80 thoughts to “Open Thread Non-Petroleum, December 13, 2023”

  2. My comment on Nate’s U2b:

    Art Berman: “AI is not going to change the geology of planet Earth.”

    Colin Campbell: “You can’t eat the Internet.”

  3. CLIMATE SCIENTISTS PUSH BACK AGAINST COP28 CHEER

    “No doubt there will be lots of cheer and back-slapping… but the physics will not care,” said Kevin Anderson, a professor of energy and climate change at the University of Manchester. Humanity has between five and eight years of emissions at the current level before blowing through the “carbon budget” required to hold long-term warming to the 1.5 degrees Celsius needed to avert the worst impacts of long term planetary heating, he said. Even if emissions begin to go down in 2024, which is not a requirement of the text, we would need to have zero fossil fuel use globally by 2040, rather than the “fraudulent language of net zero by 2050” envisaged in the deal, said Anderson. He described it as a “death knell” for 1.5C, with even the less ambitious target of 2C, which carries a significant risk for triggering dangerous tipping points in global climate systems, becoming more distant.

    https://phys.org/news/2023-12-weak-tea-climate-scientists-cop28.html

    1. Doug
      This link posted by survivalist is a good example of climate modelers trying to get away from the chaotic aspect of weather driven temperature data. El Nino and La Nina are just one of many large scale weather events with non-linear impacts on global and regional temperatures that can span several years.
      Add to that the challenge of estimating global temperature from ground stations which are primarily centered around population centers and the modelers have to deal with estimating UHI effects, and estimating temperatures for very large geographic areas with little or no data.
      I really admire the acceptance of the Mauna Loa CO2 data. Is it an accurate representation of global CO2? Of course not, it is in the Northern hemisphere where most of the CO2 is generated, the southern hemisphere trails as it takes time for diffusion to balance things out , but it is an excellent proxy for the global number.
      I just wish the climate change folks would take a similar approach to global temperature, establish a few measuring stations with substantial thermal inertia and use that as their proxy for global temperature.
      Leave the weather to the weathermen, who are challenged to predict something a week in advance.

      1. Old Chemist,

        You make some very valid arguments. The climate change proponents get a little carried away when drawing conclusions based on acquired data that may not be representative of reality. e.g. consideration of the Milankovitch cycles in the data as just one example. Your comment about measuring stations with thermal inertia hits the nail squarely on the head.

        1. “The climate change proponents”
          You mean, of course, virtually the entire world-wide scienfific comunity not associated with either the petroleum industry or the US Republican party.
          Right?

          1. Actually, the petroleum industry also acknowledges the major risks of climate change (even if the Kochs are plotting behind closed doors…). Even the Society of Petroleum engineers agrees.

          2. Maybe you should try reading the Cook et al paper, in which 97% of scientists supposedley agree with extinction threatening climate change. Please have a read and then tell me that this is good science. At best this was a survey of the scientfic community about whether, or not, they agreed with climate change. 66% that had no opinion. Of the those who agreed with the climatechange apocalypse, about 33%, there wereabout 1% who had views that did not agree with the apocolypse. Therefore by on including those that had an opinion 97% agreed with the apocolypse. This is only equalled by the Mann hockey stock fiddle. Go have a read here.

            https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/8/2/024024/pdf

            Yes I work in petrochemicals but I have no doubt on the impending issues with the fossil fuels supply which is being drawn done so fast that an apocalypse is is almost certain, driven by exponential population growth and resource depletion.

            Remember that the climate change models, are models; they are models that might confirm the hypothesis but conclusive proof there is not.

            1. Carnot, the words ‘extinction’ and ‘apocalypse’ are nonsensical in regards to the Cook paper (C13), which will be clear to anyone who reads it. Your use of these terms undermine your claims of objectivity, and raise doubts about your honesty.

              Janko 2020 et al looks at whether the method used by C13 is effective and concludes that it ‘sub optimal’. It’s an interesting paper and helps illuminate the complexities of determining consensus.

