Any subject can be discussed in this thread, though energy related subjects are preferred.
290 thoughts to “Open Thread Non-Petroleum, May 22, 2019”
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Any subject can be discussed in this thread, though energy related subjects are preferred.
Comments are closed.
IS TESLA DOOMED??
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7j0iaVmQKlQ
Thanks Fred,
Brief summary.
No.
Every time I see a negative story about Tesla, I am forced to wonder if the person who wrote the story or the person who is propagating it has an ulterior motive. I find it hard to come up with another case where so much has been at stake. Tesla is making things FUBAR for so many different businesses and people it’s hard to pick one source that might want to see them fail
Let’s see; oil companies, dealerships, mechanics, suppliers of parts that are specific to ICEs (fuel storage delivery and metering systems, ignition systems, belts and hoses, exhaust systems, pistons, piston rings, crankshaft bearings, camshafts, valves, seals, high temperature gaskets, air filters, oil filters, fuel filters, starter motors, alternators and probably quite a bit more stuff that I’ve missed).
I’m sure there are a lot more potential losers, like insurance companies that will lose business when cars start driving themselves big time. The list of interests who’s business model is being threatened by Tesla is formidable. The list of interests that will see no change or increased business because of Tesla is a lot smaller; steel, aluminum, copper, plastics, electronics, batteries and battery raw material suppliers (major winner), electric motors, wheel bearings, suspension and steering components, telecom companies (data) and maybe a few others. This is so lopsided that it would seem that Tesla is a David, fighting a Goliath and still they persist. That, in and of itself, is kinda remarkable!
bonus: Tesla Gigafactory 3’s rise shows that it’s too early to dismiss Elon Musk’s ‘sci-fi projects’
The story above has pictures showing the mind boggling progress at Tesla’s Chinese Gigafactory. The comments section has some interesting speculation on the Maxwell acquisition. This could be big. Very big!
Disclaimer: I own no interest in Tesla. Oh, how I wish I did!
For those that don’t follow the EV blogs, check out this animation of historical EV sales:
https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/374245/
It will give you a visual sense of just how badly Tesla is losing. /s
And where are the German Tesla killers? Is that you BMW, dropping like a stone?
Yeh, cool graphic display of the sales. When you watch the animated version, it is pretty incredible how a new model or brand can burst onto the scene and rise very quickly in the ranks.
I expect VW to pull that off in a few years.
Great animation, thanks. Sad part is that over eight years the total US sales are about 1 million, compared to over 130 million vehicles sold in that time. Eventually the sales will catch up but it will take a while. A lot can change in a decade.
Nice animation! It’s how statistics should be presented! Is a similar animation available for the world (not only the US)?
Re GF’s post at the end of the last thread. Among the many lies that we have been collectively telling ourselves is that according to the IPCC’s low emissions scenarios we will be able to deploy BECCS technology to keep temperatures below 2°C. Burning forests instead of coal is a form of BECCS.
Good luck with that!
Good point Fred. It would take an area of forest the size of the contiguous US to displace half the present coal burn. Yes, the rate of CO2 increase would be slowed some but the ocean would still be fed CO2 at the same rate.
Just one more stupid human trick to master nature and continue the insanity.
Somewhere in my research notes I have a paper published by a forester who concluded a few years back that we would have to burn every tree in the USA within five years if we were to try to substitute wood for coal and natural gas.
If I were a young guy again, I would be looking at buying a farm located at least six or seven thousand feet up and at least another two hundred miles farther north than I live today.
Helium is a finite resource—who knew?
Every once in a while Caelan posts something that is actually important and indeed highly relevant to rational discussion of energy and environment.
An eventual helium shortage, and an associated huge spike in the price of whatever quantity is available does appear to be baked in, there’s almost zero evidence to the contrary.
But there is at least one possible partial solution he does not mention.. outlawing the use of helium for recreational purposes.
And more efficient use of such quantities as are now or will be available later is entirely possible. There’s no REAL reason helium should be vented in most cases, rather than recycled, other than the fact that for now, one time use is cheaper.
I have little doubt that the engineers that design the machinery involved can easily if not cheaply modify the designs to capture the helium rather than allowing it to escape.
“The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” Mark Twain
I guess you missed Fred’s earlier post on this subject.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/06/discovery-of-massive-new-helium-reserves-is-game-changer-for-medical-industry/
From the cited article:
That article was 2016. Any progress?
Time’s a-wastin’… and that’s just the medical industry that uses it.
You apparently have no clue as to the source of helium or the processes involved, as exemplified by your highlighting ” gas traps are located too close to a given volcano, they run the risk of helium being heavily diluted by volcanic gases such as carbon dioxide”.
Since helium is neither created or destroyed in the process, merely phase changed, the answer is obviously conservation. How about you find a more interesting example of “the limits to growth”, the “extractive paradigm” or some real corporate capitalist problem that might be at least interesting and not solved by a bright adolescent.
Now go and be a good parrot and copy more of my/others writing to show how superior you are and inferior the rest of us are by the use of your scrambled egg writing style.
ROLF! I almost unclicked the ignore on Caelan’s comment because of your post!
Then I remembered why I had put him on ignore in the first place. First, It’s better to ignore the ignorant. And second, discussing anything with him is much like wrestling with a pig. He delights in slinging mud via ad hominems and pushing people’s buttons.
George Bernard Shaw — ‘Never wrestle with pigs. You both get dirty and the pig likes it.’
😉
“George Bernard Shaw — ‘Never wrestle with pigs. You both get dirty and the pig likes it.’
Exactly. Thankful for the ‘I’ button
Never hunt the hunter.
Self-serving expressions, wilful ignorance, ignorance-button-posturing and the like can also serve to make some feel better about themselves after having had their own ‘bacon’ handed to them. ‘u^
Me Me Me Me…
Piggy Smack
Caelan,
The article puzzles me a little. It’s no great deal to separate helium from other gases. I’ve run a line that did it and it was straightforward.
E Synapsid,
I recommend an extra glass or two of port if you read anything posted by Caelan… it makes a lot more sense that way! Even those mysterious dark magical processes like fractional cryogenic distillation.
Just thinking about it, almost makes me miss breathing heliox. 😉
Cheers!
E FredM,
I’m wondering why it’s mentioned in the article at all. I remember the announcement of the find back in 2016, it’s straightforward geology by a group at Durham. It just seems an odd thing to say. It’s easy to separate CO2 and helium, and not expensive.
All Caelan did was quote from the article.
LOL! I guess I should read the article but I don’t want to read Caelan’s post…
Cheers!
The article-in-question was posted by GoneFishing. I simply quoted a ‘problem’ with it.
Hi Synapsid,
I appear to have got GoneFishing (angrily) beating their own straw man piñata, since it is their own link to said article. So you may wish to ask them about it.
I, and it is suspected, the author (Kurt Cobb) of the article I quoted, understand fairly well the idea of alternatives, possibilities, conservation, theory, unicorns and handwaves, but also what can ultimately end up happening, despite all that. That appears the salient takeaway.
And of course, here we are on this peak-oil/collapse blog in a climate of, in part, what could have happened, but didn’t, and what could not have happened but did, if you catch my drift.
Kurt’s article doesn’t just mention helium, BTW, so he’s kind of making a larger point. I don’t have to suggest that helium (or much of anything else for that matter) doesn’t just jump from wherever it might be found to land perfectly to wherever it is wanted or needed, etc., nor is it then used with exquisite perfection, do I?
FWIW, here’s a subsequent quote from Kurt in his blog’s comment section:
“Helium One is not extracting any helium. The company is merely exploring for possible reservoirs (typically containing carbon dioxide and/or nitrogen trapped by formations similar to those that trap natural gas). The company believes it has found a substantial resource in Tanzania. I wish them success. But I am skeptical that they will be able to extract helium and refine it at a competitive cost. On the other hand, what ‘competitive cost’ means may ratchet upwards considerably in the years ahead, making it easier to justify the needed infrastructure expenditure which is considerable. The problem that has been dogging those few entrepreneurs who are looking to capitalize on the rising price of helium is whether the significant stores still available from the U.S. helium reserve will be auctioned in a way that drags the price down. It’s hard to get long-term investors interested when the long-term price looks subject to periodic downward pressure from an existing reserve.
It may be many more years before greater price certainty lures investors into the helium market. By that time, I’m sensing that we will be on a downward supply trajectory that will be hard to recover from.”
Caelan,
Thanks. I haven’t come across Kurt Cobb for quite a while; I always found him worth paying attention to, and I’ll look him up again.
I don’t know how much of the US reserve of helium is left. It was decided, I believe in the DOE, some time ago that there was no reason to maintain such a reserve so the appropriate wheels were set in motion in Congress to sell or auction it off. I suspect that any effect the reserve would have on investors’ interest in helium would be of short duration. The helium find in Tanzania pairs with Qatar’s output to make the fear of running out of the stuff less urgent than it was a couple of decades ago, but I still pay attention from time to time.
Haven’t read Caelan in a long time!
I have little doubt that the engineers that design the machinery involved can easily if not cheaply modify the designs to capture the helium rather than allowing it to escape.
Already done! New MRI machines no longer vent helium they recycle it.
As for outlawing helium for recreational purposes, it is probably unnecessary.
https://news4sanantonio.com/news/trouble-shooters/worldwide-helium-shortage-appears-to-be-overblown
Worldwide helium shortage appears to be overblown
And not to burst your bubble, but the Trouble Shooters learned only a very small percent of the world’s helium is used for party balloons.
“The rest is for research and for medical purposes,” explains Dr. Andrew Sampson from UT Health San Antonio.
He showed us why helium is critical to MRI machines.
“They need helium to cool the electronics inside,” Dr. Sampson says. “What you hear is the recycling pump.”
Modern machines actually recycle the helium, and Dr. Sampson says in the past three years the MRI machine he showed us has never had to be re-filled.
“Patients do not need to be concerned,” he says.
Cheers!
None of the quotes in Fred’s linked comment are mine; some appear OFM’s.
I’m sure you do…
Some of the implicit and explicit points (likely for the author of the helium piece as well, as per my highlighting of some of his text), and which was somewhat embellished with my concurrent comments, was not just about helium, but generally about the crony-capitalist plutarchy (and their methods and styles), ‘extractivism‘ and issues of concern surrounding myopic/blindered/non-systemic perspectives and approaches to issues/problems.
FWIW, if recalled, Gonzo is already on record heron for suggesting how much land photovoltaic arrays were calculated to occupy without elaborating on how Earth— human population numbers/overshoot/footprint, climate, ecological despoilment, etc.– is not like it was when humans were just beginning to industrialize, nor with the implied kind of system– crony-capitalist plutarchy– that is expected to effect some dubious notions of questionable changes.
IOW, to spoonfeed some of you, helium limits, like a lot of limits, should not be considered in isolation, and, for example, as if the earth is in totally pristine condition with only a relative handful of humans running around.
Gonzo, kindly consider not wrapping yourself in a whitewash-and/or-greenwash-of-concern for Earth and then offer up a certain level of support for the dystem (dystopic system) that’s killing it, if we agree that that is what you are doing.
I realize that you may have sold some of your ass/planet out to the corporation as, so you have said, a corporate scientist, but it’s often never too late to change one’s tack.
For all other readers; you/we cannot lose if Earth is our agenda/vested interest.
But if we continue to attempt to commodify it via the crony-capitalist plutarchy– minority elite vested/monied/corrupt interests and so on– irrespective of white-and-greenwashed wraps, we will (increasingly) ‘learn’, if/where that’s even possible, the hard and harder ways what happens.
Re: ” But if we continue to attempt to commodify it via the crony-capitalist plutarchy– minority elite vested/monied/corrupt interests”
ok , replace that system with what ? monarchy for example?
if you’re thinking of some collective system then it is unlikely to work, the last 5000 years of human written history should be your guide.
forbin
Emergent Properties
There are some obvious and not-so-obvious actions being effected around the globe that variably ‘nudge’ into the subject of your question, ‘Replace that system with what?’.
No one really knows what the system will be replaced with, but as it goes along, it will be replaced, and most likely not by just one kind. (We as a species will also be replaced, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.)
The Yellow Vest protests strike me as a bit of an opposite or juxtaposition to Extinction Rebellion in terms of strategy and implementation, etc., if not in generally ultimately-desired results. So maybe that’s a good sign that they’re kind of on the same page ultimately. And then there are– all essentially on the same page too– permaculture, ecovillage, intentional communities, Transition Towns and similar groups/structures and some of those interested in ‘networking’ in different senses and capacities, which include my own, Permaea.
So those kinds of dynamics and more, along with the current ‘set of living-arrangements’ (that are in many ways on a different page), are all going into the blender…
Maybe my last bit that includes the word, ‘blender’, will dovetail nicely with your bit about the 5000 years of written human history.
You can run NMR magnets with compressors, more service costs but no helium demand.
You can also capture the evaporating helium, at least in larger institutes, in academia physical institutes are the main consumers, not the NMR guys….
Why don’t you learn first a little bit about the issues you post?
BTW I am an NMR spectroscopist and pull – in contrast to you my arguments – not from my lower back.
Lab Monkeys
See here.
If one is an ‘NMR spectroscopist’, one may already be, in a sense, ‘in their lower back’ because one is not a myriad of something else’s so to speak and may therefore be missing out on broad spans of reality.
Career specializations of course have their own inherent myopias, which is probably in large part why we are in the pickles we are in.
If one is a ‘lab monkey’ for example, they may not be out in the sun and among the trees as often as they would be if they weren’t.
Climate data from the 1st 4 months of the year are in. Highlights include
-April 2019 was the 2nd warmest since record keeping in 1880.
-Jan-Apr period was the 3rd warmest on record.
-April Arctic Sea Ice extent lowest since satellite records began 40 yrs ago, and
April Antarctic Sea Ice Extent 2nd lowest.
-Record Heat vs Record Cold- Among global stations with a period of record of at least 40 years,
14 set new all-time heat records in April, and
0 set all-time cold records.
-Monthly National Heat records for yr 2019 thus far =41 vs
Monthly National Cold records for yr 2019 thus far = 0
Catch the theme folks?
We had a pretty cold April along the Gulf Coast. I seen on the news the Gulf and gulf stream has gotten several degrees colder in the last decade. I doubt these things are being considered much by the recordkeepers.
You trolls are really getting quite boring! Don’t you have some knitting or something more useful to do than to come by here and post complete nonsense?!
Charles Van Vleet,
Mr Bot Creator, you have my apology for calling you an idiot if you can provide a link to such a news program, lol.
The only reason I think you may be real, rather than a bot, is that you talk like my redneck neighbors and family.
But maybe you, the programmer and creator, are growing more proficient, and know more about how to make your bots seem more realistic.
OFM, I seen it on the channel 6 news out of Beaumont. Eric Bolling is reporting on there now.
Charles Van Vleet, you are an idiot. Parts of the Gulf Stream are getting colder because of global warming. Freshwater from melting ice sheets is causing the Gulf Stream to slow down, not allowing the hot waters from the Caribbean to flow north fast enough.
Gulf Stream slowdown is faster than ever: Fresh water from melting ice sheets may make European winters colder, warns study.
The Gulf Stream, the ocean current that brings mild weather to northern Europe and balmy conditions to the south east of the US, is slowing at its fastest rate in 1,000 years.
New research has revealed that the enormous currents that circulate warm and cold water around the Atlantic ocean has slowed by 15-20 per cent over the past century.
Scientists say that the increasing flow of fresh water from melting Greenland ice sheets may be driving the slowdown.
