73 thoughts to “Open Thread, Non-Petroleum, December 9, 2020”

    1. That’s kind of rude to come in two days after this thread was created and pin your own comment to the top to ensure it’s the very first thing everyone sees.

      What seems to be the problem? Finicky blog posting software? The comment was edited to display the chart instead of a link

    2. Global daily CO2 emission was up to 100 MtCO2/day by Jan 2020 (pandemic start), and is now down to the lower 80’s, so says the Global Carbon Project. I wonder how they estimate it.
      https://www.globalcarbonproject.org/global/images/general/TemporaryReductionInCO2EmissionsDuringCOVID-19_Fig3_global_emissions_to_April2020.full.png

      How long will it take to get back up to 100MtCO2/day? Maybe a year.
      What will be very interesting to see is how long it takes to see a blip in the atmospheric level of CO2, if at all.
      https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/mlo.html

  2. Is anybody interested in heat-tunnel power generation technology? I don’t recall any discussions, at least in the recent past.
    https://nam10.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fklinkmansolar.com%2Fmountain.htm&data=04%7C01%7C%7Ce4bf42005e5342a2322e08d89ca73dd9%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C637431589388645733%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C1000&sdata=ODyaOflBSqPaZVX3rZWW7q1D2YaUJvMtNqYIOxOVXrk%3D&reserved=0

  4. I’m looking forward to getting a couple McRibs for lunch today. I haven’t had a McRib in 4 or 5 years, but they went nationwide this year for the first time since 2012!

    1. McRibs are pretty good especially for the buzz around them, don’t get me wrong. But Subway has had a close enough equivalent since September or so that I think might even be better than Mickey D’s wonderful sandwich.

    1. The McRib coming back is about the only good thing that’s happened in this crappy year from hell.

          1. Since the McRib is a pork patty, and heavily spiced, it is a good candidate for fake meat.

            “Beyond Pork” has now been introduced to China.

            https://www.foodsafetynews.com/2020/11/beyond-meat-introduces-beyond-pork-for-chinese-market/

            If Chinese ground pork lovers will eat it, it should work well in the US too. I am sure McDonald’s is watching closely.

            Maybe that’s why McDonald’s reintroduced McRib. Right now it is good news for pig farmers hurting from the decline in McDonald’s breakfast, but in a few years with fake pork prices fall far enough McDonald’s should get juicy profits.

            1. I’ve had Beyond Meat’s Bratwursts and they are first rate. Grill fantastic. I’ve fed them to meat-eating friends without a word of complaint.

          2. The Carl’s Jr Beyond Burger is by far the best plant based alternative from a major fast food brand. Get it with no cheese and no mayo for completely plant based. The special sauce they use is vegan.

            The mcRib is basically just a pork hot dog with a different shape covered in barbeque sauce. I only tried it once back when I still ate pork and though it was terrible. But, I am looking forward to something plant based from mcd’s. Right now, mcd’s has very little to offer, they even when back to using beef fat in the fries (at least in the US). Even the coffee drinks have no milk alternatives.

          3. Maybe that plant crap sells well in the Democrat ran areas of the country where people don’t mind looking sick and unhealthy but where I’m from real men eat meat.

            2. Danny – “where I’m from real men”…
              -loved to be lied to by their leader
              -vote for a draft dodger and a tax dodger, who paid less in taxes every year for 2 decades than did a truck driver, teacher or nurse
              -hate socialism, unless of course it helps them personally
              – feel insecure unless they have an assault rifle and say prayers that men in costumes teach them

            3. Since most Americans are female, the “real man” demographic may be smaller than you think. 😉
              I think your point is that Americans will eat whatever the prevailing propaganda dictates, and not base their choices on taste, tradition or health considerations. I agree. When corporations start making money with fake meat, TV will tell you to eat it, and you will comply.

            4. Yeah well Danny I watched the documentary “What the Health” and just tried it for a couple of weeks. That was a few years ago and I only wish I had tried it sooner. The newer doc “The Game Changers” shows the benefits of a plant based diet for real men. You might be interested in the effects the college athletes experienced eating either a regular or a plant based burrito. You might not need those blue pills anymore… And yes, it sure helps living on the west coast with so many new foods to try.

              For me, I feel 10+ years younger, lost weight without trying, and watched the varicose veins in my legs go away. I can walk and workout without being in pain the next day, it’s amazing. The issue is really dose related, every now and then I may have some fish or even a steak on my birthday.

