustration. The world is sleepwalking into multiple crises and there are far too few people in positions of power and influence that seem to have any sense of urgency about what needs to be done to reduce the severity of future problems.
IMO, solutions to some of the problems exist but, are being held back by vested (FF) interests who have benefited greatly from the status quo. These interests have amassed insane amounts of wealth, resulting in their ability to exert undue influence on governments. The fact that the FF industries have powered the global economy up to now, means that the combination of influence and fear has stifled government support for alternative energy and transport while maintaining subsidies for the very energy and transportation systems the world ought to be transitioning away from.
Thanks for your thoughts on this Island Boy.
I don’t think that war over energy inevitable, but the probability is considerable since the pace of transition/sense of urgency has been poor.
The next twenty years is the period of greatest risk, I suspect.
FF affordability will be declining due to depletion, some countries may not be able to import what they need for routine operations due to market competition or imposed restrictions including blockades/sanctions/tariffs.
And many countries will be far behind on the task of implementing replacing energy production.
Some may choose to fight rather than suffer an imposed energy depression.
Think of economic barriers that previously led to war.
“the U.S. froze Japanese assets on July 26, 1941, and on August 1 established an embargo on oil and gasoline exports to Japan.[12][13][14] The oil embargo was an especially strong response because oil was Japan’s most crucial import, and more than 80% of Japan’s oil at the time came from the United States” Pearl Harbor came in 4 months.
Currently the USA has heavy trade restrictions on Venezuela, Iran, China, Russia most obviously, but many others as well. Its risky business, and this is during a time of plentiful oil, coal and gas. That will change this coming decade.
Along with concerns over CO2, the thing a territory can do is build wind/solar like there is no tomorrow.
Considering the BIG PICTURE, including the nature of Nature’s most sublime and most fucked up life form, the Naked Ape, maybe one of the best things that could happen in the near future would be nice hot oil war….. presuming it doesn’t get too far out of hand, and result in direct confrontations between the opposing major powers.
There might not be ANYTHING ELSE that would be so effective in waking us up, collectively, to the need to switch to electric cars as waiting in line for gasoline that’s jumped in price a couple of bucks a gallon over a period of a few weeks.
The back orders for new electric cars would keep every battery plant on the planet running 24 /7 indefinitely. The rest of the car could easily be built in a conventional auto plant with only modest retooling needed.
And with all those new electric cars , there would be a hell of an incentive for the owners of them to push hard for new wind and solar farms, so they could charge them up dirt cheap on off peak and often otherwise surplus wind and solar juice.
Preacher sez,”God acts in mysterious ways.”
So OFM sez, Everybody pray to the Rock or Snake or Bear or whatever of his personal choice for some WAKE UP bricks upside our collective head.
Not long ago Paul Beckwith had posted about near lethal wet bulb temperatures occurring in Pakistan.
Now it seems to be happening in China.
http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/
The image on the right shows that on July 29, 2019, it felt like it was as hot as 57.2°C or 135°F in China (in the area marked by the green circle).
How could it get this hot? As the image underneath on the right shows, the temperature in that area was 35.1°C or 95.1°F (at the right circle), while it was much hotter at some places elsewhere in China, e.g. it was 41.5°C or 106.6°F at the left circle on July 29, 2019.
What made the weather so hard to bear was a combination of high temperature and high relative humidity, which was 81% in the area at the circle on the right at the time.
Wet Bulb Temperature
The temperature in that area of 35.1°C, at 81% relative humidity and a pressure level of 1004 hPa, translates into a wet bulb temperature of 32.11°C.
Had the temperature remained at 35.1°C, but had relative humidity kept rising to 100%, i.e. rainfall, the wet bulb temperature threshold of 35°C would have been exceeded (35.01°C). Alternatively, had relative humidity remained at 81%, but had the temperature kept rising to 38.2°C, the wet bulb temperature threshold of 35°C would equally have been exceeded (35.07°C), showing how dangerous the situation is. A wet bulb temperature of 35°C can be lethal, as the human body will be unable to lose heat, even when the wind is strong and no matter how much one drinks or sweats.
The situation is dire and calls for comprehensive and effective action, as described in the Climate Plan.