Charles- nice you had some cool weather in April. Friends of mine said the New Orleans Jazz Fest wasn’t quite as hot as a past year, still uncomfortable though.
We are having a cool May in the west.
The information I provided was Global averages for the the 1st third of this year.
And yes, there are many recording stations in the Gulf coast area, and in Madagascar too.
And the Gulf Stream is heavily measured as well. Also the Straits of Magellan and the Bering Straight.
Imagine that.
Just because you saw a skinny man the other day, doesn’t mean that most the country isn’t getting fatter and fatter.
Charles, it is called weather
w
e
a
t
h
e
r
NAOM
W.E.A.T.H.E.R. is an acronym for:
When
Every
Asshat
Thinks
His or her
Emissions
Rock and roll!
🙂
The Strange Pillow-Talk of Strange Bedfellows
Hi Charles Van Vleet,
Angle 1: If there is no anthropogenic climate change, then the economic dystopia can keep chugging along and, for example, make use of the remaining fossil fuels to produce photovoltaic solar panels (PV’s), windmills/windfarms and electric cars (EV’s).
Angle 2: If there is anthropogenic climate change, then the economic dystopia can keep chugging along and, for example, make use of the remaining fossil fuels to produce photovoltaic solar panels (PV’s), windmills/windfarms and electric cars (EV’s).
What’s the common denominator in this equation here? How about the economic dystopia, AKA, crony-capitalism?
So, you and those advocating for the above trinkets would appear to be strange bedfellows.
To underscore (my additions in square brackets):
That equivalence or hedging of bets is known as a “No Regrets” policy. In other words, we have no regrets whether we approach the transition away from FF from the point of view of resource exhaustion or adverse climate change.
The No Regrets policy has been described in the climate IPCC reports since about 1991-1992 as I recall.
Thanks, Paul.
The dichotomy (as if there’s no other alternatives) doesn’t sound too no-regretful, does it; resource exhaustion or adverse climate change (or both, along with some species).
May is shaping up to be unusually cold in many places, but not the Gulf Coast.
Preemptive Disaster Capitalism Or Working The Other Side
This has got to be the coldest May I can remember!
(The buds are only now coming out in significant numbers.)
Which means, naturally, that we can continue to burn those nice and toasty fossil fuels for whatever! as well as in order to obtain those awesome non-renewable renewable energy systems!
(Some of the folks hereon will be absolutely delighted to hear that, but of course they won’t say so, because, well, you know, they’re working the other side! But, *shshsh*, we’re not supposed to know that! That’s why I have this part walled-up in parentheses!)
Because… because… they are going to be burned anyway!
(I kid you not; I’m pretty sure I really did read that!)
See how that works?!
Good news all around!
Hey, thanks, Cold Blob Bob!
You’re the best!
Guess what, Mr Frisky?! LOOK! Your little ‘Blue Blob of Weather’ couldn’t really take the rising heat, from the global CLIMATE trends. It has turned yellow and run away…
Kinda ironic at a time of run away global warming wouldn’t you say?!
https://weather.com/forecast/national/news/2019-04-27-may-temperature-outlook-forecast-the-weather-company
Keep in mind, this is the overall average trend for the month, and an individual cold front or an upper ridge of high pressure can lead to a period of colder or warmer weather, respectively.
May’s Average Temperatures
Temperatures average in the 80s across the South in May, which suggests above-average temperatures in the Southeast could be very warm. However, those in the southern Plains, where slightly cooler-than-average temperatures are possible, might get a break from the heat.
Average highs across the northern tier are in the 60s in May, so there could be a cool feel to the month in areas where below-average temperatures emerge.
Hey maybe you could get a job at FAUX NEWS as a TV weather man!
.
Mr Blobby picks cherries.
NAOM
I think he is a cherry picking Bot!
So….
Yay?
Right?
:-/
Right….Yay.
I suppose it depends what you are into.
I ‘spose so.
Sigh…
World is still going to hell in a handbasket.
At least I’m enjoying the ride while it lasts. Hope my daughter does too. No guarantees though of course.
Yee haw!
Raising the Alarm – On the Capitalists Seeking to Profit from the Climate Crisis
The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics: The gaping hole in the middle of the Circular Economy
Why the latest buzz-phrase in consumer sustainability is not only failing to tackle the core problem, but why it is doomed to fail
See also Not So Good News
Quotes from:
In case you wondered how Pompeo did in meeting with EU trying to advocate an attack on Iran.
https://medium.com/s/story/the-trump-administration-has-no-idea-what-its-doing-with-iran-120e23d6021d
Perhaps we can leave it at ” the Trump administration has no idea ” bit ………
forbin
Meanwhile, back at home:
What if Trump Refuses To Give Up Power? – Authoritarian America?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SLN_3zN9cOY
Congress Tries To Strip Trump Of War Powers To Prevent Attack On Iran
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JZGD7NBT1Q
Seems to me both the Democratic and Republican party are torn on whether to let Trump stay in office, or remove him.
The democrats probably fear a having to run against a sane and grown-up person, who states the intention to continue with much of the current economic policies (plus infrastructure of course), and thus they would prefer to run against a damaged trump. It explains the go slow maneuvering on exposing his house of glass cards.
The republicans would love to get the shitty-pants braggart out of their car, but are afraid to ditch their winner. They are uncertain if they have a replacement recipe that can win, so they pretend to like the stench. If they are going to move against him, it will come within the next 12 months.
From the second video: “They have all [the presidents] done it.” Ie started a war without getting the congress’ consent.
It was meant as a preliminary thing. It says a lot about American foreign politcs and how 9/11 has been used as an excuse to start wars. It even gives fuel to various alternative theories about the 9/11.
This may have been one of Trump’s best achievements for the future of the world. Intended or not.
LOL! Forget TESLA if you want to make a killing then its time to buy stocks in Fortem Resources Inc.
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/This-25-Billion-Discovery-Could-Trigger-A-New-Oil-Boom.html?utm_source=browser&utm_medium=push_notification&utm_campaign=PushCrew_notification_1558642837&_p_c=1
This $25 Billion Discovery Could Trigger A New Oil Boom
MPORTANT NOTICE AND DISCLAIMER
PAID ADVERTISEMENT. This communication is a paid advertisement. Oilprice.com, Advanced Media Solutions Ltd, and their owners, managers, employees, and assigns (collectively “the Publisher”) is often paid by one or more of the profiled companies or a third party to disseminate these types of communications. In this case, the Publisher has been compensated by a third party to conduct investor awareness advertising and marketing concerning Fortem Resources. A third party paid the Publisher two hundred and twenty thousand US dollars to produce and disseminate this and other similar articles and certain banner ads. This compensation should be viewed as a major conflict with our ability to be unbiased.
Terrific reporting: hundreds of millions of dollars in right-wing dark money influencing US court picks. One donor alone spent over $24 million on the Supreme Court + $1M on Trump’s inaugural – but is hiding (Jane Mayer – Twitter)
Citizens United has resulted in US democracy being on sale to the highest bidders. Now it looks like the same gang has their eyes on the US justice system!
The justice system has been an almost myopic focus of Republicans for decades. They understand very well that filling the court system with sycophants is key to long term control of the economy. Without going back to actual numbers McConnell virtually stopped allowing Obama court picks any hearing by the Senate and brazenly ignored his Supreme Court appointment. As soon as Trump was elected he was given a pre-picked list of far right judges that were guaranteed approval by the Senate.
The court system will be the most impactful and longest lasting legacy of the Trump administration. the cherry on the cake will be his appointment of a Supreme Court justice who, in his Senate confirmation hearing bleated the now-immortal phrase “I like beer”.
I think I’ll be sick now.
Agree, in total.
Missing in the CO2, 415PPM issue is Deutch bank (German and third world loans) versus British (Rothschild and commonwealth loans) as two kingdoms square off… with tiny USA stocks holding bar for both to go bankrupt…Chinese embargoes support USA domestic deficits’ (Taxes, loans for shale oil?). Likely outcome? Stocks down, Deutch broke, British buy up empire…via Yuan reserve currency.
Brilliant con-archer.
I think you’ve put it all together.
Maybe write a screen play.
I think the bot broke.
NAOM
Nah! These bots are just in a very early stage of their evolution! Akin to the primordial slime of very early biological days!
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23431304-300-chatbots-learn-how-to-drive-a-hard-bargain/
“If we want bots to help us with more complex tasks they need to become better dealmakers”
The researchers got the chatbots to hone their skills by playing the game against both humans and other bots. Three different approaches were tried. One bot was taught to mimic the way people negotiated in English, but it turned out to be a weak negotiator, and too willing to agree to unfavourable terms. A second was tasked with maximising its score. This bot was a much better negotiator but ended up using a nonsensical language impossible for humans to understand.
The team then combined these approaches. The hybrid bot was able to plan several steps ahead and assess how saying different things could change the outcome of the negotiation. On average, it scored only slightly worse than the humans it played against. It also learned the usefulness of deceit: the bot started pretending it really wanted items that had little or no value to it, offering to give them up in exchange for items it actually did want. The research will be presented at a natural language processing conference in September in Copenhagen.
Maybe AI researchers should get Donald Trump to interact with their bots!
Cheers! 😉
“Maybe AI researchers should get Donald Trump to interact with their bots!”
That would be cruel!
NAOM
Here’s a sobering statistic.
https://www.apnews.com/d276ebdec5224398b9d70a6424bdee7b
Facebook: Fake account removal doubles in 6 months to 3B
AP NEWS
Facebook said in a Thursday, May 23, 2019 report, it removed more than 3 billion fake accounts from the service in the October-March period, although it doesn’t say how many it also missed. The report comes as Facebook grapples with challenges ranging from fake news to its role in elections interference, hate speech and incitement to violence in the U.S., Myanmar, India and elsewhere. (AP Photo/Ben Margot, File)
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Facebook removed more than 3 billion fake accounts from October to March, twice as many as the previous six months, the company said Thursday.
Nearly all of them were caught before they had a chance to become “active” users of the social network.
In a new report, Facebook said it saw a “steep increase” in the creation of abusive, fake accounts. While most of these fake accounts were blocked “within minutes” of their creation, the use of computers to generate millions of accounts at a time meant not only that Facebook caught more of the fake accounts, but that more of them slipped through.
As a result, the company estimates that 5% of its 2.4 billion monthly active users are fake accounts, or about 119 million. This is up from an estimated 3% to 4% in the previous six-month
Think about that for a moment and let it sink in. 3 billion, that’s with a B fake accounts at Facebook were removed in the last six months…
I’ll bet at least 5% of the comments here on POB are either bots or fake as well.
There were 2.38 billion monthly active users (MAU) in 2019 (March?). That number above is BS.
What it shows is that Facebook has a disfunctional account sign-up system that is without security.
NAOM
Just for fun, a re-run of a classic cartoon. It should be no longer relevant, but the resistance continues…
Way Off In The Wilderness
When was it ever relevant, and if so, how and why?
As for the smaller players, I have already posted heron more than once about many investing in non-renewable renewable energy. (See also my bold text below.)
Humanity Is Committing Collective Suicide
“…NickG, you are still way off in the wilderness relative to the content of my article.” ~ Rune Likvern
“Now, let’s go to the off-topic things that you’ve offered: I don’t give my name for reasons that I can’t discuss, and because it’s irrelevant – authority doesn’t matter.” ~ Nick G
“NickG, your reply is what to be expected from a troll.
Again I urge you to provide references to my official stances on climate. Alternatively retract your statement.” ~ Rune Likvern
“Nick wrote;
‘Only good logical arguments, and evidence matter.’
Yes, hard facts, data and logic matters.
So where did you apply those in your initial comment directed towards my article?
Hint, reread your initial comment which was designed to create doubt without providing for an alternative explanation.
ON THE SUBJECT ON DEBT.
Have the world’s debt/credit grown in recent years?
(Note I provided documentation for this from several sources in my article and my point was about the growth in stocks of the worlds currencies and you provided a non relevant reply.)
NickG, I will give it to you straight. Your comments/replies reveal you are a financial illiterate.” ~ Rune Likvern
Helium Users Grapple with Supply Crunch
And that’s just helium in an era of increasing extractivism, human overpopulation/unrest/wealth disparities, and large-scale-global environmental degradation.
“At WUSTL, the four NMRs that Hayes has kept cooled require a total of 2,200 liters of helium annually. Even with a subsidy from the chemistry department, her lab’s annual helium bill is nearly $39,000…”
With four spectrometers helium recovery makes economic sense and it is possible. Educate youself before posting this nonsense. BTW I would talk to my supplier, 20 USD/l Helium is very expensive….
I have raised the helium problem on earlier posts. When will modern medicine reach limits? Fortunately medicare paid for my recentl MRI, which incidentally was of great diagnostic value. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07182-7
They’re quite heavy!
“When will modern medicine reach limits?”
At the moment increase of BMI and opioides kill the effects in other fields in the USA.
Your spending efficiency is very low.
Naturträne (Natural Tear)
at current rate descent deutch stock under 6 in two weeks when Theresa May resigns…not her fault
Five sigma heat events, are they to be a more normal part of our weather and heating climate in the future?
The variance is more important than the mean. Both seem to be happening.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_9rP-MnDLc
Christopher Schar of the Institute of Atmospheric and Climate Science discusses the relationship of heat waves and changes in climate. He begins by discussing three historical heat waves, the North American Drought of 1988, the Chicago Heat Wave of 1995 and the Great European Heat Wave of 2003, and how these have impacted scientific perspectives on heat waves. He then discusses the variability hypothesis and provides related climate change scenarios. He concludes his talk by discussing the soil moisture threshold effect and some of the complexities of soil-moisture precipitation feedback.
Since this presentation there have been almost 30 recorded heat waves globally.
For the record, I am a big skeptic on nuclear energy, but
this articles is a fair discussion of the industry potentials going forward.
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/why-advanced-nuclear-reactors-may-be-here-sooner-than-many-imagine#gs.diye61
And what about the waste? People talk up how good these are but I never see talk about the crap that comes out of them. Same for decommissioning, who foots the bill in 50 years? What happens to the reactors that get flooded when waters rise? Can they be cooled if the water temperature rises? They never seem to discuss these issues.
NAOM
NAOM- I agree. Its been the biggest game of kick the can down the road.
I’d put a universal moratorium on all nuc plant operations until storage of spent fuel is dealt with.
I know, now tell me how that is just not realistic.
Well, then lets get real about the waste that is piling up in massive quantities.
I follow Leslie Corrice on facebook and elsewhere. I first worked in an X-ray department in 1948. Retired from Radiology in 1999. Have had an interest in various controversies involving ionizing radiation since the 1950’s . http://www.hiroshimasyndrome.com/fukushima-accident-updates.html?fbclid=IwAR0QGbRVxLYHFHJMewqiTBHTC7tuA7YNPWWuR7nOeoK_kPvzUeMSkoSP-HI
robert-
I also am far too aware of the differences between chondromyxoid fibromas and osteid osteomas, than any normal person should be.
I haven’t encountered those terms since the late 20th Century. Diagnosis was occasionally difficult. On more than one occasion I mailed copies of radiographs to a world class experts for a second opinion.https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/16775-benign-bone-tumors
The answer is obvious, there is no plan to dispose of waste. The hope is to develop future ones that use the waste for power bringing it down to a low level of radioactivity.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/jul/30/fast-breeder-reactors-nuclear-waste-nightmare
I can explain the difference in interest in building new nuclear plants and dealing with the resulting mess in a couple of ways. First think of candy bars. The guys who make candy bars these days wrap them in plastic so they stay fresh for the couple of weeks between manufacture and consumption. Average candy bar eaters unwrap the treat, throw the wrapper on the ground then gabble down the bar. The wrapper ends up in the ocean eventually killing some organism or organisms. That is not the concern of the candy maker who now goes on an exotic island vacation where the water is pristine. Scale up 10 billion x and you have a nuclear plant.