              “Based on these results, the following conclusions emerge. In terms of the consensus research controversy, our paper produced empirical evidence that abstract rating is a suboptimal way to measure consensus. The associated stats can be misleading or can cast doubt on the method rationale; thus, they relate more to the rhetorical state of the literature body in question than to anything else. Scientist surveys or careful literature investigations are other options for consensus calculations. The former could also be problematic (Anderegg et al., 2010; Verheggen et al., 2014), but the latter brings us right back to the starting point (Shwed and Bearman, 2010).”

              https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959652620301748

            1. I think the intellectual fight against net-zero (aka “the transition away from fossil fuels”) in the STEM community is over and done. There’s no question about a general consensus: even Saudi Arabia, Dubai etc are on board. It’s mighty unrealistic to suggest that there’s no scientific consensus, when even the Society of Petroleum Engineers is on board.

              Here’s what the Society of Petroleum Engineers says:

              “SPE is firmly focused on the future of our industry, energy transition and the technology and process developments toward lower carbon and net zero.”

              https://www.spe.org/en/focus/energy-transition/

            2. Sorry about my failure to respond quickly. Occasionally I have to do really dumb stuff like eat and sleep.
              You may have been more convincing at climate science denial if you had actually read the first paper you referenced:
              The last paragraph of the paper included the following:
              ” Among papers expressing a position on AGW,
              an overwhelming percentage (97.2% based on self-ratings,
              97.1% based on abstract ratings) endorses the scientific
              consensus on AGW.”

              My assertion about “virtually the entire world-wide scienfific community” is not based on that 2012 paper by Cook, et al. However, not being a climate scientist myself I have no shame seeking expert advice. Here’s some sources I would claim are more credible than Fraser:

              The following are scientific organizations that hold the position that Climate Change has been caused by human action:

              Academia Chilena de Ciencias, Chile
              Academia das Ciencias de Lisboa, Portugal
              Academia de Ciencias de la República Dominicana
              Academia de Ciencias Físicas, Matemáticas y Naturales de Venezuela
              Academia de Ciencias Medicas, Fisicas y Naturales de Guatemala
              Academia Mexicana de Ciencias,Mexico
              Academia Nacional de Ciencias de Bolivia
              Academia Nacional de Ciencias del Peru
              Académie des Sciences et Techniques du Sénégal
              Académie des Sciences, France
              Academies of Arts, Humanities and Sciences of Canada
              Academy of Athens
              Academy of Science of Mozambique
              Academy of Science of South Africa
              Academy of Sciences for the Developing World (TWAS)
              Academy of Sciences Malaysia
              Academy of Sciences of Moldova
              Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic
              Academy of Sciences of the Islamic Republic of Iran
              Academy of Scientific Research and Technology, Egypt
              Academy of the Royal Society of New Zealand
              Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, Italy
              Africa Centre for Climate and Earth Systems Science
              African Academy of Sciences
              Albanian Academy of Sciences
              Amazon Environmental Research Institute
              American Academy of Pediatrics
              American Anthropological Association
              American Association for the Advancement of Science
              American Association of State Climatologists (AASC)
              American Association of Wildlife Veterinarians
              American Astronomical Society
              American Chemical Society
              American College of Preventive Medicine
              American Fisheries Society
              American Geophysical Union
              American Institute of Biological Sciences
              American Institute of Physics
              American Meteorological Society
              American Physical Society
              American Public Health Association
              American Quaternary Association
              American Society for Microbiology
              American Society of Agronomy
              American Society of Civil Engineers
              American Society of Plant Biologists
              American Statistical Association
              Association of Ecosystem Research Centers
              Australian Academy of Science
              Australian Bureau of Meteorology
              Australian Coral Reef Society
              Australian Institute of Marine Science
              Australian Institute of Physics
              Australian Marine Sciences Association
              Australian Medical Association
              Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society
              You can find the rest of the list at:
              https://www.opr.ca.gov/facts/list-of-scientific-organizations.html
              After a lot more of the world’s most prestigious scientific organozations the list ends with:
              Zimbabwe Academy of Sciences
              Every significan scientific organization in the United States is on the list.

              The Fraser institute fits into my earlier description of climate deniers, that it is a non-scientific organization aligned with either right wing politics and/or petroleum financial interests. I obtained the following from Wikipedia. It is highly footnoted and you can check their sources which include Fraser’s own published financial statements.