I had a look at the linked web page and watched one of the embedded Beckwith videos, which got me to thinking, what are the maximum survivable wet bulb temperatures for other organisms apart from homo sapiens? What sorts of temperatures are lethal for dogs, cats, goats, sheep, cows, chickens etc.? At what point will humans have watch their pets and livestock die unless they provide a temperature controlled environment for them.
It is becoming obvious to me that short term, extreme temperature swings are becoming increasingly likely as CO2 levels continue to climb. I feel there is a very real risk of a time in the future when temperatures could rise to lethal levels long enough to result in hundreds if not thousands or even millions of deaths of people who cannot escape the heat and/or humidity. The question is, how far are we from that point? At what point do other living things start to succumb to the heat. We know that corals started dying long ago but what other diversity is being lost simply because of heat.
Before any deniers or trolls decide to chip in with their opinions, the Beckwith video led me to this video:
Grand Solar Minimum is coming. And..?(Just Have a Think)
This is either the second or third video I have watched with this guy and I find him quite good. One of things that stood out to me as I watched this video is that no other explanation for the rise in mean global temperature over the past few decades makes as much sense as greenhouse gases, none! I challenge anyone who thinks it’s “solar cycles” or some other contrived BS that accounts for rising temperatures, to watch the video and come up with a credible alternative explanation for the increasing mean global temperatures.
I had a look at the linked web page and watched one of the embedded Beckwith videos, which got me to thinking, what are the maximum survivable wet bulb temperatures for other organisms apart from homo sapiens?
Yeah, good question!
If you haven’t read it yet check out Gonefishing’s post upthread and my comment below it.
http://peakoilbarrel.com/eias-electric-power-monthly-july-2019-edition-with-data-for-may/#comment-684414
I did read them and most likely they played a role in the genesis of my question
Everybody in this forum should read this article, for pleasure, for background, and for insight.
Money is an absolutely inextricable and essential part of everything happening good or bad that’s discussed here.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/08/05/the-invention-of-money
Yep! A good read indeed 😉
But there are a quite a few more layers to that onion.
https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/How_Growth_Became_the_Enemy_of_Prosperity
How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity
Book: Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity. by Douglas Rushkoff. Portfolio, 2016
“The digital economy has gone wrong. Everybody knows it, but no one knows quite how to fix it, or even how to explain the problem. Workers lose to automation, investors lose to algorithms, musicians lose to power law dynamics, drivers lose to Uber, neighborhoods lose to Airbnb, and even tech developers lose their visions to the demands of the startup economy.
Douglas Rushkoff argues that it doesn’t have to be this way. This isn’t the fault of digital technology at all, but the way we are deploying it: instead of building the distributed digital economy these new networks could foster, we are doubling down on the industrial age mandate for growth above all. As Rushkoff shows, this is more the legacy of early corporatism and central currency than a feature of digital technology. In his words, “we are running a 21st century digital economy on a 13th Century printing-press era operating system.”
In Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, Rushkoff shows how we went wrong, why we did it, and how we can reprogram the digital economy and our businesses from the inside out to promote sustainable prosperity for pretty much everyone. Rushkoff calls on business to:
• Accept that era of extractive growth is over. Rather, businesses must – like eBay and Kickstarter – give people the ability to exchange value and invest in one another.
• Eschew platform monopolies like Uber in favor of distributed, worker-owned co-ops, orchestrated through collective authentication systems like bitcoin and blockchains instead of top-down control.
• Resist the short-term, growth-addicted mindset of publicly traded markets, by delivering dividends instead of share price increases, or opting to stay private or buy back one’s own shares.
• Recognize contributions of land and labor as important as capital, and develop business ecosystems that work more like family companies, investing in the local economies on which they ultimately depend.
Rushkoff calls on us to reboot this obsolete economic operating system and use the unique distributive power of the internet to break free of the winner-take-all game defining business today. A fundamentally optimistic book, THROWING ROCKS AT THE GOOGLE BUS culminates with a series of practical steps to remake the economic operating system from the inside out—and prosper along the way.”
But as we have recently learned, if we continue on this path, in 33 years, everything on the planet will be owned by a single sociopath! 😉
Cheers!
Thanks Fred,
I’m going to get a copy for my own personal library.