In the 1970s I worked for a company making nuclear power reactors. I started to get concerned about nuclear waste so I went right to the source and asked the manager of reactor physics what needed to be done about waste and he said “I don’t know, that’s not my problem”.
I hope this makes it all clear to everyone.
GoneFishing,
I began saying in the 1970s that it would be as safe to shoot it into the Sun as it is to bury it, especially in Nevada (thinnest continental crust on the planet, sliced by faults, volcanically active in the last millennium or so.)
Note that I didn’t say it would be safe, not at all.
Not much long term or wise thinking going on when money is waved in front of people.
I have asked dozens of times in lots of forums why it is not possible to dispose of hot waste by pulverizing it, and then pumping it down an old oil well. The geologic features underground, the thick and impermeable layers of stone that have held oil for millions of years, so far as I have been able to find out, are going to remain stable and impermeable more or less forever, in human terms, and for sure more than long enough for hot wastes to decay to safe levels.
Pulverize it, use a fracking or other oil drilling set up, and put it ten thousand feet down, highly diluted. The odds of anybody ever being able to retrieve enough of it to matter would appear to be slim indeed, and there’s sure as hell no way it could be done without the doing if it being obvious, with LOTS of heavy equipment.
Getting enough of it back out again to make a bomb with it would be a nation state level job.
I’m not actually advocating doing this, because unanticipated things could still go wrong, but so far nobody has told me why why it wouldn’t work.
OFM- “but so far nobody has told me why why it wouldn’t work.”
Probably because no one you’ve asked is qualified to know.
It may be something as simple as- you don’t pulverize highly radioactive material.
Or something else.
I haven’t studied it, but there is probably a damn good reason.
I have asked dozens of times in lots of forums why it is not possible to dispose of hot waste by pulverizing it, and then pumping it down an old oil well….
but so far nobody has told me why it wouldn’t work.
Okay, I will tell you why it wouldn’t work. Oil is pumped from solid rock. Yes, there are tiny pores in it but they are very tiny and oil flows very slowly through them or is pushed through with injected water. Sometimes the oil, or water, flows hundreds of yards, through the tinest of pores, to get to the wellbore.
But basically, you are talking about pushing pulverized solid material through solid rock. You might push a tiny bit a few inches into the rock but that would be it. All that effort to dispose of a few ounces of material.
Of course, you could just fill up the well borehole with the stuff. You would not even need to pulverize it to do that as it is already in pellet form. But then you would be contaminating the groundwater in the area for miles around, not to mention the oil if there is still any left in the area. In other words, you would just be burying the stuff in the ground. There are very good reasons that is not a good idea.
Frac sand goes a long way into the rocks.
And nobody has ever mentioned hearing about oil breaking thru the impermeable stone caps that have kept it in place for millions of years, ten thousand feet or more below the surface.
And I can’t see any reason any body would actually want any water recovered from such depths from an old oil field.
There’s no such thing as a perfect solution, but I don’t see this as being unreasonably dangerous, if done with ample security during transporting and injecting the waste.
Furthermore the people who piss and moan about a million or ten million years from now are quite often the same ones who assure us we will be extinct well before then any way, in the natural course of events.
Mother Nature is going to throw worse problems by a couple of orders of magnitude at the biosphere at least a couple of times, maybe many times, within a million years.
Sarc light blinking but not burning hot.
Frac sand goes a long way into the rocks.
You need a smiley face after that one Mac. You are going to use fracking equipment to push the highly radioactive stuff deep into the rocks? This stuff is not sand. Every ounce of it must be carefully handled and accounted for. It is normally encased in steel rods. If it were outside those rods everyone must wear hazmat equipment to avoid becoming contaminated.
If they thought they could just bury it, they would just drill a hole and drop it in. They would not need to find an old oil well, a hole already dug.
Okay, I will tell you why it wouldn’t work. Oil is pumped from solid rock. Yes, there are tiny pores in it but they are very tiny and oil flows very slowly through them or is pushed through with injected water.
Maybe we could just Frack the heck out of it… 😉
I was once tasked with teaching the scaling feature in a high end scientific graphics app to engineers and scientists, even a few from NASA, I was surprised at how difficult it is for people in general to deal with the concept of scale.
For some perspective, the image below is a nanoscale image of a typical pore found in shale. Which I extracted from an image found here:
https://www.nature.com/articles/srep15880/figures/1
(Scaled diameter dimensioning added by me.)
For the record, even sand the smallest sand grains in silt are huge by comparison, they are measured in mm.
https://hypertextbook.com/facts/2000/IlanaPrice.shtml
Of course a particle physicist would tell you that most of the matter in that picture is just empty space…
I tried to draw a scaled picture depicting the pore compared to the smallest grain of sand found in silt. Turns out to be difficult.
Just imagine if the grain of sand was our sun and it had to fit through a pore about the size of the earth. While that is not accurate dimension wise that mental image of that should help.
Cheers!
.
Chernobyl is now officially the highest rated TV series of all time on IMDB
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9APLXM9Ei8
The Podcast the making of the Movie gives a lot of insight.
A typical America home with a 200 Amp service consumes ~ 1 megawatt-hour/month generating ~2 grams of “hot” radionuclides – aka “spent Fuel”. Two grams = a fatal dose for all living things within a city. Radiation bullets from the tons of radionuclide particles will rip apart Life’s DNA for Centuries. God/Sky Daddy matched Risk with Reward. The good news is that isolating the “waste” from the Biosphere is more of a political than a technical problem. The bad news is that isolating the “waste” from the Biosphere is more of a political than a technical problem. Hopefully this series will alert the peps to demand governments to relocate and secure the high level waste waiting in spend fuel pools spread all over the US. Such pools at commercial reactor sites are over filled, lack passive cooling and were NOT designed to contain such hazard. A power failure will result in the unthinkable. Pure insanity, nothing else will matter over time. Ignoring this hazard will result in an extinction level event for life forms on the planet.
Lets hope that a tornado or airplane doesn’t happen upon those spend fuel pools.
New tool for calculating your travel footprint gaining traction in Europe-
“For example, for 2 people traveling from London to Barcelona, the tool gives a calculation of 130kg of carbon dioxide equivalent emitted for a train or bus journey, 244kg by private car, and 371kg by plane.”
https://phys.org/news/2019-05-swedish-tool-highlight-climate-impact.html
Good to learn to stay put. Play music or something.
Guess what Hickory? The carbon footprint of the internet exceeds that of air travel. So staying at home just does not work. We can destroy the world from our laptops! 🙂
So stay off the internet and go fly a kite.
So stay off the internet and go fly a kite
You mean like this one?!
https://www.teslarati.com/google-x-clean-energy-kite-wind-power-generation-anywhere/
Google’s giant “kite” can generate wind energy from almost anywhere
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=4&v=CKFlMDUHtLg
Testing Makani’s M600 energy kite in Spring 2017
😉
GF. Quit pretending that you care about carbon footprints.
Talk is talk.
Walk it.
Are you always this delusional or did you take a course to get that way?
It took quite a few courses, and many roads less traveled.
Sure, I can do delusion when it suits me, but I do reality too. You’d be surprised if you knew how well I get paid for hard core reality.
btw- that post wasn’t an attack on air travel. It was a heads up on a good tool for people to use so they can understand the impact of their choices.
Some people think thats a good thing apparently.
I would point that even the least impactful travel method they include (car) is very harmful when multiplied by 7.8 B people [and 3 x’s worse for air].
And I am under no illusion that just because I produce more electricity via solar than I use for home electricity and my yearly travel, that it is somehow environmentally ok. Its still a method of trashing the earth.
But it is a big improvement, and so is limiting my totally travel by motor in air and land to 5000 miles over the past 12 months.
Again, Talk is cheap.
The PV cost was almost 20K. You?
Uh, oh. Who’s got the bigger one, huh? Or is it the littler one in this case? 🙂
Well paid too? That is great, glad for you (not being sarcastic).
Don’t worry, I am at about 1/7 the typical American use of fossil fuels, use far less materials (effects across the world) and my use is diminishing.
I was just joking with you, Hickory (smiley face). Since you were trolling me about aircraft previously.
However, the comparison was valid. The problem is that changing things by a percent or two at most will do about nothing. Even though I have successfully encouraged others to also reduce their “footprint”, I have no delusions that it will mean much for the world.
I agree that efficiency, solar in all it’s forms (I use passive and active thermal) and wind power are good starts. Problem is that they are not really being implemented seriously in most areas because of cheap natural gas, legacy investments, poor past choices and well funded political schemes. Work needs to be done on improving storage too.
EV’s are still up in the air as to making a dent. Might bend the curve a bit unless gasoline gets expensive for a long time. So far they are too expensive for most people and charging stations are just starting to get developed.
It doesn’t mean much when the next war will wipe any gains right off the books. There will be a next war, and a next.
By the time people get serious (if?), the Arctic will be mostly ice free in the summer and global heating will be accelerating along with natural increases in GHG rates. That will more than wipe out any “progress” in renewable energy and EV.
Probably the most advanced and useful things we can do include actions such as not using pesticides/herbicides, not planting monocultures and allowing wild species of plants/animals to flourish, even on our own properties. Making small or large habitat available for other species.
I just get this horrible feeling that renewables will end up just being a fossil fuel extender, as it is now. Sort of like Obama’s energy mix plan. Hope that feeling goes away due to actual changes in the rates of GHG emissions and changes in the real world over the next few years. Once we cross the major climate threshold, reducing fossil fuels will do very little.
But keep up the good work Hickory. Maybe you can convince people to not drive all those trillions of miles each year and reduce GHG emissions by 10 percent.
BTW: your thinking I own a plane or fly is wrong. I was a licensed sailplane pilot but gave that up years ago. I merely look on reducing the needs for road and bridge infrastructure as a big step forward. I hate seeing squashed salamanders, frogs, etc. on the roads. Not that there are many left to see around here anymore. I saw one squashed frog this spring, total. I remember when the roads were covered with amphibians on wet spring nights.
So maybe I don’t take personal CO2 calculators that seriously. Don’t take it personally. I get tired of seeing negative progress now for so many decades.
HI GF and Hickory,
I follow both of you guys, because both of you are like two of the three blind guys examining the elephant. I’m the third one, lol, for immediate conversational purposes.
We all know some things about the elephant, and no doubt we are all in need of more data and more discussion of it, in order to arrive at a more detailed and nuanced understanding of the big picture.
One day I’m very hopeful that people like Tony Seba will turn out to be right, and that the electric revolution will save us from peak oil, and that wind and solar energy can and might save us from climate hell, etc.
The next I revert to my old conviction that we are have royally fucked up the environment already and that civilization and the biosphere as we know them today are soon to be historical artifacts for the few historians still around to contemplate them.
There are things we can do,individually, and things we MIGHT do, collectively.
GF, you say
“It doesn’t mean much when the next war will wipe any gains right off the books. There will be a next war, and a next.
By the time people get serious (if?), the Arctic will be mostly ice free in the summer and global heating will be accelerating along with natural increases in GHG rates. That will more than wipe out any “progress” in renewable energy and EV. ”
I believe the odds are rather high, maybe as high as ninety nine percent, that you are right, that we are inevitably headed to hell in a hand basket, that there’s no more turning back than if you once start down a ski jump.
But I can’t say you are correct as a matter of my own professional judgement, because I’m not qualified as a biologist, climatologist, or physicist.
And you say “Probably the most advanced and useful things we can do include actions such as not using pesticides/herbicides, not planting monocultures and allowing wild species of plants/animals to flourish, even on our own properties. Making small or large habitat available for other species. ”
Now we’re on my turf, and I agree that you’re dead on about preserving any natural habitat we have control of, personally. I put a good bit of effort into this myself, in terms of the way I manage my own property.
We absolutely do need to find ways to produce enough food for everybody without using pesticides, and without mono culture operations on the grand scale………. and while people outside the ag industry don’t appreciate it, progress IS being made in terms of pesticide use, depending on how you measure that use.
Lots of the worst offenders have been outlawed in most of the world, and farmers in countries such as the USA use less, and hopefully ( no way to ever know for SURE, until it’s maybe too late!) less dangerous pesticides, per unit of food produced than in the past, and this trend of less pesticide per unit of food production promises to continue to hold.
We are also using less manufactured fertilizer, per unit of production, at least in most countries, but not everywhere by any means. And in some lesser developed countries, both fertilizer and pesticide use are increasing fast.
But for now, and for the foreseeable future, I just can’t see any likelihood that we can give up mono culture production of staple crops, because the technology needed to do so simply does not scale, and may never scale, when you take into account the economic and cultural issues involved when the discussion is about modern life and industrial agriculture.
We can’t quit raising corn, wheat, soybeans, rice, apples, grapes, oranges, potatoes, or any other really important crop by the hundreds and thousands of acres, for now, and maybe not ever, because the people don’t live where the crops are raised and CAN BE raised, anymore, and wouldn’t move there, except at the business end of a gun, and at the places where such crops CAN be raised….. there’s nothing in the way of housing, jobs, medical care, etc.
We don’t need more than five or six people these days to run a five thousand acre grain farm. Everything is mechanized out the ying yang these days on the farms that provide the vast bulk of our staple foods, in modern countries. One dinky little farm like my own is enough to provide apples for ten thousand people , even twenty thousand people, and our operation was so miserably behind the times in terms of scale we gave it up years ago. The last ten years we did run it, we lost money, because we were addicted to the orchardist farming lifestyle.
I’m converting to hay and pasture, which are less intensive and work at small scale, and instead of growing food, other than grass fed beef, I’m out of it, commercially.
I am forced to conclude that you are almost for sure right in that we are collectively fucked, in terms of the big picture, taking the whole world into account.
But I am hopeful that some people in some places will manage to come thru what’s obviously a baked in HARD crash, and preserve some of the best features of industrial civilization, such as good medical care, nutritionally satisfactory food in stores year around, good public health policies such as water and sewage systems maintained to prevent epidemics, good communications, etc.
And every thing that happens now, in terms of progress in electrification of transportation, energy storage and efficiency of use domestically and industrially, etc, sets the stage for a POSSIBLE transition in time to preserve at least a portion of our modern way of life.
The industrial base needed to manufacture batteries on the grand scale is now in place, ditto the base needed to produce solar panels, wind turbines, triple pane insulating glass, modular or even printed housing that will not burn or decay, birth control pills by the trillions at negligible cost, etc.
So maybe the situation isn’t hopeless. I believe there’s good reason to believe that it’s still POSSIBLE, although it’s unlikely, that we can collectively turn the corner on fossil fuels, pesticides, and some of our other worst bad habits, before it’s too late to prevent most of our species from dying off slow and hard.
What ‘s needed, in my own estimation, is a series of Pearl Harbor WAKE UP broken bricks upside our collective head that simply CANNOT be ignored. It’s been possible, SO FAR, for people to forget the floods, the storms, the droughts, and the mostly minor hot resource wars fought in recent years.
Not one person in a thousand has actually suffered any consequences from any natural disaster in the USA so far, in a way that impacts him or her DIRECTLY. Ninety nine percent of the country has forgotten, if it ever knew, that a major hurricane did many billions of dollars damage to the North East only a few years back, the country has forgotten the floods that actually killed only a few dozen people while submerging New Orleans, etc.