              “The institute has received donations of hundreds of thousands of dollars from foundations controlled by Charles and David Koch, with total donations estimated to be approximately $765,000 from 2006 to 2016. It also received US$120,000 from ExxonMobil in the 2003 to 2004 fiscal period. In 2016, it received a $5 million donation from Peter Munk, a Canadian businessman.

              The Fraser Institute accepted donations worth $100,000 from Philip Morris for “publishing research studies” in 2011-2012. Research produced by the Institute has previously argued that ‘tobacco taxation causes smuggling’, a common claim by corporations in the industry that has been disputed by public health officials and critics as exaggerated and erroneous.
              Please don’t rebut with a story from the Heartland Institute. They are one of today’s most prolific supporters of climate denial and, like Fraser, also support the tobacco industry.

            3. And, here’s what physicists say:

              “The Council of the American Physical Society strongly advocates that the United States: 1) implement policies that promote conservation, efficiency, sustainability, resilience and innovation throughout the global energy system; 2) make sustained and broad-based investments in research and development of long-lasting reduced-carbon and carbon-neutral energy cycles and technologies; and 3) support research into means of reducing the concentration of carbon dioxide, and other greenhouse gases and heat-trapping emissions in the atmosphere. Such policies and investments are essential to ensure our national security and to provide an adequate range of options that will protect the environment and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, as called for in the APS Statement on Earth’s Changing Climate.”

              https://www.aps.org/policy/statements/17_1.cfm

          4. JJHMAN
            ‘The climate change proponents’ Yes, and I include myself in that group. I do, however reserve the right to criticize what I see as shortcomings and hyperbole within that group.

            1. Fair enough. There are zombie zealots on both sides of every discussion.

        2. Carnot
          The Milankovitch cooling associated with the past several glaciations proceeded at a rate of approximately one degree Celsius per thousand years, undetectable with current measuring systems.

          1. Old Chemist,
            Milankovitch is an orbital forcing. There are many more orbital forcings that cause variations on scales up to a millenium, everything from the twice daily tidal periods to the interannual ENSO, multidecadal AMO, and possibly some longer periods that the instrumental record does not cover. This is a failure of the climate science community not to cover this. Recently I reviewed a paper that included sunspot (!) variations but ignored the shorter term orbital tidal forcing factors. They ignore because they are not included in models.

            https://editor.copernicus.org/index.php?_mdl=msover_md&_jrl=365&_lcm=oc108lcm109w&_acm=get_comm_sup_file&_ms=112361&c=255881&salt=9409441451866808274

          2. Old Chemist.

            And I am one of those( an old chemist). Quite true, but nonetheless the Milakovitch variations shoud be included. My point is that climate change is an inexact science. A bit like marketing.
            I do not deny that the climate is changing. I just do not happen to believe that carbon dioxide , and maybe methane , is the sole cause. The climate has always changed, and that can be reasonably proven. But the idea that carbon dioxide is the prime cause of “global warming” is a little over egged.

            1. Here’s what the National Academy of Sciences says:

              “From more extreme weather to rising seas, the climate is changing in ways that pose increasing risks to people and ecosystems. Building on decades of work, the National Academies continue to provide objective advice from top experts to help the nation better understand, prepare for, and limit future climate change.”

              https://www.nationalacademies.org/topics/climate

            3. “But the idea that carbon dioxide is the prime cause of ‘global warming’ is a little over egged”
              That’s a distorted view of the issue. From the comments, it seems Carnot has opinions but they aren’t based on the science.

              What part of the physics of the radiation environment do you not agree with? There’s a couple of hundred years of science behind it, so maybe there’s one component you don’t believe?
              As for the impact on the climate, there’s about 60 years of science behind that. What part of that work don’t you agree with?
              Climate scientists themselves can list the components of the scientific consensus that are strongly supported, and others that are less strongly supported. Do you know anything about that?
              Or is your opinion just based on feelings?

            4. Try looking at the absorbtion bands of the various gases in the atmosphere. You will then see that water vapour absorbs far more strongly than carbon dioxide. Water vapour is present in concentrations of up to 2 orders of magnitude greater than carbon dioxide.
              Then there is the seemingly dismissed fact that carbon dioxide has been present in the atmosphere at much higher concentrations in the past, and that the temperature response is not linear with carbon dioxide concentration.