Maybe there’s some hope for humanity, but I live among the great unwashed mass of the working and welfare classes of this country, and I can tell you, and every body else, where in the true root of the problem lies.
The breadth and width of the ignorance of a typical man or woman met on the street at random is simply INCOMPREHENSIBLE to a typical ( semi at least ) well educated person such as Bernie Sanders fan.
You CAN’T explain something to most of my neighbors, or half my family, using facts, using graphs or charts or quoting ” papers”. They don’t have even the FOGGIEST idea what is meant by the term “paper” in the sense of a peer reviewed journal article.
A fact to a good friend of mine who has successfully run a business of his own, for forty years, bases his politics on reasoning such as this. “Lookit them AFERkerns, ‘n how they live. They ain’t never done nothing. Ain’t gonna never do nothing. Look’t how white people live. Ya gotta have sense enuf to think for yerself, Mac”. He actually laughed at ME, a good natured laugh of course. He’s DEAD sure he knows the score, and that I’m the nincompoop.
HE will never vote D, not because of racism in particular, but because he is STILL mad as hell that ACA resulted in his losing the health insurance he had, and he has to pay a hell of a lot more for anything even remotely comparable now. ( I will go to my grave CONVINCED that the D’s who wrote the law were well intentioned, but that they also deliberately took the opportunity to fuck lots more Republicans DRY, no vaseline even, than D’s , the way it is set up to pay for it. Typical D voters are WAY more likely to gave a government sponsored plan, being teachers, cops, etc, members of large unions, employees of larger businesses who do skull work rather than back work, etc, than to be running a small business of their own, which is more down the alley of a typical R voter. I have often said then, here and elswhere, ACA aka Ocare was one of the biggest miscalculations EVER on the part of the D’s , and I will go to my grave convinced that it’s one of the BIG reasons Trump is prez today. It ENRAGES lots of typical R type voters who are paying thru the nose for it. Good idea, worst execution of any major program in my lifetime. )
Another one, soon to die from cancer, and unable to afford proper treatment, is absolutely dead set against SOCIALISM, without even a CLUE to the obvious facts that social security, medicare, public schools, workers comp and unemployment, etc are all SOCIALISM, all of which he approves.
He is adamant that he will NOT vote for a Democrat, because he’s opposed to socialism, although he does understand that the cancer specialists who want to charge him many tens of thousands of dollars for chemo are ripping him off, and he does know that you can get the same drugs in Canada for only a very minor fraction of what they cost here.
So he will die younger than otherwise, because he doesn’t have money enough, or socialism, to pay for this chemo.
He gives Trump credit for having plenty of oil, now, but it was during the Obama time that the oil biz got rolling again here in the USA. Trump has told him HE TRUMP is providing him with cheap gasoline, and so since he is against socialism, he believes Trump.
Good examples of ignorance OFM. I see a different version from both sides of the political spectrum. The version I see is perhaps worse, since the people have had a decent amount of education. So maybe ignorance is not the right term, but there is failure to be analytical, to be skeptical, to be an independent thinker, and a willingness to be easily influenced by media manipulation to the point of brainwashing. They pick a tribe to associate with, and then swallow the whole ideology of that tribe without question.
This applies to ‘progressives” just as much as the ‘Pence/Cheney/P.Ryan’ crowd (what do you call that crowd- neocons?)
Ex- I observed a conversation between some bright Univ graduates about food and GMO’s. There was no acknowledgement that the term GMO’s encompassed a wide range of manipulations, some inconsequential at the field level or to the end user, rather it is mentally an easier task to lump it all in one politically incorrect basket.
Another example- most conversations I have witnessed on Medicare-for-All fail to acknowledge that private insurance layered on top of the government layer, is how the system works. And they fail to understand that a system like this has limitations/rationing as a fundamental part of its function. Its just not convenient to the simple argument.
Perhaps people of all shades generally prefer to be naive.
running a small business of their own, which is more down the alley of a typical R voter
Mac – please do a little research on what percent of Americans are small business owners. I think you’ll find that’s NOT a typical voter.
The ACA helped average Republican voter much, much, much more than it hurt them.