The country has forgotten the double nickel and every other day gasoline. People these days do more or less know that WWII was fought by their parents or grandparents, but they don’t know what it was ABOUT…. WWII was a hot resource war above and beyond every other cause of it.
BUT if we get into a hot little oil war, NOW, that means we can’t buy gasoline except once a week, for six months, and then just barely enough to get to work, well, that would be remembered for quite some time, time enough for LEVIATHAN, the nation state, to put it’s power to work breaking the oil addiction.
As Gandalf said, it’s given to us do use the time we have to do what we can. Beyond that, it’s out of our hands.
IF we get lucky, and the shit hits the fan hard enough to get our collective attention, hard enough to knock us down, but not so hard we can’t get up and get to work changing things, there is probably still a fair to good chance that life as we know it can continue, for at least a substantial portion of our species.
Let’s not forget that the power of LEVIATHAN, the nation state, and ESPECIALLY the modern industrial state , has never been fully mobilized for any purpose other than fighting do or die wars.
The price of one new car is enough to put wind farms and solar farms in place to provide most of the electricity needed for THREE OR FOUR typical families, and some easily managed tricks can do away with most of the need for back up power provided by fossil fuels.
A refrigerator can be constructed with it’s own BUILT IN ice box, making it’s own ice when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, to preserve the food in it, for a week or longer, a damned sight cheaper than battery power can be provided for that same purpose.
I don’t have figures, but I’m pretty sure we could build a nation wide HVDC electricity distribution system for less than we spend annually on protecting our access to imported oil…….. and that the political will to build it will be there, once we have suffered the right combination of WAKE UP bricks upside our head, lol.
Renewable energy tech is not NECESSARILY useful only as a means of extending our finite supply of fossil fuels.
I’m with Hickory in that I see plenty of reason to keep the pedal to the metal when it comes to renewable energy, etc.
We may make it safely into port, some of us, even if we only make it there in lifeboats. Renewable energy and conservation are the keys to our survival, other than as small remnant populations of people living a preindustrial life style.
” Renewable energy and conservation are the keys to our survival”
Nahhh, flying insects and a stable climate are the keys to our survival.
We are losing both. No one can eat electricity.
The Ents successfully fought industrialization and eco destruction. Yet the world as depicted in the Lord of the Rings was turned over to humans. Why?
Results are quickly becoming apparent, even to humans.
The score: 15,000 years ago almost all life was wild. Now, if you count land vertebrates, humans 97, wildlife 3. Bit of a change there. Invertebrates and marine life seem to be fighting a losing battle now.
Fossil fuel/synthetic chemical/nuclear/electric world doesn’t seem to be working out very well for the inhabitants of earth.
The Great Wall of Shame is proudly displayed and mass marketed in every hardware store and big box home supply or Ag supply store across the planet.
There are no winners in a fight against Nature.
Back atcha GF,
” Renewable energy and conservation are the keys to our survival”
I should have added a couple of qualifiers, to the effect ” as modern civilization goes, etc.
Nahhh, flying insects and a stable climate are the keys to our survival.
We are losing both. No one can eat electricity.
You are dead on, unfortunately.
The Ents successfully fought industrialization and eco destruction. Yet the world as depicted in the Lord of the Rings was turned over to humans.
Why?
In as few words as possible, two reasons. Change is inevitable, and modern people were in a position to take over…. to the detriment of everybody of course.
But mammals didn’t displace dinosaurs because we were around fucking things up.
“Results are quickly becoming apparent, even to humans.”
In order for this statement to be true, YOU should have added a qualifier to the effect “comma, at least the tiny minority that’s paying attention and knows enough to take the situation seriously. ”
The score: 15,000 years ago almost all life was wild. Now, if you count land vertebrates, humans 97, wildlife 3. Bit of a change there. Invertebrates and marine life seem to be fighting a losing battle now.
Fossil fuel/synthetic chemical/nuclear/electric world doesn’t seem to be working out very well for the inhabitants of earth.
The Great Wall of Shame is proudly displayed and mass marketed in every hardware store and big box home supply or Ag supply store across the planet.
There are no winners in a fight against Nature.
There are no PERMANENT winners. I WOULD argue that we have been winning for the last few thousands of years, BUT I readily agree that the status quo is temporary, and that we are in for a very hard fall.
However, the king’s men, technologists, may be able to save a few of the billions of humpty dumpties, maybe even a lot of them.
Used to fly in a Cessna 150 quite a lot—
The fuel use was quite minimal. And you could land and store it privately.
But fuel was used. It had a 22.5 gallon tank, which gave you quite a range.
I lived in Micronesia without electricity or running water for a year. Did have surgical tubing for spears.
Ride a bike or take a hike! 😉
Hi GF,
You can call my stance showing anti-aircraft bias, but I’m trying to understand what your argument about the carbon footprint of the internet has got to do with travel?
Regardless, I’ve got two main problems with your comparison anyway (has it already been debated here – sorry I missed it if it has).
1) I hadn’t heard it before, so I tried to google some information about the internet’s carbon footprint. All the information I could find led back to one report claiming the internet footprint was similar to the air travel footprint. I admit to not reading the report, but a summary of it describes the footprint was calculated by including not just the electricity for the servers and airconditioning, but also the manufacture and transport of the servers and their components, and noting that computer hardware has a fairly short life. The summary didn’t say anything about whether the footprint of constructing aircraft, or maintaining them to give long , safe, service lives was included in the air travel footprint. There were also some rebuttals made by Google and Facebook, and one of the newspaper articles I found acknowleged these as reasonable. If you can point me to other sources for this statement I really am interested.
2) A statista webpage says there were 1.86 billion smartphones users in 2014, and the 2019 forecast was 2.7 billion, let’s say 30% of the worlds population, and most of those people are using parts of the internet on them. You can find info on the number of global air trips, about 3.5 billion passengers in 2018, but nothing definitive on the percentage of the world’s population that has flown. I did find suggestions of 5 or 6% of the world’s population has flown at least once in their life, but no data. So, even if the internet does have a bigger carbon footprint, its serving (a pun?) a much greater proportion of the world’s people than the airline industry.
Cheers, Phil
Ok, so I’ve just seen your longer reply to Hickory. Am I right if I take your point to be that calculating footprints won’t change enough people’s behaviour significantly enough to make a difference?
In case you do want to calculate CO2 footprints here’s an infographic from Climate Care. The truth is, none of this data and information is static things are in constant flux.
https://climatecare.org/infographic-the-carbon-footprint-of-the-internet/
Hi Fred, thanks, but that infographic was the first thing I found. It doesn’t have any sources for the numbers it gives, other than links to other website homepages. Its produced by/for a company selling carbon offsets for internet use. I guess I’ve learnt there is lots of information floating around on the internet that gets repeated over and over that people accept as fact without thinking it through. I am trying to determine whether GF’s pithy “The carbon footprint of the internet exceeds that of air travel” line is accurate, and whether its a valid comparison.
Cheers, Phil
Hi Phil,
Well if you read the comments you would see that Hickory said we should stay home and listen to music instead of travelling. So between the streaming video, the cell phone use and the regular internet use the energy use will be well above what air travel uses. That is what the younger generations and the older ones do now (6 to 8 hours a day).
Air travel emissions are 1.6% of total carbon emissions. So eliminating them would do nothing except cause more pollution. People would still travel, more roads to be built and repaired, more railroads and trains and terminals, passenger ships are notoriously inefficient. All that cargo would need to transported too.
I don’t know if the study on the internet took into account the energy losses in generating electricity or not but we don’t have to go there, the communication systems are growing much faster than air travel.
So staying home playing on the internet, streaming and cell calling/texting instead of just flying might give one a bigger carbon footprint. Go stream that music or ship in some (probably by aircraft since every plane carries cargo and mail thus serving a lot more people than you think)
The average family spends $67 a month and average cell phone user spends $80 a month. Much of that is energy and high tech equipment cost.
It’s just silliness anyway, neither is going away, they are growing. Yet they are not the big problems, they are small. Airplane travel and the internet/communications are small potatoes in the GHG world. Not insignificant just small and not going away.
Here is a list of larger carbon footprints to work on:
Road transport 10 percent
Rail ship and other transport (not aircraft) 2.3 percent
Residential buildings 10 percent
Commercial buildings 5.4%
Basic industries 22 percent
Oil & Gas extraction, refining, processing 6.3%
Deforestation and Harvest/Management 21 percent
Agriculture and Ranching 15% (much of that as methane and nitrous oxide – very powerful GHG)
Lots of important areas to work on.
But another point comes up, concerning bragging rights on adding PV and electric cars (or anything one purchases to be “green”).
Much of that money does not go to making the PV, it goes out into the world via paychecks, marketing costs, profits etc. All those produce more GHG’s as they are spent since fossil fuels still run the world.
So is it better just to live low or to buy lots of high tech “solutions” to the BAU problem? Everything you buy comes from the mine, used fossil fuels, etc. from around the world.
As far as significantly changing people’s behavior, the best way is fear. The governments use it (laws, police, prisons, armies) and nature is starting to become really terrifying. Religions use it also.
Fear caused action. Economics (fear of being poor/homeless or freezing to death or starving) causes action.
There is no escape. Enjoy the warmth and the chaos.
70 Billion kWh per year and growing, twice as much as all the US solar panels combined produce. A bit of a Red Queen effect going on here.
A new report from the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory figures that those data centers use an enormous amount of energy — some 70 billion kilowatt hours per year. That amounts to 1.8% of total American electricity consumption. At an average cost of 10 cents per kwh, the annual cost of all that juice is on the order of $7 billion.
Seventy billion kilowatt hours is such a giant number that it’s helpful to put it into some other terms. For comparison purposes, 1 kwh is enough power to keep ten 100-watt lightbulbs illuminated for one hour, or to keep your smartphone charged for an entire year.
To generate 70 billion kwh you’d need power plants with a baseload capacity of 8,000 megawatts — equivalent to about 8 big nuclear reactors, or twice the output of all the nation’s solar panels.
Sliced up per capita, the average American uses about 200 kwh a year for his or her internet use, costing about $20. For those of you obsessed with carbon footprints, your internet use is responsible for the emission of about 300 pounds of carbon dioxide per year.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2016/06/28/how-much-electricity-does-it-take-to-run-the-internet/#6dcc84f71fff
None of the above seems to capture the kWh/hour of use or the kWh per person per year. I suspect that an individual who takes a inter-continental vacation by airplane uses quite a bit more energy in that trip than in annual internet use.
None-the-less most of this wouldn’t matter if there were less than a billion of us. Fundamental problem: too many f**** people.
That is just the servers. Nothing else.
My whole idea, which causes trouble, is to get people to look at the bigger problems not the little ones. Airplanes and internet are not the big ones.
So I guess my idea, and it might be JJHMAN’s too, is to get people to look at the things in their own lives that are the biggest problems.
Per capita, air travel seems to be about 5 times worse than internet use.
If we gave each person on the planet an equal annual carbon allowance that reduced carbon emissions to 1990 levels, a return intercontinental flight would use pretty much all of it. That seems a pretty big problem to me.
A personal carbon allowance makes the too many f****** people problem pretty obvious.
JJHMAN, do your really think the environment responds to the per capita use of energy and emissions? It’s the actual amount emitted to which the planet responds.
Air travel 1.6 %
Internet 2.0%
Which is bigger?
I only wish to make the point that both problems are compounded by the size of the population doing things that are environmentally harmful. Either you think I can’t count or didn’t read my comment very carefully.
My main point is that neither internet use nor air travel would be much of a problem with only a tiny number of practitioners. Population is the fundamental problem.
So GF, the planet responds to our emissions, can it do anything about reducing them? No, that’s up to us. And thats where per capita use can help provide additional context.
For a crazy thought experiment, let’s say I could ban the internet or ban air travel. I can ban the internet, affecting 2.5 billion people, and the planet benefits with a 2.0% reduction in emmisions, or ban air travel, reducing emissions by 1.6% and affecting 0.5 billion people. Which should I pick?
I think your comparison of the internet and air travel emissions as “The carbon footprint of the internet exceeds that of air travel. So staying at home just does not work” without any other context in terms of users (a bit difficult to calculate) and overall benefits (very difficult to compare) annoys me because it reminds me of my fellow Australians who believe we shouldn’t do anything about greenhouse gases because we only emit 1% of the world’s total – any changes we make aren’t going to make any difference and we only hurt ourselves. I try to put that 1.0% in context by pointing out we are only 0.4% of the world’s population. If we don’t reduce our emissions, how can we expect anyone else to?
Cheers, Phil
Apples To Oranges
My before heading out, off-the-cuff, food for fodder 2¢ about this issue of energy use WRT internet vs ‘plane travel’:
We are not exchanging information online between only two or maybe a half-dozen more places as most would seem likely to do if they traveled by air.
We are downloading movies instead of taking a car or city bus to the video store and sending emails instead of letters by snailmail. Mail trucks? Couriers? Cargo planes?
We appear to be exchanging far more info electronically than we would ‘materially’, but, or so, maybe Jevon’s Paradox, as problematic as it might be sometimes, might factor into some of this.
In any case, I suspect that the internet may save us some energy, despite its usage, and that it appears much cheaper to bring info to people than the other way around, but that its increasing usage may run into some kinds of Jevon’s Paradoxes, such as for example where people are now wandering city streets, perpetually gazing at and finger-rubbing their cellphone screens.
“I suspect that an individual who takes an inter-continental vacation by airplane uses quite a bit more energy in that trip than in annual internet use.”
Perhaps not. Energy=Power * time. It’s not uncommon for US crap gear with regulated power supplies to waste 99% of Energy.
GF, throwing around big impressive numbers is not that useful. I can quote for aircraft fuel use
“For worldwide air travel statistics, ICAO is the best source. For 2013, they give the worldwide monthly passenger-kilometers as 500 Billion, which corresponds to 16.5 Billion passenger kilometers per day.
Again according to ICAO, the fuel consumed per passenger mile is
Modern aircraft achieve fuel efficiencies of 3.5 litres per 100 passenger-km []. The next generation aircraft (A380 & B787) are targeting an efficiency of less than 3 litres per 100 passenger-km
Now all we have to do is to combine both numbers to arrive at 575 Million liters or, if we assume a medium density of aviation fuel of 0.81 kg/l, 466,000 metric tons of fuel. Add some more for training, air cargo and waste, and the real number might well be around 500,000 to 600,000 metric tons per day, with an ascending trend.”
Which comes out to 1.56% of global CO2 emissions. I stated 1.6% which is close enough. What is your point?
Hi GF, sorry commenting back and forth is difficult with time zone differences, discussing things clearly on the internet is difficult enough.
What was my point? Maybe you linked to the forbes article to provide me with some data. When I read it, instead I saw a piece of crappy sensationalist media that threw around a bunch of iimpressively big numbers without trying to put it into any meaning, comprehendable context. To try and illustrate, I threw back a bunch of big numbers. Which you immediately put into a more meaningful, comprehendable 1.56% of global emissions. Why didn’t the forbes article do that? Because it wasn’t trying to make an argument, it was trying to impress. If I was meant to focus on the data, and not emotion laden bullshit like “For those of you obsessed with carbon footprints, your internet use is responsible for the emission of about 300 pounds of carbon dioxide per year.” I’m sorry. But my point was I don’t think that article really contributes to the discussion.
Cheers, Phil
Oh, the numbers from Berkeley National Labs discussing the energy use and footprint of servers. That was added as additional information not an all inclusive view.