            5. Yes, water vapour is at higher concentrations than CO2, and absorbs more strongly. This was known in the 1920s. But water vapour is limited to the troposphere and water vapour levels are fairly constant, and the absorption bands don’t overlap completely. This has been well known since the 1970s.

              There’s a remarkable correlation between CO2 and temperature for the last number of glaciations, going back almost a million years or so. CO2 goes up, temperature goes up. CO2 goes down, temperature goes down. This has been well-known since the 1990s.

              The physics of the radiation balance of the atmosphere is increasingly well known now. There are other factors that affect the radiation balance, but the role of so-called greenhouse gases is well established.

              The math and physics are there, and the observations are there. It can’t be hand-waved away with “Facebook factoids” that misrepresent the physics.

              There is much more room to question the climate models, but it gets harder to do that the more you know about climate models. From the most basic models in the late 1800s, it was apparent that injecting fossil CO2 into the atmosphere would change the radiation balance in a small way. When I was going to school, nobody questioned the effect of fossil CO2, but there was a prevalent belief that the climate was self-regulating, and feedback mechanisms would counteract the CO2 and restore the radiation balance. It was in the 1970s and 1980s that bigger and better models started to show that maybe those feedback mechanisms wouldn’t restore the balance, they might make it worse. How those feedback mechanisms might interact is a big ongoing research area.

              But the basic physics of radiation absorption, emission, and reflection is well established now, and first-year college students can do the math.

            6. Try looking at the absorbtion bands of the various gases in the atmosphere. You will then see that water vapour absorbs far more strongly than carbon dioxide. Water vapour is present in concentrations of up to 2 orders of magnitude greater than carbon dioxide.

              Perhaps one needs a chemistry/physics/materials science background to understand this but CO2 is classified as a non-condensing GHG with catalytic properties while H2O vapor is classified as a condensing GHG with feedback properties. That means that H20 can freeze out of the system if it starts to cool without something else propping it up, while CO2 can’t really condense since it is only a liquid at 77K. So what happens is that the CO2 rise will promote a temperature increase, thus acting as a catalyst for greater partial pressure of H2O in the atmosphere and thus promoting feedback (2 paths — CO2 an H2O) for more warming.

              So it seems that those w/o training in thermodynamics are the most to have issues with CO2-based AGW.

    2. So here we have another long discussion about climate change with both sides agreeing it’s happening, just debating the cause, known or unknown. Does it matter??

      Does anyone really think we have enough oil to bring about the changes the IPCC say will happen with increased rates of CO2 until the year 2100??

      To me climate change is one issue among the really big issue of human overshoot, and is used as a distraction from the real issues of overshoot, being resource depletion, biodiversity loss, and pollution. Climate change involving CO2, methane, N2O emissions are a subset of overall “pollution”.

      The mere fact that people can only think in terms of one problem and blindly look to resolve that one problem, while keeping the entire system of Business As Usual going ‘normally’ by exchanging one form of energy producing machines with another form of machine, without looking at the total damage the BAU model is doing to the planet we live on, shows a complete lack of understanding about the system as a whole..

      While the complexity of modern civilization is immense and every simplification to a model must leave out vastly important parts, what we have built can be sumarised by simply looking around at what happens.

      We mine minerals using mostly fossil fuels, we process these minerals into concentrated forms, mostly with fossil fuels, we then transport and manufacture products with mostly fossil fuels. We build new machines and items of modernity in factories built with mostly fossil fuels. Logic therefore dictates that if the future involves building more of anything, it will involve using more fossil fuels.

      The real problems will surface when one of those fossil fuels has constrained production, with the largest form of energy being oil most likely to decline first. We use oil and all it’s derivatives to gain access to the other fossil fuels, so when oil production starts to fall rapidly, every other energy form becomes much more difficult to obtain.

      The concept of reducing emissions is to build more renewables, or more nuclear or geothermal or whatever, with every single one of these ‘solutions’ totally relying upon oil in their mining, processing, production and transport. Unless it can be proven to be possible, by actually making any of these solutions from just electricity, then they are all dead ends. It’s just more BAU, using more mining, creating more biodiversity loss, more pollution and greater overshoot.