More from the archives of the bad news is much worse than we expected!
https://physicsworld.com/a/animals-adapt-to-climate-heat-but-too-slowly/
German scientists have an answer to the great question of species survival: can animals adapt to climate change? The answer, based on close analysis of 10,000 studies, is a simple one. They may be able to adapt, but not fast enough…
…“Even populations undergoing adaptive change do so at a pace that does not guarantee their persistence,” said Alexandre Courtiol of the Leibniz Institute. And the data available apply to species that are known to cope relatively well with changing conditions.
Here’s a link to the paper in Nature:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-10924-4
Biological responses to climate change have been widely documented across taxa and regions, but it remains unclear whether species are maintaining a good match between phenotype and environment, i.e. whether observed trait changes are adaptive. Here we reviewed 10,090 abstracts and extracted data from 71 studies reported in 58 relevant publications, to assess quantitatively whether phenotypic trait changes associated with climate change are adaptive in animals. A meta-analysis focussing on birds, the taxon best represented in our dataset, suggests that global warming has not systematically affected morphological traits, but has advanced phenological traits. We demonstrate that these advances are adaptive for some species, but imperfect as evidenced by the observed consistent selection for earlier timing. Application of a theoretical model indicates that the evolutionary load imposed by incomplete adaptive responses to ongoing climate change may already be threatening the persistence of species.
In case anyone is wondering, that last bolded sentence is proper conservative science speak for: “MOST SPECIES ARE ALREADY FUCKED!”
Cheers!
A MAJOR FACTOR IN THE “INSECT APOCALYPSE” HAS JUST BEEN PINPOINTED
“The acute toxicity loading of insecticides in agricultural land in the US was 48 times higher in 2014 compared to 1992. The big jump in land toxicity started in the mid-2000s, a time when neonicotinoids first started being used to coat the seeds of commodity crops like corn and soy. Even beyond the US, a meta-analysis study has shown that 40 percent of insect species could face extinction in the coming decades. While climate change was a notable factor, the “root cause” of the problem is the intensification of agriculture over the past six decades, entailing pollution, loss of habitat, and increasingly relentless use of synthetic pesticides.”
https://www.iflscience.com/environment/a-major-factor-in-the-insect-apocalypse-has-just-been-pinponted-/
Meanwhile,
Every year an area of rainforest the size of New Jersey is cut down and destroyed. The plants and animals that used to live in these places either die or must find a new forest to call home. It’s called progress, I think.
So, not so bad; apparently New Jersey only covers about 7800 square miles (or 20,000 square kilometers).
https://kids.mongabay.com/elementary/501.html
It’s called progress, I think.
Yeah! I was having a conversation with my student yesterday, a young highly educated Brazilian executive of a Multinational, a father of three young children and concerned about the environment and deforestation of the Amazonian rain forest, yet he still somehow is unable to connect the dots and believes that Bolsonaro’s policies are good for Brazil and the Brazilian economy!
Yes indeed! ‘ORDER AND PROGRESS!’ it says so right there in the middle of the Brazilian flag.
As for me, I would have much preferred the messy disordered chaos of healthy ecosystems.
.
This issue is a big one. This class of insecticide may be behind the big rise in honeybeee decline.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neonicotinoid
Warmest night in 145 years of recordkeeping at #Galveston TX: 30C (86F)! https://twitter.com/nwshouston/status/1159734802905468928 …
Fred —
THE GULF STREAM IS SLOWING DOWN. THAT COULD MEAN RISING SEAS AND A HOTTER FLORIDA
“A weaker Gulf Stream would mean higher sea levels for Florida’s east coast. It could lead to colder winters in northern Europe (one reason many scientists prefer the term climate change to global warming). And it could mean that a lot of the heat that would have gone to Europe would stay along the U.S. east coast and in Florida.”
https://phys.org/news/2019-08-gulf-stream-seas-hotter-florida.html
The good news:
TRUMP ADMINISTRATION THROWS COLD WATER ON CLIMATE CHANGE THREAT TO CORAL REEFS
In the past decade, 90-95% of coral on the Florida Reef have died or incurred severe damage, according to scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which estimates the reef sustains roughly 70,000 jobs in South Florida and generates over $4.4 billion in annual sales.
“There is no evidence that coral bleaching is intensifying now or will in the future,” reads the comment, attributed to the NSC. Two sources said it was written by William Happer, a prominent skeptic of climate change. “Coral reefs have bleached and usually recovered throughout their evolutionary history.”