Also, it’s just a report supposedly showing the results of a study. Most reporting is not comprehensive, only a few sources bring together all the pieces and know how to present them coherently. Or sometimes one has to do it himself.
It seems a misleading/pointless comparison and kind of stupid. I write ‘seems’ and ‘kind of’ to be charitable because of its potential value in fleshing out some thoughts/ideas from its broach/discussion.
Except when talking to people who are highly literate in both math and ecology, throwing around absolute numbers is a deceptive way to make one’s point, because the typical person has no conception o what they actually MEAN, in context.
This usage works out to less than three hundred kWh per person in the USA. I doubt personal usage doubles that.Total net juice per person is probably less than five hundred hours annually.
That’s a hell of a lot,no doubt, but my own use of the net without a doubt saves pollution, by keeping me entertained at home, reducing my driving, allowing me to buy stuff online and get it by U P S truck which passes the house daily, even out here in the boonies nowaday.
I research new projects, pass out pro advice and get it in return via the net, etc.
Bargain use of juice imo.
Growing up in Amarillo I often saw one of the helium plants near Amarillo. Much of the helium was stored under the land of the notorious Amarillo resident, the late Stanley Marsh 3. One World War II summer I was a regular caddy for his grandfather Stanley Marsh. Over the years there was controversy off and on over the government sales of helium. https://www.google.com/maps/uv?hl=en&pb=!1s0x8701511fd5341e59:0x2b3e059d79e0de95!2m22!2m2!1i80!2i80!3m1!2i20!16m16!1b1!2m2!1m1!1e1!2m2!1m1!1e3!2m2!1m1!1e5!2m2!1m1!1e4!2m2!1m1!1e6!3m1!7e115!4shttps://lh5.googleusercontent.com/p/AF1QipMICjs74-uL08Kjj0YG6FHtpdInkggEr9XtStvn%3Dw426-h320-k-no!5shelium+plant+route+66+-+Google+Search&imagekey=!1e10!2sAF1QipMICjs74-uL08Kjj0YG6FHtpdInkggEr9XtStvn&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwipyYi6w7TiAhXHuZ4KHRsSBp0QoiowFnoECA0QBg
For Islandboy…
The bus wars are over. Electricity — and China — won.
China has 421,000 electric buses. The United States has 300.
https://thinkprogress.org/electric-buses-outsell-diesel-china/
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-24/russia-s-dirty-oil-crisis-is-worse-than-almost-anyone-predicted?srnd=premium-middle-east
I’m too dumb to understand the implications of this
Can someone explain what these organic chlorides are, please?
NAOM
Hydrocarbon chains with at least one covalent bond with a chlorine atom.
The main problem is HCL corrosion.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/241792446_Effect_of_Organic_Chloride_Contamination_of_Crude_Oil_on_Refinery_Corrosion
Effect of Organic Chloride Contamination of Crude Oil on Refinery Corrosion
… Corrosion in crude overhead systems stems primarily from the presence of hydrogen chloride vapor present from hydrolysis of salts in the atmospheric crude distillation unit. The most common source of HCl is from the hydrolysis of calcium chloride and magnesium chloride salts at temperatures exceeding 250 o F (121 o C) 1-7 though the HCl may also come from the decomposition of organic chloride species 1,[8][9][10] . HCl, being a light volatile gas, moves into the crude unit overhead condensing systems where it is readily absorbed into condensing water. …
… Various remedies are used to mitigate the acidic attack from condensed water containing HCl, including neutralizing compounds like ammonia and organic amines [2][3][4]6,8,11 , film-forming inhibitors 1,5-6,9 , wash water systems [1][2]6,[11][12] , and close control of temperature in the overhead circuit 3,13-15. Care must be taken to implement one or more of these remedies as introduction of the remedies may lead to fouling, under-deposit corrosion, and other problems
… While organic chlorides are typically not present in crude feeds in any appreciable amount, feed stocks contaminated with some species of organic chlorides can result in severe attack in the overhead circuit. Organic chlorides are not removed in the desalter operations due to their limited solubility in water 1,[8][9][10] . As little as 1 ppm organic chlorides in the desalted crude has been found to double the amount of HCl in the overhead circuit 9 . …
Thanks for the link Peak Beer. However, you should have posted it in the petroleum thread since it deals with Russian petroleum production.
I have answered it there with credit to you.
The Annual Greenhouse Gas Index (AGGI) by NOAA has been updated for 2018. 2018 CO2e is 496ppm.
https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/aggi/aggi.html
Informative real world data on vehicle maintenance costs on Teslas.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30gzXOGWICE
Tesla Ride Sharing Service – Tesloop Full Interview
Which reality will it be?
‘The Good Ancestor’ – What was it like when the great whales swam?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wUu_WRf9ww
Which reality will it be?
Dunno but I’m pretty sure it will be very different from anything we have been familiar with even from our recent past.
Case in point: there are only 12 Vaquitas left in the world! To put that in perspective, there are 80,000 Koalas left in Australia in the wild and they are considered functionally extinct.
https://blog.nature.org/science/2018/08/20/vaquita-the-worlds-most-endangered-mammal/
The world’s population of vaquitas, a small porpoise that lives in the Upper Gulf of California, consists of only 12 individuals (and possibly fewer). It is the world’s most endangered marine mammal, and one of the most endangered creatures on earth.
The population trend for this secretive creature strongly suggests time is running out. Just twenty years ago, there were 600 vaquitas. In 2015, there were 60 remaining, and in 2017, 30.
How about the Steller’s sea cow?
https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/stellers-sea-cow-first-historical-extinction-of-marine-mammal-at-human-hands.html
Steller’s sea cow: the first historical extinction of a marine mammal at human hands
Steller’s sea cows were extraordinary creatures.
Their closest living relatives are the dugong and manatees, known collectively as the sirenians. But while all four surviving species of sirenian live in warm tropical waters, Steller’s sea cow had become highly specialised to the sub-Arctic waters of the northern Pacific Ocean.
This specialisation included growing to incredible sizes: adults could reach up to 10 metres in length while weighing up to 11 tonnes, bigger than many modern whales. To put this into perspective, an adult male killer whale can come in at eight metres long and weigh up to six tonnes.
Richard Sabin, Principal Curator of Mammals at the Museum, says, ‘Steller’s sea cow, Hydrodamalis gigas, is unusual for a modern mammal in as much as we know little of it from a true natural history perspective.
Of course there are a lot of people right here on this very site who claim that insects can go extinct for all they could care and the old FF BAU economy is just fine by them… While I know that EVs and renewables can’t save the Vaquitas, they may turn the odds just enough in favor of some other creature surviving rather than also going extinct and that right now that may be the best that we can do.
Things seem to be heating up a bit.
The Orange Guy seems to be upping the game.
” a US diplomatic convoy travelling to Baghdad Airport was hit by several powerful roadside bombs. A high-level State Department political officer, 3 diplomats and a U.S. Army colonel were instantly killed….
“A suicide attacker hit a U.S. military unit operating in eastern Syria, near the Iraqi border. Two American Special Operations troops were killed, and two more were taken hostage by a Syrian militia.”
“even Russia finally had to admit (and nearly too late) that the only thing that matters is, as Mao put it that ‘power grows out of the barrel of a gun”.”
The Orange Guy knows it. He is a 6 times bankrupt scammer from Queens.
It would help to cite what you are quoting. Which is a WaPo article describing a hypothetical scenario.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/this-is-how-easily-the-us-and-iran-could-blunder-into-war/2019/05/23/40dbbcae-7c07-11e9-8ede-f4abf521ef17_story.html?utm_term=.fb8c839ed90e
No, 5G Won’t Ruin Your Weather Forecasts
By Sascha Segan
https://www.pcmag.com/commentary/368561/no-5g-wont-ruin-your-weather-forecasts
Some battles aren’t worth the cost. As the FCC tries to cobble and scrounge together valuable airwaves for new 5G wireless networks, it’s gotten into a spat with meteorologists over the airwaves used for storm tracking.
As Wired reports, Neil Jacobs, acting chief of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told Congress last week that if the FCC auctions off the 24GHz band as planned, weather forecasts could be 30 percent less accurate. Horrors, right? I can see the YouTubes already: 5G will expose us to DEATH BY TORNADO.
5G wireless is about very fast speeds and very low latency. To get there, it needs a lot of wireless spectrum—the networking equivalent of very broad roads on which to drive. The FCC decided a while ago that the easiest place it could find those broad roads was at very high frequencies, called millimeter-wave (mmWave.)
The agency first auctioned off 28GHz and some 39GHz. Now it’s working on 24GHz (which the weather guys are complaining about), and later this year it’s going to do 37GHz, more 39GHz, and 47GHz.
All these bands have a lot of “free space,” but they are very short-wave. So far, they only work line-of-sight, they don’t penetrate windows well, they don’t penetrate buildings at all, and they need cell sites at least every 1,000 feet or so. They’re also the subject of Russian-government-funded misinformation campaigns to make people think they’re hazardous to your health, although there’s no actual evidence they are.
To please the weather forecasters, the FCC will likely have to demand lower power from the mmWave transmitters. Now, if the FCC demands lower power limits, I wouldn’t be surprised if a bit of a hot legal mess crops up. The agency has already auctioned off some of this spectrum based on higher power limits, and wireless carriers could very well argue that the airwaves are worth less if they can’t turn their radios up as high as they could before. But if that’s what it takes to balance the competing interests, that’s what it takes.
Better wrap your heads with aluminum foil and rub your bellies with linseed oil.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urglg3WimHA
That was a good one!
Here is the original Steve Allen recording that sparked the whole thing. Where he got it from, I don’t know.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_lNHfCzMjU
There a lot of claims that RF from electric meters is bad for your health – I wonder where they come from?
Dunno, but I worked at a satellite TV uplink station once and remember seeing a lot of signs like these… 😉
.
Uh Oh, EV’s are badddd!
Hybrid & Electric Cars: Electromagnetic Radiation Risks
https://www.saferemr.com/2019/02/
The larger site for EM safety. https://www.saferemr.com/
My question, safety in relation to what? The human world is full of synthetic toxins, carcinogens, mutagens, petroleum and fossil fuel products and oxidation products, hormonal analog plastic degradation products, toxins sprayed all over the landscape and our food, air, water. We live in a witches brew of chemicals and highly altered landscapes.
We worry about everything yet do little about anything.
https://www.fcc.gov/engineering-technology/electromagnetic-compatibility-division/radio-frequency-safety/faq/rf-safety
CAN PEOPLE BE EXPOSED TO LEVELS OF RADIOFREQUENCY RADIATION THAT COULD BE HARMFUL?
Studies have shown that environmental levels of RF energy routinely encountered by the general public are typically far below levels necessary to produce significant heating and increased body temperature. However, there may be situations, particularly in workplace environments near high-powered RF sources, where the recommended limits for safe exposure of human beings to RF energy could be exceeded. In such cases, restrictive measures or mitigation actions may be necessary to ensure the safe use of RF energy. (Back to Index)
The satellite up link station where I worked definitely had high powered RF sources that could have cooked you should you have entered a specific area at the wrong time. What?! you never put a kitten or a puppy in a microwave oven?! /sarc
If the weather/climate forecasts get 30% less accurate, how will we even notice?
You won’t notice the warmer temperatures (in your state).
But even you will notice the flooding,
and the migrations conflicts,
and the rising food costs.
mm Wave “They’re also the subject of Russian-government-funded misinformation campaigns”
So the MSM says – Follow the $$. Who has the most to lose? Anyone know what wavelengths SPACEX’s Starlink radios are programmable for?
Here is a question for you all to think about.
Is it more “green” to buy your way there or to live low and frugally?
By buy your way there, I mean get the solar panels, heat pump, low power use appliances, and get EV cars.
By live low and frugally, I mean minimize your needs and only purchase what is needed. Keep things as long as possible by maintaining, repairing, minimizing use. Ride share when travel is needed.
By purchasing items much of the money goes into the system with no controls and will produce a lot of GHG, eco-destruction, etc. By not purchasing, one at least maintains some control over the situation.
I have not thought this one through thoroughly, so put on your thinking caps and see what you come up with. Nothing is simple.
Oh yeah, one rule, try to keep this in the present rather than what things might be like ten or twenty years down the road. For all we know population might have dropped off a cliff by then, so we will be bathed in an excess of solar panels and EVs instead of a shortage.
I’m pretty sure in most situations, the ‘live low and frugal’ is the big winner in this analysis.
Eating lower on the food chain, for example.
Travel little. Buy little. Avoid reproduction.
Don’t live too long.
Keep expectations low.
Enjoy the simple things we are incredibly lucky to see, and eat.
Everything you said is logical and sane, however it goes against both the biological and the social conditioning of man, hence the chances of it occurring on the large scale is extremely low in my opinion.
Hi Mike,
“it goes against both the biological and the social conditioning of man”
I don’t buy it. We are a product of our environment. The first years are the most important. You can be trained to be a fighter or a lover. I think your comment says more about you than humans.
Salud
Look at human history, not quite so rosy is it. You can delude yourself but facts are facts.
Do you always have to resolve to personal attacks ?
What does that say about you?
“9 People Attended A KKK Rally In Ohio. At Least 500 Showed Up To Protest Against Hate”
“Nine people showed up to a white supremacist rally in Dayton, Ohio, on Saturday — and they found themselves dramatically outnumbered by counterprotesters who flooded the city’s downtown in a show of “unity against hate.”
City officials said an estimated 500 to 600 people gathered to express their condemnation of the rally, organized by the Honorable Sacred Knights of Indiana, a Ku Klux Klan-affiliated group, CBS News reported.”
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/kkk-rally-dayton-ohio_n_5cea7113e4b0512156f316c5
“Look at human history, facts are facts.”
Lol hilarious.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias
Perspective:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_and_anthropogenic_disasters_by_death_toll
Mike, your first link on confirmation bias is very interesting. However, I had visited it before. Confirmation bias is extremely important in forming people’s world view. Second only to appeal to authority. In fact, confirmation bias is a form of appeal to authority. Want to believe anything, just find an authority that agrees with you, confirming your belief.
The internet is a boom to people to wish to be more confident of their belief. Just pick your bias and google it. Don’t believe in evolution? Just google “Evolution Debunked”. Don’t believe in peak oil? Just google “Peak Oil Debunked”.
Whatever you wish to believe, or disbelieve, you can find an expert, an authority, who will confirm your belief or disbelief. Just google him/her, and have your bias confirmed. It’s really that easy. And you will have to believe him because after all, he is an authority on the subject.
Thank you Mike for helping make my point that people “are a product of our environment” and not ” biological conditioning of man”. From your link, the estimated 60 million soldiers and citizens who died in WWII were “a product of our environment”. The choices made to drop bombs on their heads were made by a hand full of men. That’s not an example of human nature. I’m sure those few men justified their actions to themselves most likely with “confirmation bias”.
There’s nothing here that is “hilarious”. Just sick behavior. People can justify their behavior with “confirmation bias”. Now that’s human nature.
Are you making that your excuse too ?
Ron
Very well said. It is a dangerous game people play with confirmation bias, cognitive dissonance and appeal to authority. We’ve been doing that prior to the internet age, but it is currently on steroids due to social media and the internet.
HB,
Biological conditioning lays the foundation for men to commit violence. Genetic programming is often downplayed in determining human behaviour, this is a fallacy. It plays a huge role. Of course environmental conditioning is a major factor too which allows those genes to activate more readily. Human nature is inherently violent and it had to be, in order to survive the harsh environments in the hunter and gatherer days, those same genes are still within us. And it’s track record can be seen with a history of violence regardless of the environment it plays in.