      Can people get it through their thick heads that there is no ‘transition’ happening and never has been one. We, as in humanity, have added every new energy source on top of prior ones, using more energy in the process. Coal didn’t replace wood, overall biomass use today is much greater than 300 years ago on a world basis, oil didn’t replace coal, we use a lot more coal today than 120 years ago. Nuclear didn’t replace anything, and neither have solar panels or wind turbines.

      The only transition that has happened is the biodiversity of the world is reducing faster, the pollution is growing more rapid, while human population goes into a higher level of overshoot…

      Humanity, and probably most life on this planet, is the frog in the pot of water. What difference does it make if we stop fossil fuel use tomorrow, as in the 18 December 2023, or in a decade or 2 through depletion of oil??

      2. Hideaway:
        I agree that population overshoot is THE problem. I don’t think that climate change is being used to distract from that issue. My take is that climate is something so obvious by this time that people can actually address it. Population ad population growth is so fundamental to virtually every cultural norm that most political types are just afraid to address it. Like climate, in the final analysis, it will only be addressed seriously when those at the top of the power pyramid start to seriously hurt in the here and now.

        1. JJHMAN … That’s precisely why we are headed to collapse, no-one has every gone near the overall problem, nor do they want to or have any intention trying to tackle it.

          Every politician just hopes the collapse doesn’t happen on their watch, and pays some tribute to climate change, renewables and/or nuclear, so they have a back up position in case they don’t get out in time. Very few politicians will even listen to any argument about overshoot, as they then have plausible deniability about not being informed.

          Climate is much easier to cope with as it provides an area for further ‘growth’, despite the impossibility of growth without increasing fossil fuels use, but people make up stuff to avoid talking about that bit.

          1. Hideaway:
            The powers-that-be will start to respond when they are surrounded by peasants with pitchforks backed by hungry soldiers. The question is will that be too late.
            I’d give it 40/60% no. It’ll be too late.

        2. “Like climate, in the final analysis, it (overpopulation) will only be addressed seriously when those at the top of the power pyramid start to seriously hurt in the here and now.”

          I find that to be a hopeful notion….that these problems will actually be addressed in an intentional, constructive and/or effect manner.

          I don’t harbor such hope, rather I see the collective human walk as just stumbling into cataclysmic events. Not enough people are aware of the issues, and willing to put down everything for a collective proactive response to the situation. By ‘put down everything’ I mean including the intentional restraint from having any offspring, as a start. And things like forgoing all aircraft travel (100%), and being vegetarian (or atleast nearly so), as examples of required behavioral changes.

          Since the 1970’s these things did not happen except by a few (and in China for a short time with the 1 child policy). If we ever have a carbon tax, for example, it will come many decades too late to bend the trajectory much.

          Don’t mistake this stance for thinking that I don’t think it is worth taking dramatic personal and general policy steps now. Might save a few species, and children.

      3. One thing may be unique about climate change. Without humans the natural world could probably recover relatively quickly from the other insults we’ve inflicted but once we get to four degrees (which probably means only getting to two and waiting for the inevitable feedbacks to kick in) nature will be changed for ever. No more mammals, certainly none larger than a house cat, large portions of dead ocean (and if it goes mostly anoxic then no more oxygen based life), families of insects and plant life, many that have yet to be catalogued, in current tropical regions gone for good, etc.

        Climate change is also the most easily and accurately measured of the overshoot impacts. Temperatures, gas concentrations, ice extent are all known pretty much exactly. The big unknowns surround aerosols and clouds and that is where there is the most controversy. It’s not so easy to measure rates of extinction, overall soil loss, exact amounts of minerals and freshwater left underground, impact of estrogenic chemicals on each affected species etc. Even the earth system models, as complicated and uncertain in some specifics as they still are, are much more reliable than anything that has been attempted for prediction in those other areas.

      4. Spot on. The idea that we can switch everything to renewables is ill conceived. We are absolutely dependent on petrochemicals to build renewables now and in the future, and to date there are no viable processes that can produce the base building blocks in the quantities required.

        The idea that we can re-use carbon dioxide or biomass as feedstocks for petrochemicals, let alone fuels, is wishful thinking. The petrochemical industry in the EU is being crippled by climate change rules and more and more products are being imported from the ME and Asia (and the US) where carbon emissions are simply ignored. We are seeing the de-industrialisation of Europe. Some may think this is a good idea but all that will happen is that EU will descend into chaos first. Meanwhile the Chinese will not let up on their quest of acquring access raw materials to quell their thirst, and to hell with the flora and fauna.