            5. Danny,

              Where I’m from real men don’t worry about their manhood. May be different where you live. 🙂

            6. Doesn’t change the fact that people on meatless diets become malnourished from lack of vitamins and nutrients we get from meat. Personally, I think it affects mental abilities too. Also, lots of people will tell you that you can’t trust vegans.

            7. PHF,

              See video below

              https://nutritionfacts.org/video/evidence-based-weight-loss-live-presentation/

              If you prefer reading try book at this website (only 110 pages).

              http://www.dresselstyn.com/site/

              or $10 from amazon

              https://www.amazon.com/Prevent-Reverse-Heart-Disease-Nutrition-Based/dp/1583333002/ref=sr_1_11?dchild=1&keywords=prevent and reverse heart disease by caldwell esselstyn&qid=1608132588&sr=8-11

              also the China Study is very good but longer (400 pages)

              https://www.amazon.com/China-Study-Comprehensive-Nutrition-Implications/dp/1941631568/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=china study&qid=1608132731&sr=8-1

              Info on China Study at

              https://nutritionstudies.org/the-china-study/

            8. PFH
              Here are few vegetarians for you- Einstein, Leonardo Da Vinci, Nikola Tesla, Benjamin Franklin.
              Perhaps you think they could have done better if they ate meat.

        2. It is mainly the excess sugars and carbs that I have avoided in the McRib–
          Also, factory farming of pork is a very no no.

  6. Ten years of the Nissan Leaf. In that time most things about the car have stayed the same or similar, including the $35-40K price, but the range has almost tripled from 72 to 226. Anything remotely similar in battery improvements over the next decade will be the ruin of ICE cars. It’s a shame that Nissan has almost abandoned EVs, after being a leader. Their car sales are crashing worst than most right now and their reputation has taken a massive hit worldwide because of Ghosn.

    I bought a 2013 Leaf in 2015 for $10K and it continues to be a great car. I love to drive it. It is far superior to even most gas sports cars in terms of acceleration and smoothness of drive. The battery has dropped to about 72 miles from 82 originally. Not a mainstream car because of the range, but other than buying new tires at 60K miles and a new starter battery I have had no maintenance costs and I’ve estimated fuel costs to be about 1/4 of a gas car, even with cheap gas. I’ll keep going with for as long as I can but an upgrade to another used EV with much better range in the next 3-5 years seems likely, or possible replacing the 24 kWh battery with 40+ is also a possibility. I’ve always considered it to be the model T of EVs and I expect it to appear similarly antiquated in the near future.

    https://cleantechnica.com/2020/12/12/the-nissan-leaf-is-10-years-old-500000-sold-worldwide/

    1. Many seem to have it back-to-front: In the same sense that fossil fuel usage doesn’t appear to be declining (quite the opposite) because of pseudo-renewable energy buildout, so ICE car usage won’t likely decline because of E cars, but because of fossil fuel/fossil fuel-related pseudo-economic declines.

      BTW, we now have images in America of long car-lineups to food banks. And I’ve personally seen people shopping at local vintage/second-hand stores who drive BMW’s, Audi’s, Mercedes and Range Rovers.

      How long have we got?

      The Grand Parade of Lifeless Packaging

    2. Yes Stephen, and I suspect that battery improvement will be much more this decade.

      1. Hicks , you discount the ” law of diminishing returns ” . There is only so much juice you can extract from a lemon . Adios .

        1. Hole in Head- you forgot to acknowledge innovation.
          Remember that innovation is what got wheels on a donkey cart to haul barley to market.
          Its a powerful force.

          1. Hicks ,At the end of the day even Moore’s Law hit the wall . There are no survivors from “The Law of diminishing returns “. I agree that innovation is a powerful force , but innovation is complexity + connectivity = fragility . To top it all , innovation is an energy sink when we are on the downward slope of nett surplus energy . What is needed in the current environment are devolpments of what Naseem Talab calls ” anti fragile ” systems . That is not happening .I have in my earlier posts commented on system failure in India . I am now observing a system failure with Brexit . I live 60 Km from the port of Zee Bruges from where ferries depart from Hull in UK . Lines and lines of trucks . I will keep posting as things devolp on this side of the Atlantic .
            P.S : Zee Bruges is the port where the entire production of cars produced in UK are imported for European distribution .

            1. In fact Moore’s Law is still doing fine. Some say it will end in 2025, but people have been predicting it will end “in about five years” since the 80s. We’ll see.

              If chips stop shrinking so fast computer design will have to take up the slack. The saying in the industry is “Hardware giveth, and software taketh away”. Modern computer design is insanely wasteful by historic standards, because upgrading to the newest generation of chips is cheaper than design optimization.