2 thoughts:
1st, why not do both? Minimize your consumption, then get the inputs from the best sources (PV, etc). If you have a used ICE, replace it with a used EV.
2nd, not spending money on a personal level won’t work: the people who run the thermostat for the economy (most the Federal Reserve, these days) will do whatever is necessary to maintain Aggregate Demand at the maximum level. If you don’t spend, someone else will. The last resort may be military spending…
You are certainly right Nick. Its not an either or type of choice.
We need both, less consumption and smarter production, and smarter leadership.
Both on a massive scale.
Looks like we are on track to score miserably on both fronts., as Iron Mike said.
Better be getting to it.
On your second point. Too true.
No one has a recipe for de-growth.
No one has a recipe for de-growth.
There are plenty of recipes, question is, do we have the will to actually implement any of them.
A little background and history:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_economics
Ecological economics
A vision of where we need to go, the short version: 4 min. 22 secs duration
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KE1eVR-xyHE
What is doughnut economics? Kate Raworth explains
How do we get there?
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364032119301868
Life cycle to Pinch Analysis and 100% renewable energy systems in a circular economy at sustainable development of energy, Water and Environment Systems 2017
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYThdLKE6TDwBJh-qDC6ICA
Waterloo Uprising – “We’re Knee Deep in Dead Canaries!” – Extinction Rebellion
A film by Lindford Lowe about Extinction Rebellion’s occupation of Waterloo Bridge, London during the International Rebellion, April 2019.
Song by Grace Gillan accompanied by Blythe Pepino
Music by Hans Zimmer
.
By de-growth, I was referring to downsizing.
Downsizing from a position of severe overshoot.
Lowering human population fast enough to avoid a catastrophe in the billions, without being cruel [OK, crueler than our normal extremely cruel selves].
Lowering energy use/capita to perhaps 1/10th of what it is today on a global average basis.
Dramatically lowering the percent of global primary productivity that we sequester for ourselves from the lands and seas of the world.
Lowering the amount of dead zones, the extinction rates, the area under concrete, the contrails in the sky, the chemicals in the pipelines.
Shrinking the human footprint from 10 miles down to its actual size.
There is no charted pathway or viable de-growth plan.
People are desperate to avoid even considering the notion.
Just look who the president of the USA is.
GDP is something different. It measures economic activity like financial transactions and getting your manicure. It is a sideshow to this discussion.
Just look who the president of the USA is.
Aw, cut him some slack, he is still growing 😉
No Fred, you have it wrong. He stopped growing at about 5th grade.
No, Fred is right. He is still growing just not growing up.
Kinda reminds me of this, all it needs is an orange wig and it would be a perfect copy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxRnenQYG7I
Monty pythons, Mr creosote, Full version,
I couldn’t decide if the waiter was Graham or McConnell. I don’t think either have the balls to stab the orangutan in the back. Their both just another shade of orange.
The smart ones picked up and left. Might be a good idea if 2020 goes wrong.
Cheers
>No one has a recipe for de-growth.
Growth is a measure of the change in GDP, and GDP is measured in money (actually inflation adjusted money).
Growth has nothing to do with the total mass of the goods produced, or the energy used, or the raw materials consumed. Only the resultant value of the goods and services delivered is measured. As products provide more and more value with a smaller and smaller footprint, the economy will keep growing while human impact shrinks. Here is a nice illustration of that:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/radio-shack-ad_b_4612973
It isn’t a new idea by any means. Buckminster Fuller remarked that technology would be able to do “more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing”. He called it “ephemeralization”. That was nearly a century ago.
Clinging to crude obsolete tech just shows lack of imagination. The world is changing. It is changing mostly because companies make more money delivering better products with fewer inputs than they do by maintaining the status quo.
alimbiquated,
I’m a huge fan of Buckminster Fuller! I have studied his life’s work in great depth!
However, this particular quote is total nonsense. It completely ignores the realities of the basic laws of thermodynamics.
It isn’t a new idea by any means. Buckminster Fuller remarked that technology would be able to do “more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing”. He called it “ephemeralization”. That was nearly a century ago.
Seriously?!
Yeah seriously. The current economy is very very far from any thermodynamic limitation. For example, look at this chart, where LLNL estimates that 70% of America’s primary energy is “rejected”, meaning wasted.
https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/content/assets/images/energy/us/Energy_US_2018.png
This doesn’t even begin to take things into account like poor insulation, badly designed transportation systems etc.
Another good example is agriculture, which is disappearing. If the world farmed like the Netherlands, most of the inputs including land would go unused. Furthermore, much of what is output is becoming obsolete. For example, 40% of the US corn (maize) crop is used for methanol, which is completely worthless and only exists by government fiat. Much of the rest of the crop if for feed, and artificial meat is poised to disrupt that market.
I think “rejected” means something different than you say. Heat is rejected in thermodynamic processes and the 2nd law determines how much in any given process. It is never zero. Thermodynamic limitation is exactly what that waste energy represents. What the limits of that waste are is also related to cost. For example many common processes could be improved to be more efficient yet the cost would be prohibitive for the given product.
The age of giant cooling towers is passing. Coal open cycle gas and nuclear plants are all being shut down and replaced by combined cycle gas, wich needs much less cooling water, solar and wind, which need none.
Meanwhile combustion engine vehicles, which are 80% heaters on wheels, are under threat as well.
Arguments about thermodynamics in this context are usually just lame excuses for perpetuating bad or obsolete designs.
Personally I haven’t seen any hardware that has violated the 2nd law but I don’t get around much in my decrepitude. I’m not sure what bad or obsolete designs I just excused but usually I don’t like them.
Ethanol, not methanol, and it’s very useful, in dilute solution aka BEER helping ugly people get laid soon after last call.
But the moonshine as fuel industry is a prime example of well intentioned people being made fools of by business men and politicians.
Environmentalists were dumb enough to help it get established.
I had Fuller as a guest prof in a Future Of Man class at UCSB (I think it was the late 60’s). He was getting a bit bitter even then.
Frank Herbert,( the author of Dune) was also a prof, and was brilliant.
“It isn’t a new idea by any means. Buckminster Fuller remarked that technology would be able to do “more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing”. He called it “ephemeralization”. That was nearly a century ago.”
Sounds like BAU on steroids, infinite growth in a finite world. Or maybe it’s just magic. Use the force, Luke.
Of course technology can get more efficient, notice much of that efficiency gain is by finding methods that operate at lower temperatures, avoiding the oxidation reactions. If it had time technological society could run on 10 to 20 percent of the current energy. Of course earlier civilizations ran without fossil fuels or PV or wind turbines, engines or transformers, not even the internet.
As far as smaller footprints, the system cannot take an extra 2 or 3 gigaton CO2 per year (now 40) without heading toward hot world. Sure it will be slower but that will just make it easier to ignore and crossing the stability points will be less noticeable.
Nature figured it out a long time ago, converting CO2 to useful products using sunlight, air, water at low temperature. Oxidizing glucose at low temperatures. Extremely advanced and complex systems are employed. Biological products are fully recyclable and the system reproduces itself. Human products are like simple toys compared to biological and ecological systems.
Energy is not the problem, there is vast amounts of energy falling on the Earth continuously.
Hint: there was lots of mammalian life, birds, fish, etc. during the PETM. They did not disappear. Think about the differences and why this time will be different even with smaller changes.
>If it had time technological society could run on 10 to 20 percent of the current energy.
Energy consumption doesn’t need to fall that much if you harvest ambient energy, like sunlight. he problem with energy today is that we are still stuck in the mindset that building a bigger fire is the only form of progress. As technology improves, it will get easier and easier to get the energy we need without building a fire.
Wealth creation, and thus economic growth, within a capitalist system is infinite.
A fixed pie narrative is just false dogma championed by collectivist class warriors on the extreme left.
From the late Garrett Hardin, best known for The Tragedy of the Commons (and Tragedy Revisited).
https://www.garretthardinsociety.org/docs/hardin_living_within_limits_ch_8.pdf
Good one George.
And if you eat spinach you don’t ever get older than 24 yrs.
https://www.albartlett.org/articles/art1998jan.html
The New Flat Earth Society
by Prof. Al Bartlett
January, 1998
There was a time, long ago, when people thought that the Earth was flat, but now for several centuries people have believed that the Earth is round . . . like a sphere. But there are problems with a spherical earth, and a now a new paradigm is emerging which seems to be a return to the wisdom of the ancients.
A sphere is bounded and hence is finite, which implies that there are limits, and in particular, there are limits to growth of things that consume the Earth and that live on it. Today, many people believe that the resources of the Earth and of the human intellect are so enormous that population growth can continue and that there is no danger that we will ever run out of anything. For instance, after a United Nations report predicted shortages of natural resources that would follow because of continued population growth, Jack Kemp, who was then Secretary of Housing and Urban Development in the Cabinet of President George Bush, is reported to have said, “Nonsense, people are not a drain on the resources of the planet.”2
These people believe that perpetual growth is desireable, consequently it must be possible, and so it can’t possibly be a problem. At the same time there are still a few remaining “spherical earth” people who go around talking about “limits” and in particular about the limits that are implied by the term “carrying capacity.” But limits are awkward, because limits conflict with the concept of perpetual growth, so there is a growing move to do away with the concept of limits…,
Ergo, we must live on an infinite flat earth, populated by vast hordes of imbeciles!
The solution
A spherical earth is finite and hence is forever unappealing to the devotees of perpetual growth. In contrast, a flat earth can accomodate growth forever, because a flat earth can be infinite in the two horizontal dimensions and also in the vertical downward direction. The infinite horizontal dimensions forever remove any fear of crowding as population grows, and the infinite downward dimension assures humans of an unlimited supply of all of the mineral raw materials that will be needed by a human population that continues to grow forever. The flat earth removes all the need for worry about limits.
So, let us think of the “We’re going to grow the limits!” people as the “New Flat Earth Society.”
Nick, I am not tied to either approach but have been thinking about the side effects of adding capital into the system. Once that money is moved, even to buy green things, much of it disperses and just enhances the very things that are spewing GHG as well as further eco-destruction. So buying “green” has two dark sides, one the GHG and destruction to produce it and two the enhancement of the very system that the “green” tech was supposed to eliminate.
Versus just drawing capital out of the system while doing as little damage as possible.
I am trying to develop mental models of this but it might look like:
Frugal: people basically walking away from the system that is destructive as much as possible and finding other ways to enjoy life and live well while spending little money
Green purchases: people using the destructive system to produce some long term reduction in the destruction while at the same time aiding the destructive system
I know most people can’t completely walk away nor are they going to run out and buy full PV systems and EV’s for the family. Most won’t live very frugally either, for various reasons they like debt and living paycheck to paycheck. Once in that cycle of debt they often never get out until failure.
When I see statistics such as 58 percent of Americans have less than $1000 dollars saved, in the most powerful and richest country in the world, I do wonder.
Basically we have a large pool of people that would benefit from living frugally. Once they are well funded again, they might think about larger long term purchases to lower their costs and reduce carbon at the same time.
Money must be spent, one way or another. If you don’t spend it yourself, then the bank into which you deposit your savings will spend it. They will call it “investing”, but it will be spent in the form of a loan to some kind of project (hopefully on long-term projects that will bring a Return-On-Investment).
So. If you want control over how your money is spent, spend it yourself on something benign and useful, like efficiency and conservation, PV, EVs, etc.
Changing 8 days at a time, nice graphic.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2019/may/25/the-power-switch-tracking-britains-record-coal-free-run
NAOM
Internet growth sucking up all the power of wind and solar or all the hydro power.
Internet uses more than 10% of the world’s electricity
Best-case scenario sees a growth from 1 982 TWh (terawatt hours) per year, expected scenarios sees it go up to 2 547 TWh per year and worst-case scenario sees numbers go up by 3 422 TWh a year.
This equates to an expected 10% increase, with a worst case scenario of 13,5%. Whether or not the electricity consumption goes up by the former or latter estimation, this is still more than the world’s total energy production from renewable sources such as wind and solar, which provide only an expected increase of 2151 TWh per year.
However, this does not include hydro and nuclear -powers, which provide an increase of 4060 to 2636 TWh respectively.
Expected growth to electricity use thereby equates to the world’s entire hydropower supply, per year. No small increase in energy consumption just because of the internet.
https://www.insidescandinavianbusiness.com/article.php?id=356
In just a short time civilization is fully dependent upon the internet. No easy way back now.
If one adds cell phones into the equation, something like 235 million tons of CO2 equivalent is added.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235932638_The_Global_Carbon_Footprint_of_Mobile_Communications_-_The_Ecological_and_Economic_Perspective
It’s not easy being green in a Red Queen world.
Yes, on current trends nearly all energy consumption will be for computation by 2050. Efficiency (or at least potential efficiency) is improving dramatically in all industries, including IT, but in most areas there is a reasonable limit to demand — there is only so much plastic crap you can buy and use. Demand for computation doesn’t some to have any limits for the time being at least.
Good thing we have limits to growth.
Hi all,
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/how-much-oil-electric-vehicle/
this is to enlighten all the “Harry Poter wand up their asses” idiot crowd on this forum, who think that “energizer bunny” is going to send us to Mars and finish “dirty oil” in a few years…. you know:
Magyar, NickG, Peninsulaboy, GoneWhailing, Calelan…. and many, many more “knowelable, enlightened dudes” like them…
Happy Momorial Day to all
Hi yesanoilman.
Excellent link, although I’m not qualified to fact check it.
The point is a very good one.
One conclusion you could draw is that oil for various products is too valuable to simply burn in a car engine. Better to use the oil to produce an more electric economy, which could greatly extend the ‘oil age’.
Secondly, yes we will still need refineries for a while. Maybe not so many. Sometime in the next few decades we will mothballing many of them. Not enough oil coming in to sustain the operations.
Third, who the hell thinks we need to go to mars. They ought to sober up.
Fourth, your condescending attitude sucks. I’d throw you out in the hog yard with that orange dude.
“this is to enlighten all the “Harry Poter wand up their asses” idiot crowd on this forum, who think that “energizer bunny” is going to send us to Mars and finish “dirty oil” in a few years…. you know:
Magyar, NickG, Peninsulaboy, GoneWhailing, Calelan…. and many, many more “knowelable, enlightened dudes” like them…”
I like Hickory’s idea “Fourth, your condescending attitude sucks. I’d throw you out in the hog yard with that orange dude.”
Hey Hickory, he’s afraid of EV’s and PV’s. That is a good reason to have them, put the fear into the petro-brains. Keep up the fear. Quick, everybody buy some to put the fear in the petro-brains.
It’s War on Petroleum Day from now on.
Don’t know who you are yesanoilman, but whatever else you may think about us I’m pretty sure no one here is thinking about heading to Mars anytime soon.
BTW yes, there are plastics in EVs, about the same amount as there are in ICE vehicles. I guess you are probably not all that interested in biopolymers… but stay tuned!
Other than that, pretty much what Hickory said! So bug off!
Yawn! I’m guessing yseanoilman has never watched a Tony Seba presentation. I went to the link and my response is, so what? How much oil (NG actually) is used to make the plastic components in a car, compared to the amount burned as fuel over the life of the vehicle? In addition the carbon in the plastic is not converted to CO2 over the life of the vehicle and the plastic could theoretically be recycled. Currently it is usually easier and cheaper to use new plastic rather than go through the hassles of recycling but that might change at some point in the future.