  6. COAL USE HITS RECORD IN 2023, EARTH’S HOTTEST YEAR

    Global consumption of coal reached an all-time high in 2023, the IEA energy watchdog said Friday, as Earth experienced its hottest recorded year. The International Energy Agency reported that nations would burn even more coal this year than in 2022, the previous record for consumption of the key source of planet-warming gases.

    The EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service said earlier in December that 2023 will be the hottest on record after November became the sixth record-breaking month in a row.
    https://phys.org/news/2023-12-coal-earth-hottest-year.html

  7. Don’t feed the trolls guys. It’s not about winning the argument, it’s about stifling conversation with a flood of random lies.

    1. Excellent point. Isn’t there some law of debate (supercharged on the internet where folks don’t have to say it to your face) that troll garbage is an order or two magnitude easier to generate than refute?

      1. “A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”
        ― Mark Twain

        1. Great link. I’m sure I’ve seen every one of those tactics here. At least one of them this week.

  8. So, it’s Business As Usual I guess?

    AUSTRALIA IS PREPARING TO BURN MORE FOSSIL FUELS

    “In contrast to our last government,” the new government now “acknowledges that climate change is very real, is with us now and is worsening extreme weather and disasters,” Greg Mullins, the former commissioner of fire and rescue for the state of New South Wales told Al Jazeera. But, Mullins added, it is “inexplicable that as they strive to reduce emissions, they undo all of their good work by continuing to approve new fossil fuel projects.” Even as the Albanese government passed its new legislation in March, its annual Resource & Energy Major Project list included 116 new fossil fuel projects, “two more than at the end of 2021”, according to Canberra-based think tank the Australia Institute. Combined, Australia’s oil and gas expansion plans are the eighth largest of any country, the advocacy organisation Oil Change International said recently.

    https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2023/12/13/australia-is-preparing-to-burn-more-fossil-fuels

        1. That may be what the wolf is wearing: a permanently failed BAU, and there are many world-wide signs suggesting that.

          1. I have great confidence people and institutions will perform all manner of card tricks to give the appearence of BAU.

            2. “the appearence of BAU”
              That’ll be as effective as “hopes and prayers”

  10. I recently stated that the power industry does not exist to keep the lights on. It exists to make money.
    Apparently Texas law agrees:
    https://www.kut.org/energy-environment/2023-12-15/texas-power-plants-have-no-responsibility-to-provide-electricity-in-emergencies-judges-rule

    Texas does not currently recognize a legal duty owed by wholesale power generators to retail customers to provide continuous electricity to the electric grid, and ultimately to the retail customers.

    As solar increasingly drains profit out of the industry, it will simply die.

    1. In my opinion, Texas is just a super rich energy state. They got so many options, including natural gas, wast wind resources in addition to oil. So, if looking for innovative solar solutions; probably California or somewhere in the south of Europe would be the place to look for how to make steps forward to add solar energy to a high proportion of the grid. Maybe in Japan or South Korea also. There you would find incentives, not in Texas. If government or state supports the sector (solar), even more push to have the scale to make better solutions. The solutions would be to challenge the boundaries of grid management including micro grids and storage along with demand management most likely. The EROI is probably great as long as the grid can take the load.

        1. Thank for your input.

          I am not at all against the solar industry, and Texas should probably not be as well. The point is more the general energy complacency that creeps in when energy is cheap and there are too many options.

          To go somewhere else in the discussion, I would say that historically fossil fuels have always moved in tandem with renewables. All from the Roman area to the industrial revolution and beyond. The future would most probably be a marriage between renewables and fossil fuels, and the adoption to not growth; but the opposite.

    1. My favorite from the techno optimists is Marc Andreessen in his manifesto writing: “We believe the global population can quite easily expand to 50 billion people or more, and then far beyond that as we ultimately settle other planets.”

      Yet there’s no room for multi-family housing in Atherton CA where he lives. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/08/marc-andreessens-opposition-housing-project-nimby/671061/
      https://www.vice.com/en/article/k7bbd9/billionaire-marc-its-time-to-build-andreesen-is-a-nimby

      1. I write for the 3QD website and had considered responding but decided it would be a waste of time.

        1. “[I] considered responding but decided it would be a waste of time.”