            2. Software is incredibly inefficient. Remember machine language programming? Software runs about 1% as fast as it could, if it was optimized. But, again, faster chips have allowed programmers to save time by using very high level languages: fast to program, slow to execute.

            3. Right Nick, because hardware is cheap and good programmers are insanely expensive, and good project managers are more or less impossible to find. Look at an executable file with a hex editor and you’ll see that it’s 99% garbage. That’s just the tip of the iceberg of course, what happens at run time is even worse.

              But it goes deeper than that. Chip design suffers from the same problem. Most of the real estate on a CPU is just wasted on bad design.

            4. My personal guess is that while we ARE looking at a major energy crunch sometime in the not so distant future, we will have PLENTY of net energy to do pretty much anything we want a few decades down the road……… because INNOVATION will allow us to do what we do now with a third or even a quarter of the energy we use now. We can get that much easily from the wind and the sun.

              It’s not how much junk we manufacture, use, and throw away that measures prosperity. It’s how much USE we get out of the stuff we make.

              Automobiles in the future will last two or three times as long as they do now. Houses in the future will need a quarter or less of the energy we use now to maintain the same comfort level and run the same appliance load.

              Furniture can be made to last indefinitely. I have such furniture myself, lol. The older it gets, the more valuable it becomes, and it’s good for another hundred years of steady hard use at least, probably twice or three times that. Of course good solid red oak and white oak lumber is scarce these days…….. but given the VALUE, it’s still quite affordable.

              And the population is going to peak and gradually decline. Any younger people in this forum have a good shot at living to see it happen.When it does, the need for new infrastructure will start to decline along with the population, meaning we won’t need very much in the way of new highways, water and sewer systems, etc.
              Refurbishing existing systems will cost only a very minor fraction of the new from scratch cost.

              Maybe I’m daydreaming, but if we’re lucky enough to avoid WWIII and the climate doesn’t go totally nuts, the future is looking pretty good……. for those of our descendants that survive the baked in die off headed our way.

              It’s impossible to say how bad it will be, but I’m hoping it’s piecemeal and regional, and distributed over a period of years. Otherwise…… it may well morph into WWIII or worse.

            5. OFM —
              I agree. The value of a thing is the use we expect to get out of it.

            6. Thanks, Joni.

              “OFM —
              I agree. The value of a thing is the use we expect to get out of it.” ~ Alimbiquated

              “They took all the trees put ’em in a tree museum
              And they charged the people a dollar an’a half just to see ’em

              Don’t it always seem to go
              That you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone
              They paved paradise, put up a parking lot…” ~ ‘Big Yellow Taxi’, Joni Mitchell

        2. That’s the great thing about batteries:you can extract juice over and over again…

            2. Hole, you and 70 million Americans have Tverberg’s.

              Never good enough, no forward ideas, a crap load of doom

            3. “Hole, you and 70 million Americans have Tverberg’s.

              Never good enough, no forward ideas, a crap load of doom” ~ HuntingtonBeach

              So says apparently someone who got kicked off of Tverberg’s site, and this one as well, only to return in a new incarn to grace this site once more.

              What happened to the ChiefEngineer nickname?

            4. Reply Of The Month (& Hollow Promises)

              “That’s the great thing about batteries:you can extract juice over and over again…” ~ Nick

              “….. until you can’t” ~ hole in head

              Nick appears to (still) like to misrepresent or conveniently omit some things sometimes.

              “Do you see where this is going?

              The hollow ‘promises’ made by society not only ‘can’ … but do often stretch into the millions, billions or trillions of dollars and into the far away future.

              It is, –as Stoneleigh suggests–, potentially a giant Ponzi scheme that appears to be working only as long as society can pretend to be providing actual ‘growth’ in wealth in the far away future.” ~ step back

    3. Stephen , you are surprised , but I am not . The issue is not technology , the issue is affordability . The world is becoming poorer by the day . Period . Diamonds at $ 100 per carat are cheap if you can afford them , diamonds at $10 per carat are expensive if you can’t afford them . Don’t believe me call up DeBeers in South Africa . Business down by 33 % . Please don’t respond with averages . If a millionaire becomes a billionaire and a billionaire becomes a multi billionaire it is not going to increase sales of the Leaf .