If the “energizer bunny” refers to Elon Musk, I think his ideas on colonizing Mars are completely wrong and wish he would focus what little attention he gives his quest to go to Mars on solving more problems here on spaceship Earth.
I invite yesanoilman to check back in with us on January 1, 2020 and each year thereafter to see how things are working out! See OFM’s comment immediately below this subthread and my comment in that subthread.
Elon seriously believes things will go FUBAR here on Earth, which explains his push to live elsewhere. He thinks AI is likely the deadly source but we have a list of things that could cause widespread destruction.
I don’t think the Mars colony will work but it is small potatoes compared to much of what we do each day.
I think we need to make a stand right here, right now and not for humans but for all life. Not sure who we is though.
So funny/strange when I hear people think we could give it a go on some other planet, when we can’t do it right here.
Talk about delusional thinking.
They can have Mars, I’ll take Tennessee.
Heck I’d take an industrial waste dump in Alabama over Mars any day!
I could still get O2 from the air and at least I could harvest the rain from the sky. Perhaps I could even extract minerals and other resources from the dump. If the soil were too toxic I could build planters above ground or tanks for planting or even set up hydroponics to grow plants. And I wouldn’t have to travel 9 months through space being exposed to radiation. I’m more than happy to have robotic rovers exploring Mars for me.
Plus, you could drive the F250 to the store for beer and Cheetos.
They will have faux news on—-
Yes, I can imagine Republican on Mars yelling about how the supposed leaks in the dome are just green fear mongering and demanding tax cuts instead of wasting money on repairs. They would keep yelling until the oxygen ran out.
Y0u mean like these company guys on Mars…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUSBzVKoJzU
Garibaldi’s Firing Method 😀
Not sure who we is though.
Good question! There are about 60 million Americans who support individual one! He tweeted this yesterday…
Donald J. Trump
Verified account
@realDonaldTrump
Follow Follow @realDonaldTrump
More
North Korea fired off some small weapons, which disturbed some of my people, and others, but not me. I have confidence that Chairman Kim will keep his promise to me, & also smiled when he called Swampman Joe Bidan a low IQ individual, & worse. Perhaps that’s sending me a signal?
6:32 PM – 25 May 2019
That is a real tweet! He then later corrected the misspelling of Joe Biden’s last name but let the tweet stay. You can find it on his account which is now part of the official presidential record. Should there still be historians in the future I have to wonder what they will have to say about this period in our history?!
https://constitutionus.com/
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America…
Anyone wanna take my bet that Donald J. Trump has never read the US constitution even once?!
Who’s ‘we’ kemosabe?!
Must be a different way to measure IQ.
“Anyone wanna take my bet that Donald J. Trump has never read the US constitution even once?!”
He doesn’t read.
He can scan numbers, but isn’t able to read more than one or two simple sentences in a row.
No attention span.
Make him read three sentences- he throws a tantrum.
There is banana and oatmeal splattered all over the walls of the oval office.
Four sentences- he gets incontinent.
Its very ugly.
Thank you for proving why we should not be burning oil, it is many more, very important, uses.
BTW, for comparison a Jeep Cherokee is over 4,500 lbs, Dodge Ram around 5,000 and Chevrolet Suburban over 5,500 so the electric cars are not out of line with this.
NAOM
Just to add, the Sono Fred mentions below weighs in at just over 3,000 lbs. What was that about electric cars being heavy?
NAOM
https://cleantechnica.com/2019/05/25/skyrocketing-tesla-sales-force-mercedes-dealer-in-norway-to-face-a-kodak-moment/
Sales are off at this Mercedes dealer by thirty percent, but the boss says he will be ready in a year or two, with electric cars to sell to the people who otherwise are sure to buy a Tesla.
The car industry is in a real uproar right now. “Peak car” is being taken seriously. Note that this means peak car sales, not peak cars on the road, as more are being built than scrapped.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-02-28/this-is-what-peak-car-looks-like
That may seem alarmist, but the short term numbers look even worse than the long term prospects. Light vehicle sales are dropping fast.
https://www.best-selling-cars.com/international/2019-latest-international-worldwide-car-sales/
https://www.autonews.com/sales/sales-fall-saar-dips-1641-million
The “Kodak moment” couldn’t have come at a worse time for the industry.
“The 6th Mass Extinction is a leftist plot to discourage people from buying SUVs and Roundup.”
It’s not working.
A paleontologist’s view of the Sixth Mass Extinction.
“The only hope we have in the future,” Erwin said, “is if we’re not in a mass extinction event.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/06/the-ends-of-the-world/529545/
Right! I have in the past posted that we are not ‘Technically’ in a mass extinction. That is a correct scientific statement. However, do I find comfort in that, or do I even believe that we have not already crossed some invisible unremarkable line, where we have already passed some tipping point of no return? I don’t claim to know one way or another but I tend to focus on the overall health of ecosystems. To be frank I am very worried about a number flashing red warning signs! It is the information that is coming in from many different sources that the foundations of many food webs are severely stressed.
From the link:
While Erwin’s argument that a mass extinction is not yet under way might seem to get humanity off the hook—an invitation to plunder the earth further, since it can seemingly take the beating (the planet has certainly seen worse)—it’s actually a subtler and possibly far scarier argument.
This is where the ecosystem’s nonlinear responses, or tipping points, come in. Inching up to mass extinction might be a little like inching up to the event horizon of a black hole—once you go over a certain line, a line that perhaps doesn’t even appear all that remarkable, all is lost.
“So,” I said, “it might be that we sort of bump along where everything seems okay and then . . .”
“Yeah, everything’s fine until it’s not,” said Erwin. “And then everything goes to hell.”
So I view all of this through the same lens that use to view the risks of climate change. A worst case scenario is still a real possibility that we should do everything in our power to avoid at all costs. Either that or break out that last bottle of scotch!
Two radically different perspectives on our present circumstance. Both present the same article, however it is interesting to read the comments on the Whats Up site.
An Earth Scientist on Climate Change: ‘We’ve Created a Civilization Hellbent on Destroying Itself, and I’m Terrified’
https://theconversation.com/climate-change-weve-created-a-civilisation-hell-bent-on-destroying-itself-im-terrified-writes-earth-scientist-113055
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/05/26/climate-change-weve-created-a-civilisation-hell-bent-on-destroying-itself-im-terrified-writes-earth-scientist/
Fuck it, convincing 8 billion flat earthers that ‘Houston we have a problem’, just ain’t gonna happen!
https://www.albartlett.org/articles/art1998jan.html
The New Flat Earth Society
by Prof. Al Bartlett
January, 1998
“convincing 8 billion flat earthers that ‘Houston we have a problem’, just ain’t gonna happen!”
Enjoying the heat wave up here in the north, hit mid summer temps a bit early. Great to just walk out of the house without even the thought of a jacket in early morning.
Don’t worry about the 8 billion, they will be told it’s just a drought, just a flood, just a storm when they see food prices rising fast. There have always been storms, floods and droughts, right?
They all know the temperature data is manipulated and global heating is just invented to make the scientists rich. Remember, we were told there is no global heating and there the next ice age is coming (now showing up as Blue Blobs).
BTW the US is now producing over 30 trillion cubic feet of natural gas per year. That is more than fifteen times our 1930 production.
Global is four times that at least.
Happy methane day.
Now for the good news (sort of), think this is the last one left in the state.
Coal-Burning Power Plant To Shut Down After More Than 50 Years In Service
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWSzO_MfaUg
And global coal production in 2018 is still below peak but on the rise again.
Bu we all know CO2 and methane make everything better.
sarc
GoneFishing,
Washington state used to be a major coal producer (Eocene coal, from back before the Cascade uplift when this region looked like the Gulf Coast does today) and there’s still a huge inactive open-pit mine at Black Diamond. There’s one coal-fired power plant left in the state, in Chehalis, and it’s being shut down stepwise, I believe, with final closure to be in 2025.
But we (snif) don’t get any attention for this.
E Synapsid,
Does Washington state have any plans for the future of that Black Diamond site?
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/20/us/west-virginia-coal-mine-solutions.html
Old Mines Are Full of Dangers (and Possibilities)
You might get some attention and proper recognition if you did something creative and restorative with the site.
I kinda liked this idea
There are many examples in the United States, too. In Gilbert, Minn., Lake Ore-Be-Gone was created from three open-pit iron ore mines, and now offers scuba divers a chance to see the “sunken treasures” at its bottom. A state agency has introduced more than 210,000 pounds of fish in mine-pit lakes in the area since 1984, and in 2015, one lucky fisherman caught a 16-pound lake trout.
Though it might not work in a coal mine…
😉
Not coal but I did some of my training there
https://www.stoneycove.com/
NAOM
NAOM, Nice place!
I did all my basic training in Brazil in the ocean but when I lived in New York I used to go to this quarry in Pennsylvania with a couple of buddies.
https://www.dutchsprings.com/scuba/
The stupidity of the Washington state residents west of the Cascades is just mindnumbing. Many of them have ecodreams of making the state fossil fuels neutral, because they think they are Gods of the earth. The problem I think is there are to many liberal arts majors in that part of the state. They don’t know nothing scientific. They are suckers for sleezy conmen convincing them that energy just magically comes out of thin air. Then they decide they are against any kind of economic development and wonder why housing and retail space is in short supply and ridicuoulsly expensive.
Danny Brave.
Are you a character from a Coen Bros movie?
“They don’t know nothing scientific.”
Good one.
How about- ‘they don’t know God is a real person who lives out near Moses Lake. He grows Alfalfa.’
Or, Univ of Wash in Seattle ‘is no better than going to Trump University. Thats where I went. I still pay ’em money’
Real smart Danny Brave.
btw- The University of Washington is ranked No. 14 in the world — No. 3 among U.S. public universities — on the 2018 Academic Ranking of World Universities, released this month….
Those rankings are bunk because the Pac 12 is a trash conference under the current management. SEC and Big Ten schools should have the better rankings if we’re being honest.
” I believe, with final closure to be in 2025.
But we (snif) don’t get any attention for this.”
Sorry Synapsid, the alternative power has helped cause the excess death of billions of salmon and hurt the 135 species that depend upon them. Maybe fix the waterways, stop the clear cutting along rivers and streams. Possibly put a lot of PV out in the eastern (dry) part of the state before the salmon are all gone.
Has the old mill site in Port Gamble Bay been cleaned up so it stops killing off the herring spawn?
If I do travel again, Washington state is top on the list.
Every state needs to work hard to preserve and build the ecological heritage, that is the kind of growth I like.
Interesting historical photos: https://timeline.com/logging-photos-of-washington-states-old-growth-forests-bf18aef19955?gi=b116408859b8
Danny Brave:
“SEC and Big Ten schools should have the better rankings if we’re being honest”.
The rankings are for brains, not brawn. I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that Cal and UCLA beat out UW, and the Pac 12 has 4 schools in the top 14, while the Big 10 and SEC combined have zero.
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/student/news/shanghairanking-academic-ranking-world-universities-2018-results-announced#survey-answer
GoneFishing,
As far as I know the cleanup of the mill site at Port Gamble Bay was complete about two years ago. I rarely go over to that area, though, so I haven’t checked.
As to killing salmon: I agree with you. Keep in mind who it is that builds the dams responsible, though, and what they are for: irrigation, and agriculture is a powerful lobby anywhere, and energy production through the Bonneville Power Administration, and that’s the Feds.
And yes, you should come visit.
Last year there were a dozen goslings on the lake. Most seemed to make it to maturity. This year there were four but they disappeared when still small.
The state brings around a very expensive boat and crew at night to disrupt the goose nests on the lake. I guess they miss one or two, but it doesn’t look like there will be many in the future.
E Fred,
Some knucklehead with money wanted to buy it, I think, a couple of years ago with an eye to putting it back in production. Lots of coal-fired power plants closing around the country, and I haven’t heard anything more about the proposal.
I haven’t heard anything about using the pit for some other purpose, either, nor had I thought of such a thing. Black Diamond might be interested in some-such idea maybe. I do know there are methane seeps in the area, and Flaming Geyser State Park was set up around one that had a perpetual flame until vandals filled the opening with junk decades ago.
If there is exposed pyrite, any body of water put there will be highly acidic and corrosive.
I suspect many are holding off to see which way the economy is going to go. With trade wars and threats it cannot be good for business. Add in Brexit uncertainties in the UK and Europe, Millennials not wanting their own cars, the move to city living. We live in interesting times, recession on the way?
NAOM
Meanwhile:
BMW Shareholders Concerned Over Tesla’s Advantage
I give it another six months for wholesale panic to set in in Germany. Protectionist measures will be floated by the German auto industry but, will be unpopular with the car buying public. Questions will continue to be asked about why the German car industry has been so slow to respond. The time to have made massive investments in product development was ten years ago, when Tesla was developing the first model to come out of the Freemont factory, when sales of existing product were relatively strong, not now when sales are tanking,
Hold on, Tesla had a lot of backlogged buyers waiting for cars so one should expect a surge then fallback in demand, where it levels out to actual demand rate.
Or am I being too logical again?
Also, the time for R&D is during a recession, to be prepared to hit market with new products as soon as the rise starts. Any company with large debt and low cash going into a recession is in danger of bankruptcy.
Not sure how Tesla will do but VW and others are building into a probable recession which could be a big mistake if they push too fast. They would need to make big cuts elsewhere fast, maybe in the ICE area. I wonder if that is why Toyota is holding back on BEV production.
How big is the investment that VW is making for EVs compared to the company size?
Timing may not be everything, but it sure helps a lot.
VW might be a survivor. They are lining up battery supplies, and have some good prototype models in the works.
Yes VW, is less exposed than other German manufacturers at the moment. I just took a brief look at sales figures for 2018:
Mercedes Benz – 2.4 million (record)
BMW – 2.49 million (record)
Volkswagen Group – 10.83 million (record)
of which
Audi – 1.8 million
Porsche – 256,255 (record)
Not German but, largely competing in the same market space:
Jaguar – 180,833 (record)
So, the Germans by and large experienced record sales in 2018 but ,there was a dark cloud on the horizon . That dark cloud is the Tesla Model 3, projected to be manufactured at a rate of about ten thousand a week by the end of 2019.The reason why that matters to BMW and Mercedes is that the Tesla’s price takes it into their market territory, that is, high price modest volume. We can therefore assume that Tesla sales will eat into premium sedan sales more than they would high volume, modest price models like VW’s Golf. To illustrate the relative impact that Tesla sales will have on the different competitors we could assume that Tesla will take 100,000 each from BMW, Mercedes and Audi while taking 25,000 from Porsche and 20,000 from Jaguar. That would leave 155,000 Tesla units to eat into the sales of all other manufacturers. Based on 2018 sales here’s the potential loss to the five brands under consideration.
Mercedes – minus 4.2%
BMW – minus 4%
Audi – minus 5.6%
Porsche – minus 9.8%
Jaguar – minus 11.1%
For comparison, if we assume that VW Group sales, less Porsche and Audi are 8.75 million, if all the 155,000 Teslas that did not displace sales of the five brands under consideration were to displace other VW Group sales, it would amount to a reduction in sales volumes of less than 1.8%. It should be noted that Tesla is more likely to impact sales of higher end sedans like the Toyota Camry and the Honda Accord than the sales of VW’s Golf, Polo and Up, or their equivalents from group members Skoda and Seat, so the Volkswagen brand is relatively safe for now. It should also be noted that Toyota is not exactly immune since sales of it’s Prius model are being adversely affected by Tesla.