          Well, that’s one advantage the optimists do have. ;D

          The assertion that human wants and needs are unlimited is really a confession that their greed is unlimited. It brings to mind Kurt Vonnegut’s anecdote about Joe Heller:

          “Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer now dead, and I were at a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island.
          I said, “Joe, how does it make you feel to know that our host only yesterday may have made more money than your novel ‘Catch-22’ has earned in its entire history?”
          And Joe said, “I’ve got something he can never have.”
          And I said, “What on earth could that be, Joe?”
          And Joe said, “The knowledge that I’ve got enough.”

        2. Ahh, and you have a piece at 3QD today I see, a very good one.
          Remarkable that prose so teeming with death could be so affirming of life, and going forward, it’s going to be fun to tell friends “May your years by many, and your sinuses unremarkable.”

        3. Thanks for that link Mike B, I needed a laugh.

          What gets me most about those techno utopian pieces is how little the author knows and perhaps cares about the natural environment. They seem to think we can have multiples of current population, all living a better lifestyle than current westerners, without negatively affecting the environment, as in biodiversity, and pollution wise.

          Plus of course nuclear power plants just grow on trees, and the nuclear fuel is sitting on the surface just waiting for a use. I also started to write a comment about the terrible EROEI of nuclear, negative how they do it in USA (Vogtle) and UK (Hinkley), before costing in transmission lines and dismantling the plant as radioactive waste at end of life, likewise for resolving spent fuel..
          Then couldn’t be bothered..

          No-one anywhere wants to count the EROEI fully. They all want to draw the line at primary energy spent building the plant etc. The whole industry, which it is, in academia, wants to make whatever their preference is, in a positive light, so misses most included energy.

          1. Hideaway,

            I have been banging on about EROEI for 20 years. Few people get. It covers just about everything we do. Most of the time I get blank stares.

            Charles Hall is probably the most well known on this subject and his cheese slicer model the most descriptive. Sadly the animated cheese slicer GIF is not longer available but some graphics still remain available. I am sure you know it well.

            For those that are interested here is a link to a presentation that uses the Hall cheese slicer.

            https://www.slideserve.com/cambria/what-can-world-models-tell-us-about-peak-oil-supply-and-global-warming

      2. Those dreams of vast human populations are Fascism Lite. They don’t care about individuals and pretend to hide behind the “big picture”. It’s the same as eugenics, thousand year empires, “real” communism, god’s kingdom on Earth etc.

        Nobody wants that many people except a few lunatics. Most women see themselves as something more than baby machines. Until these guys come up with a baby machine (and a child rearing machine) to replace them, these isn’t much chance of continued population growth.

        On current trends, this is the more likely future:
        https://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_national/1120885.html

        1. It seems kind of non-sequitur to their other fantasies also. Why breed a trillion humans to produce fifty Mozarts when we are allegedly on the cusp of cheap mass produced humanoid robots with AGI that vastly exceeds human intelligence and creativity?

    2. I read most of that and largely just shook my head.For example, I don’t know how much time Ms. Clarege spent in the nuclear industry but I spent eight years there and virtually everything she said spoke volumes about her ignorance of the subject. And her assumption, tied to that innocence at some level, that we can produce infinitite amounts of energy at no social or ecological cost is pure puffery.
      Space travel? Give me a break. The only good likely to come of the billions spent and planned spending outside of Earth orbit is the potential of sending Elon Musk to Mars. Permanently.

      1. JJHMAN

        I am fully behind your comments. I am not knowledgeable on nuclear but what I do appreciate is the sheer level and cost of the inputs and the legacy costs that will accrue.

        But the best bit was the last word. If only.

  12. A dose of reality as Norway gradually expands operations northwards into the Norwegian and Barents Seas.

    NORWAY OIL AND GAS INVESTMENTS SET TO SOAR IN 2024

    “Oil and gas companies operating in Norway are expected to invest 240 billion Norwegian crowns ($21.85 billion) in 2024, up from 220.5 billion in 2023, and more than previously expected. OFFSHORE NORWAY, which published the new forecast based on a survey of its members, had previously predicted 2024 oil and gas investments would amount to 194.3 billion crowns. The rise was the result of new developments, increased scope of ongoing projects as well as inflation and a weak currency.”