      1. No I agree wholeheartedly HiH, income inequality is a problem of equal magnitude

        1. Stephen , tks for understanding what I am getting at . Affordability is the keyword . Latest on Tesla
          https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/tesla-shut-model-s-x-production-18-days-puts-some-staff-unpaid-leave
          There is a saying ” China will become old before it becomes rich ” . EV will die naturally because of affordability issues . Next question is when ? Answer : I don’t know . Shale was a Ponzi from day 1 . Art Berman called it so . It worked for + 10 years . EV is another Ponzi . My WAG is 2025 ,but could be wrong in either direction .
          P.S : Art called shale as ” retirement party “

  7. In the previous open thread I mentioned a group called the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance and the testimony of the president of the group to a senate hearing this past Tuesday (Dec 8). Below is a Link to a news report carrying his testimony:

    “I CAN’T KEEP DOING THIS”: Doctor pleads for review of data during COVID-19 Senate hearing

    From the video of the press conference on Friday, Dec 4 a box of the pills being recommended by this group is $10 and 3.7 billion prescription for it’s use have been issued since it’s introduction in 1981. The drug companies are not going to like it!

    2. Falling prices have very little to do with innovation. It’s mostly the consequence of low FF commodities prices that are used to produce those rebuildables.
      Try to produce a solar panel or a windmill, only using electricity for every required process (mining, ore refining, smelting, assembling) and the price goes through the roof
      Try again using only electricity coming from a intermittent source and price goes to Mars

      1. A good example of a comment where literally nothing is realistic:

        Little oil is used to produce wind turbines or solar panels, so falling oil prices are irrelevant;

        Electricity actually is the primary energy input; and

        Renewable electricity is very cheap, so making renewables with renewable power would make it even cheaper…

        1. Nick is maybe decade or maybe two premature in saying the renewable electricity industry is capable of shouldering the load currently borne by fossil fuels, but that’s not a game killer.

          We have plenty of oil, gas, and coal available to run essential industries that long.

          And by 2040 or maybe 2050 the renewable energy industries will be scaled up sufficiently that we won’t need fossil fuels to run mines or steel mills or aluminum refineries or anything else critical except maybe on a back up basis once in a while, or in a remote location too far from the existing grid to run transmission lines.

          And even then, we may have affordable synthetic gasoline or diesel fuel or even hydrogen in sufficient quantities to run any essential equipment.

          Lets not forget that the coal industry was founded with iron and steel tools made using charcoal, and that the oil industry was founded using horses and mules rather than oil burning trucks, lol.

          1. Last Year’s Model

            All governpimps have to do is to throw out the current economic model and make it a command economy. Leverage covid1984 if you have to. Presto magico. Consider it done. Debt? Poof, gone. That was last year’s model.

            Welcome to The New Normal™. Hang on, let me get that trademark symbol… There.

            1. “All governpimps have to do is to throw out the current economic model and make it a command economy.”

              That’s exactly what the Bolsheviks that saw to it that Biden won the election aim to do. The complete insanity of government shutting down businesses over a disease not much worse than seasonal influenza is to prepare and condition the public to what is to come, that is big central government taking away everything from the rural countryside so that people have no other option but to flee to the cities where you can be at the total mercy of the state. The final dismantling of what still remains of heavy industry and the “war on oil” (packaged as The Green New Deal) will finish the job probably by the time they say they are going to ban gasoline vehicles everywhere (2035 or so) which is a necessary condition to limit the distance people can travel away from major cities (how far from a city do you think you can go in an electric vehicle? ?). For history is filled with people trying desperately to escape socialist “workers paradises” wherever they occur.

          2. maybe decade or maybe two premature in saying the renewable electricity industry is capable of shouldering the load

            The funny thing is that utilities are well ahead of consumers: the transition to renewables for generation is moving faster than the electrification of transportation, HVAC and industrial/commercial processes. Electrical demand is pretty flat in OECD countries, so new generation pretty much has to replace old facilities. If utilities build renewable generation faster than the natural retirement rate of their existing facilities they have to declare unusual losses due to closings before the facilities are fully depreciated.

            So a faster transition by consumers would raise power consumption and make it a bit easier for utilities to build renewables.

            I think there’s little doubt that utilities could build renewables faster than consumers can electrify their FF consumption. That’s not the problem: the problem is slow adoption due to political resistance by legacy industries.

            Have you read “Democracy in Chains”? It details the subversion of democracy by Koch et al, in large part to protect the oil industry and other mining/resource exploitation industries.

    1. Retreats As BAU-Green Annexes

      Those on this site would do well to talk/read more about such things as, say, seed-saving, natural food preservation, knitting, distilling, how to create/join an ecovillage, beekeeping, natural building, home-lighting with beeswax candles, and related, including what they might like to learn and do in that sort of regard.

      Imagine a retreat that was a ‘real’ one, rather than a bit of a BAU-Green annex.