That position has spooked government experts who have worked in marine biology for decades, and who in recent years sounded alarm bells over the consequences of mass die-offs along U.S. shorelines and beyond.
https://phys.org/news/2019-08-trump-administration-cold-climate-threat.html
I am beginning to have a sense of foreboding that the global warming (climate change) deniers will be getting a wake up call, within the next 18 months. Dunno what it is, I just feel it. Maybe it’s just wishful thinking!
Don’t hold your breath.
NIGER SHRINKS MAJOR BIODIVERSITY RESERVE
TO ALLOW CHINESE OIL EXPLORATION
“One of the last havens for Saharan wildlife, including the endangered addax or white antelope, is being cut in half as CNPC plans to expand drilling. Three times the size of Belgium, the reserve in eastern Niger is considered one of the last bastions of Saharan wildlife by Unesco because of its minimal human presence. The 100,000 square kilometre reserve was established in 2012. Under the plans, areas of the reserve which overlap with CNPC’s oilfields will be declassified from their protected status to allow the company to expand its oil exploration activities.”
https://www.climatechangenews.com/2019/08/07/niger-shrinks-major-biodiversity-reserve-allow-chinese-oil-exploration/
I really don’t care any more what ignorant tribal morons like William Happer say or don’t say! It is probably way too late to change the course of history that is already baked in. Whether or not they deny reality isn’t going to change much at this point.
Specifically in the case of Florida’s coral reefs I have witnessed the devastation first hand with my very own eyes over the last two decades or so. I have also read the peer reviewed papers and talked to more than a few marine biologists about the reality of these reefs and ecosystems. So at the end of the day I guess I have to decide for myself if it is the scientists or Happer who are lying and who I’m going to believe! If for the crime of looking at the underlying science and the data, someone wishes to call me an alarmist, then so be it! Guilty as charged!
Anyways, I just listened to Guy McPherson talking to Dr Andrew Glikson
Glickson is an Earth and Paleo-Climate scientist, you can find a list of his published papers here: https://climate.anu.edu.au/about-us/people/andrew-glikson
Here’s a link to the Youtube video of the conversation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UONiD5GdTY
Dr. Andrew Glikson & Guy McPherson – Aug NBL Interview
As a sidenote, mid presentation there is a tree of life graphic by Leonard Eisenberg
https://www.infogrades.com/science-infographics/the-tree-of-life/
Humans are but a very tiny twig on the tip of that tree but we are having an enormous impact on the potential future of life on this planet.
Cheers!
Has anyone a good explanation for the drop in new solar installations this year?
I guess 2 possible causes:
1. unusual low price of natural gas
https://www.indexmundi.com/commodities/?commodity=natural-gas&months=60
2. trade war
https://news.energysage.com/2018-us-solar-tariff-impact-prices/
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2018/08/29/us-data-suggests-collapse-of-pv-module-imports-in-the-wake-of-section-201/
Is this correct?
First your premise does not sound correct
https://www.seia.org/solar-industry-research-data
https://www.seia.org/us-solar-market-insight
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-solar-outlook/global-solar-installations-to-reach-record-high-this-year-research-idUSKCN1UJ371
Or are you going by spend as did another person proclaiming doom? With the drop in price more solar is being installed for less money.
It is worth noting that the spike followed by 2 lower years, in the first link, syncs quite well with Trump’s attack on renewables and is typical for businesses rushing to beat a deadline and pull projects forward.
NAOM
U.N. report: Rising emissions could drain foods like rice and wheat of their nutrients
A new report from the United Nations warns that climate change decreases the nutritional value of important food crops like wheat and rice.
That’s because high levels of carbon dioxide disrupt plants’ internal chemistry, altering how much protein and other vitamins they produce internally.
Climate change is linked to myriad health issues: longer, more intense allergy seasons, the spread of mosquito-borne diseases like Zika and malaria, and the proliferation of flesh-eating bacteria in warmer water.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/health-news/un-report-rising-emissions-could-drain-foods-like-rice-and-wheat-of-their-nutrients/ar-AAFAegZ?ocid=spartanntp
Whats Your Thoughts on Tradational Pest Control Vs Eco Friendly