    1. The Norwegian crown is so weak that the increase in investments probably would mean only a marginal growth in the dollar dominated oil and gas world. The other aspects are that investments are critical to keep competence and secure continuity of the national oil and gas sector, along with securing supplies to Europe in face of the escalation of geopolitical risk in the energy space. The coastline is so wast that there is bound to be medium or small sized pockets of hydrocarbons for a long time going forward. If what are found is profiable is not so obvious; depends on outlook and just the size and remotness of the resources.

  13. https://www.knoxnews.com/story/news/local/2023/12/13/kairos-power-hermes-nuclear-reactor-oak-ridge-approved/71892765007/

    https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=250333

    Oak Ridge Labs to start building a Thorium reactor in the USA. They built one previously in the 1950’s and 60’s.

    IMO, this could be a game changer for the future.

    My understanding is that Thorium is abundant in Coal, And with the world’s largest coal reserves…CTL powered by Thorium reactors could meet all the USA’s energy needs………………………………………………………………………………………..

  14. The significant technology of the Hermes reactor is not the use of Thorium, it is the use of salt as a coolant, eve n though that’s been done before too. Thorium doesn’t offer any special challanges except the reactor need to be run with a high enough flux to breed the Thorium into U-233. Otherwise it’s useless.
    Getting something as corrosive as salt through a pump made out of metal at 650 C separates the men from the boys. What could possibly go wrong at those temperatures in the same building a fissile material? I hope they use prisoners to run the plant. Anyone else will probably run as soon as an alarm goes off.
    Don’t laugh. I’ve seen it happen.

    1. Thorium has been a solution for reactors for 50+ years.
      It has never worked out in a market situation.

      1. Thorium got abandoned in the USA because you can’t make nuke bombs from it.

        At the time ORNL (Oak Ridge Labs) built one, Nukes were very important.

        So they abandoned it.

        The Chineses and Indians are currently working on their own thorium reactors.

        1. I’m not sure that’s the whole story. The current technology based on natural or partially enriched Uranium In the reactor breeds small amounts of P239 Plutonium from the non-fissile U238. Plutonium is preferred but not necessary for bombs. Fully enriched Uranium works too. In fact the first ever atomic bomb, Fat Boy, used such Uranium. The Nagasaki bomb used Plutonium.
          For a major expansion of nuclear technology Thorium is attractive because there is a lot more of it and it needs only a small amount of Uranium to begin breeding fissile material, U233, from Thorium. U233 bred from Thorium is the actual fuel, not the Thorium. The reactors I worked on in the 1970s did indeed use Uranium in small quantities mixed with larger amounts of Thorium. Unfortunately to enable the Thorium to be useful the Uranium used at that time was fully enriched, or to be more clear: weapons grade Uranium. And, yes, you can make a bomb out of U233 also.
          There is never a really long distance between any nuclear reactors and bombs.

          1. And that’s the biggest problem with nuclear power.

            People worry about radioactive waste, but that’s relatively small. Sadly, you’ll never see nuclear power advocates discuss the problem of weapons proliferation. There’s no real solution, so they just wish it away.

            Of course, with wind and solar becoming ever cheaper we don’t really need nuclear, which by comparison is big, ponderous, slow and very expensive.

    1. Meanwhile, it’s not only oil productio (and the debt, US currently pushing $34 trillion), CO2 continues its relentless climb.

      November CO2
      Nov. 2023 = 420.46 ppm
      Nov. 2022 = 417.47 ppm

  17. “Then one day a foraging mouse notices a new hole at the base of an abandoned silo on the edge of the prairie that’s been dormant and irrelevant for all these years. Out of this hole some grains of wheat have spilled out. Tasty! Excited by her find, she brings her friends and they all have a feast. Within weeks, the mice are growing in number and exploiting this seemingly endless resource…”

    https://www.resilience.org/stories/2023-12-20/a-story-of-mice-and-men/

    1. Ummm. Why don’t the mouse predators expand in population with the mice?

    2. The last line- “Or should we encourage the bold among us to arrange a quiet, early exit to start exploring new ways to live?”

      Could instead be written with a shorter version-
      “Or should we encourage the bold among us to arrange a quiet, early exit?”

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