      1. Right after you start practicing hieroglyphics. Your a hypocrite. Knitting, I have two closets of clothes I will never ware out. You should have invested in a formal education and a work ethic.

        Your doom is self inflicted

  12. Tire dust killing coho salmon returning to Puget Sound, new research shows – “I find it incredibly sad to watch the adults when they are sick”

    “It is a killer hidden in plain sight.

    Tires.

    More specifically, a single chemical, 6PPD-quinone, derived from a preservative that helps tires last longer.

    Through painstaking analysis and building on years of prior research, the team, including researchers from the Center for Urban Waters in Tacoma, the University of Washington and Washington State University, isolated the killer from a witch’s brew of some 2,000 chemicals in roadway runoff. [cf. Pollution from tire wear 1,000 times worse than exhaust emissions and Electric cars are not the answer to air pollution, says top UK adviser. -Des]”

    1. LOL this reminds me of anti-vaxxers, who think vaccination is worse than deadly disease.

      1. McRibs and A Paper Cup of Liquid Cotton-Candy Society

        I’m unsure your dubious comparison is understood, appreciated or appropriate (feel free to elaborate, but I won’t hold my breath), but you should know perfectly well that that example is just one of the many assaults on nature of global/techno-industrial civilization– greenwashed and otherwise– and that it adds up.

        LOL’ing in the face of the needless deaths of salmon, while allegorical of part of the problem, doesn’t do anyone justice, but then this section of the site at this stage seems little more than a platform for mindless, huckster and/or adolescent-level capitalist corporate greenwash/etc. discourse. McRibs and a paper cup of liquid cotton-candy… Hang on, let me make that my comment’s header…

        That’s essentially society, BTW, so don’t mind me, you have lots of company.

        See also here.

        1. I was laughing in your face, not in the face of needless death of salmon.

          Your claim that tire wear is worse than burning fuel is asinine.

          1. We are gradually getting rid of the worst of the known dangerous chemicals at least in modern countries,so long as it’s possible to do so without too much economic disruption.

            I used to use a dozen pesticides that were outlawed in the USA quite some years back. Substitutes were found, or we changed our production strategies as necessary, and grow more food than ever, using less pesticides, and safer ones ( hopefully) per unit of production every year, on a collective basis, on American farms.

            A substitute for the particular chemical that’s killing salmon can be found, one that’s safer.

            But the big picture problem is getting worse, because more and more chemicals are put into production every year, without ANY testing for safety in more cases than not.

            And it’s just not politically feasible to simply outlaw the worst of the polluting chemicals that are used in the largest amounts in important industries, at least not in the short term.

            Doing so would cause too much economic disruption, putting too many people out of work, resulting in the election of the worst sort of politicians, in respect to environmental policies.

            But we can and we are at least putting policies into place to gradually cut back on and eventually maybe even eliminate some of the worst chemical products, such as gasoline and diesel fuel.

            Countries such as the UK have put laws into place to eliminate new ice car sales in a decade or so. We Yankees are at least promoting the sale of electric cars, thus cutting into the demand for gasoline.

            It’s REALLY IMPORTANT to remember that policies involving chemical regulations need to be written and enforced taking the BIG PICTURE into account.

            I don’t have data, but consider the case of so called ” salt treated ” or pressure treated lumber.

            I’m not at all sure that we have actually gained anything, from an environmental pov, by outlawing the chemical processing of such lumber.
            The pressure treated lumber I bought twenty or thirty years ago is still good, nice and solid.
            The stuff I can get these days isn’t much better than tissue paper, in terms of long term durability out in the weather. So three times as many trees are going to be grown, harvested, and processed to replace outside wooden construction over the next thirty years.

            Maybe the cure is worse than the disease in some cases.

            Maybe considering the amount of fertilizers saved, and the amount of topsoil saved, and the amount of fuel and machinery wear and tear, we’re better off using herbicides and sod planting grain than plowing.

            There’s less pesticide and fertilizer runoff, less potential for flooding, less need for irrigation water.

            I don’ know, personally. But I do know that we need to think about such things before we get all religious about any particular pollution problem.

            1. Merry Christmas Mac,

              On November 3 we landed a beach head. January 5 we continue to fight for democracy. This war isn’t over.

            2. HB,

              I’ve been reading a book titled “Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America”. It details the subversion of democracy by Koch et al, to protect income inequality, corporate power and the oil industry and other mining/resource exploitation industries.

              It’s mighty convincing in it’s history and explanations for what we’ve been seeing with Republicans and government for the last 40 years…

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