One final note. I just went to the following link:
Watch Refreshed Tesla Model S Set New 1/4-Mile Record
The drag race is not nearly as interesting as the car owner’s comments on the improvements over the previous generation of this car. This particular model apparently comes with technology and batteries that were developed for the Model 3, giving it more range (higher efficiency), faster charging times and slightly better acceleration. It remains to be seen how much improvements in their battery technology can be squeezed out of the Maxwell acquisition. As far as I am aware, there is none of the Maxwell technology in any of the current crop of Tesla batteries.
Maxwell dry tech is a gamble. We can only pray it will pan out. It may take the Asians (GF3) to make it happen. North American culture does not favor economical high volume Battery Cell 7+ Sigma Production. US workforces can’t even deal with the Metric system. Players like Nissan, A123 and Panasonic has learned this lesson the expensive way. The Model 3 has too low of ground clearance for the condition of American roads in many states. There is an Air suspension for the Model 3 in the works, M3 is a no go for many markets in the US until they offer this air suspension. Tesla Future may depend on the quick execution of the Model Y production.
I give it another six months for wholesale panic to set in in Germany. Protectionist measures will be floated by the German auto industry but, will be unpopular with the car buying public.
Yeah, but cars as we know them are so last century! Autonomous ride sharing is the future and it is why TESLA has gone whole hog on Robo Taxis.
I happen to like these two German companies very much they are both based out of Munich. Both were developed from the ground up with a totally new paradigm in mind. One is building ground transport vehicles the other is an aviation company.
The legacy auto manufactures whether they be German or not, have missed the boat about a decade ago. They are going to find themselves between a rock and a hard place.
https://sonomotors.com/en/sion/
Sono Motors GmbH
Waldmeisterstraße 76
DE-80935 Munich
+49 (0)89 – 45 20 58 18
info＠sonomotors.com
https://lilium.com/
Kontakt
Telefon:
08105 7727787
E-Mail:
info@lilium.com
Web:
https://lilium.com/
Lilium GmbH,
Claude-Dornier Straße 1, 82234 Wessling
I still like German engineering!
The Shining
Brilliant! Thanks Ron.
I would have painted their noses a nice shade of brown!
Vietnam culls 1.7 million pigs as swine fever spreads
https://www.smh.com.au/world/asia/vietnam-culls-1-7-million-pigs-as-swine-fever-spreads-20190527-p51rmo.html
Anti-Capitalist Chronicles: Primitive or Original Accumulation
from Democracy At Work, 22:58 minute video
Anti-Capitalist Chronicles: Accumulation by Dispossession
from Democracy At Work, 22:55 minute video
Anti-Capitalist Chronicles: Rate and Mass of Growth
from Democracy At Work, 27:35 minute video
Can’t find the link again but Tesla is apparently delivering a few cars now for thirty five grand.
Base Telsa 3 is 35K. Edmunds.com
That doesn’t include any tax credits.
Anyone who is considering that kind of purchase would smart to look hard at the Kia Niro as well-
https://www.engadget.com/2019/05/24/2019-kia-niro-ev-review/
The bulb burns brightest right before it fails.
A saying that can be applied to an individual, a business, or a civilization.
Are we at that point now? Will dirt and forest cover the remains of skyscrapers and highways soon?
Will everything we now see as a problem or predicament suddenly lose importance as reality sets in? Our hopes, dreams, aspirations all vanished?
Can the adage be applied to a planet?
Tikal, the greatest city, seems a Manhattan of art deco pyramids (Maya architecture influenced the modern style) presiding over a conurbation of 120 square kilometres. It took 1,500 years to reach that size, yet all of Tikal’s skyscrapers were built in its final century, an extravagant flowering on the eve of collapse.
Civilizations rise because they find new ways to exploit natural and human resources, to tip the balance between culture and nature. They feed on their local ecology until it is degraded, thriving only while they grow. When they can no longer expand, they fall victim to their own success. Civilization is a pyramid scheme.
In the past, these cycles were regional. As Rome fell in the Mediterranean, the Maya rose in Central America, and so on; the setbacks were local, the overall experiment kept going. But now the 10,000-year bets all rest on a single throw. We have one big civilization, feeding on the whole Earth at such a rate that we can observe the exhaustion of natural capital within our lifetimes, whether it be the loss of wildlife, water, coral reefs or rain forests. We are razing forests everywhere, we are irrigating everywhere, we are fishing everywhere, and no corner of the biosphere escapes our hemorrhage of waste. Even if we ceased this minute, our dominion over Earth would still appear in the fossil record as a blight like the impact of an asteroid.
http://www.sacredlands.org/pyramid.htm
Is civilization itself a flawed system, always destined to flourish then fail, inherently defective?
Well, one thing we do know, even if the party will soon be over it will be heating up.
But now the 10,000-year bets all rest on a single throw.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xWtysMlrcA
Casey At The Bat James Earl Jones YouTube
Oh, well! Anyone up for a game of Mahjong?!
As I write, the greatest power that has ever existed is planning to spend $60-billion on a new arms race, a sum that could provide the world with safe drinking water and leave $20-billion in change. The typical response of the mighty is to go on building higher pyramids while the storm clouds gather, like those long-dead Maya kings.
Throwing the climate dice
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dx9ci7ZQi7c
Is civilization itself a flawed system, always destined to flourish then fail, inherently defective?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXC4X_dsmCc&feature=youtu.be
It’s our world (Steve Cutts / Yann Tiersen) FullHD 1080p
Yeah, that about describes it.
Problem is there are a billion species lost too.
End of the World Parody
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XTwWqzKeXc
Ecocapsule® Your new self-sustainable microhome
https://www.ecocapsule.sk/
A little pricey at € 79,900.
You can buy a Scion from Sono motors for € 25,500, have full mobility just hook up a camper behind it and the Scion can power it. Maybe just add a few extra solar panels to the camper.
https://sonomotors.com/
Or you can get one of these and move it around yourself! 😉
http://www.n55.dk/MANUALS/SNAIL_SHELL_SYSTEM/sss.html
At times, some of the regulars here questioned my questioning the ethics of HRC, etc, and refusing to toe the Democratic Party dogma line, that WE are the good guys, and the Republicans, social conservatives, Christians, etc are the bad guys.
I usually support good policies, rather than particular political organizations and individual politicians. This means I am with the D’s on the environment, etc.
But the rot runs so deep that never a peep did I hear about the D’s doing a goddamned thing about the actual SOURCE of the opioids that are killing people right and left in this country, when they had control of the country, and COULD have acted.
Now a state government is FINALLY doing a little something about it.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/drug-company-to-face-first-opioid-trial-in-oklahoma-as-families-of-the-dead-seek-recompense/2019/05/27/2049cdac-7e35-11e9-8bb7-0fc796cf2ec0_story.html?utm_term=.9e65705ef26b
Every actual executive and board member of a company that engages in marketing such drugs in such a fashion should have to pull the same prison time people who sell these drugs on the street pull if convicted.
FINING a corporation, an alien entity that is immortal and immaterial and can feel no pain, has no noticeable effect on the behavior of it. The companies that have been providing these drugs in unethical quantities to questionable buyers who are diverting them to illegal use have made profits many times the size of the fines.
I can’t see fines EVER getting the job done, but jailing a few executives and board members would work MIRACLES.
This is not to say I ever heard anything about the Republicans doing anything about the opioid epidemic at its source.
We should be careful what we wish for. I’m personally fine with gays and lesbians, etc, but as an intellectual exercise, consider the actual consequences of having forced truly major changes on people who didn’t WANT these changes made, via the court system.
Abortion is legalized, gay marriage is legalized, etc. This is all fine and dandy with the PC crowd, because they define a just society as one that endorses THEIR interpretation of what is moral and just, with everything else judged to be immoral and unjust.
So the liberal establishment got what it wanted…….. in terms of personal rights………BUT it’s entirely reasonable to argue that it also got what it DID NOT WANT…… Republican control of the federal government at all levels until the last midterms, when the D’s got the House back, and continued Republican control of entire states and many smaller cities and rural areas in blue states……. and TRUMP.
People like most of my family and my neighbors, and tens of millions more like them, have only one way to fight back, short of taking to the streets…. the ballot box. They put Trump in office, and they put Mitch Mc Connell in office.
And like it or not, there are enough of them that if the D’s run a candidate in 2020 who focuses on factional issues, such as sexual discrimination, which is not an IMMEDIATE and PRACTICAL issue to ninety percent of voters, as opposed to the jobs issue, which DOES matter to most voters……. Trump might win a second term, and the R’s might retain control of the Senate.
I’m not arguing that Trump and the Republicans are an existential threat to EVERYBODY EVERYWHERE, not to mention the birds and the bees and the whales and the butterflies.
I don’t need to, everybody else is making this argument, and everybody in this forum agrees with it, with maybe a couple of exceptions.
If the R party and business as usual thinking combo results in the USA going to hell in a hand basket…… it’s going to be hell for EVERYBODY.
Maybe world wide Hell for everybody.
Be careful what you wish for, because there are ALWAYS unexpected consequences involved.
Maybe it would have been better to wait for my generation to die off and to have dealt with such divisive issues at the ballot box rather than in court.
Maybe we would be better off if we were to allow states to control such issues locally, via the state ballot box. Within a few more years, my generation will be gone, and with it most of the hard core support for fifties style sexual values, etc.
My own opinion is that Trump wouldn’t be president if it weren’t the result of social conservatives pushing back at this tide of unwanted change brought about via the ballot box. YMMV.
My opinion is that the country and maybe indeed the whole world may well go up in flames BECAUSE Trump is president, and because the R’s control so much of the country politically.
This last is not to say that the D’s will save us, if they regain control of the federal government, but rather that with them in control, we will at least be at MUCH lower risk of war, runaway climate problems, etc.
We should be careful what we wish for. I’m personally fine with gays and lesbians, etc, but as an intellectual exercise, consider the actual consequences of having forced truly major changes on people who didn’t WANT these changes made, via the court system.
Just what the hell are you talking about? Exactly what changes are being forced on good God-fearing Bible-banging Republicans? Is someone forcing them to marry a gay person? Just because they are idiots who believe sexual orientation is a choice doesn’t mean they can force others to obey the laws of their Bible.
This is personal with me Mac. I had a son who was gay. He died of what he called the gay plague, AIDS. I worked with people who believed AIDS was sent by God to punish Gays. They preached that bullshit from their pulpits. They had the law on their side. They made homosexual behavior between consenting adults illegal. They made it the law of the land because it was the law of the Bible, the law of Moses.
Social behavior ordered via the court system can only be removed via the court system. Changes had to be made via the court system because those God-fearing Christians forced their hate and venom on everyone else via the court system.
You don’t seem to understand that no one forcing changes on them. That is, no one is forcing them to change their behavior whatsoever. Those God-fearing Bible-banging Christians are just pissed off because they see other people behaving in a manner that is forbidden by their law, the law of Moses.
So Bible thumpers should get their way, no separation of church and state, no equal rights? From what I see them and the Republicans they support are quite willing to throw the country and the world under the bus to get their way.
Payback is hell.
Abortion is legalized, gay marriage is legalized, etc. This is all fine and dandy with the PC crowd, because they define a just society as one that endorses THEIR interpretation of what is moral and just, with everything else judged to be immoral and unjust.
OFM, You’re kidding right?!
So I guess that in the name of religious freedom I should also accept the fact that according to the tenants of one of the major religions in the world today, it is required that a victim of rape should be stoned to death, because that is according to THEIR interpretation, moral and just, with everything else judged to be immoral and unjust.
Well screw that and the misguided morality of all fundamentalist religions and their followers whose only real purpose is to exert power and control over anyone who does not conform to their beliefs.
PC crowd, my ass!
Wham,
I got more or less precisely the response I expected.
Instead of THINKING ABOUT what I posted, you attacked.
Now tell me WHY YOU THINK Trump is president?
Do you actually THINK people who voted for him WANTED the changes brought about by way of the courts over the last forty or fifty years, as opposed to the ballot box?
Or do you think maybe it’s a little MORE LIKELY that they voted for Trump because they wanted things the way they used to be, and because they were sick and tired of being called various derogatory names?
I have never known YOU to miss the point by such a wide margin, Fred.
Now answer the question, directly, instead of flying off the handle.
Do you think Trump would be president if it had NOT been for these changes being forced on people who didn’t want them, and had no other way to resist them, other than either rioting in the streets, or at the ballot box?
NOTE I AM NOT PASSING JUDGEMENT.
I’m a Baptist ( nominally at least) who married a Jew. I’m pretty close to libertarian when it comes to social issues, personally. That however doesn’t mean I don’ t understand the fitness value of a social norm such as one on one marriage, which is a superb tool when it comes to the prevention of STD epidemics, etc. It’s also HELPFUL in terms of keeping men together with the women who have borne their children, rather than just taking off with a younger one.
People in MANY parts of the world are murdering each other day in and day out, year in and year out, on the basis of one group or another trying to force it’s values and culture on another group.
It’s FINE to go around believing you can get your way, via the court system and the law, without consequences ……. so long as you get it, and the consequences are worth it, all things considered.
But all actions result in reactions, of some sort or another.
The world is not a perfect place, people are not perfect, and they will believe what they WANT to believe. A federal system of government, with states controlling some of the law, is the only means I know of that allows really divergent cultures to remain within the same nation, without the risk of a great deal of violence, which has often worsened to the point of actual civil war and genocide.
I knew some gays, back in the sixties and seventies, who moved to LA and such places…..because they could live as they pleased there, as compared to Richmond Va, where it was wise to remain in the closet. ( Richmond was my home away from home in those days. )
Young people all over the country, from the boonies and the small towns and old set in their ways cities have been moving to the bright lights just about forever, which left the people who liked things the way they were in place.
BUT now they HAVE NO PLACE. Are you so blinded by your own beliefs that you cannot see that such people have NO WHERE TO GO, no place to retreat to, if they want to continue to live the way they always lived?
Now you can like it, or lump it, as the vernacular goes, but you have not provided a rational response to my comment, which is about what I perceive to be historical reality, here in the USA. Future historians in my estimation will agree with me, to some substantial extent.
The fact that people have and may continue to murder women for no reason at all, or the worst possible reasons, in various societies, has next to nothing to do with what’s going on here in the USA NOW.
I often walk the streets in small southern towns and see white girls or women with black boys or men virtually every time I’m in town….. and as a rule, you have to look hard to catch a disapproving glance from some old timer. Forty or fifty years ago, instead of being totally ignored, these couples would have been driven out of the community and an occasional murder would have resulted.
You know some physics, a LOT of biology, and you know some political science, some sociology, some psychology.
You are without a doubt a one per center, intellectually, the cream of the cream of the crop. I am NOT being sarcastic.
So tell me, in terms that would be used by a working scientist, rather than a cultural partisan, why YOU believe Trump is president.
I’m willing to listen, rather than attack.
I’m a throwback, in a lot of ways…… but you cannot understand the present, without understanding the past, and as Faulkner so famously wrote, the past is NOT, it’s forever with us.
Maybe if I had simply said all the stupid, racist homophobic, ignorant superstitious rednecks in this country elected Trump, simply because he makes such women tingle and such men feel manly, you would have rated my comment double plus good.
But that sort of successful politician has always been common. Something WAY personality is in play where Trump is involved.
I’m not personally opposed to the cultural revolution that has come about since I was a kid. On three different occasions, I have provided money and transportation, plus a sympathetic ear, to women who wanted abortions, and I may yet do so again. I lived with both my wives, common law, before making it official. So I SORT OF GET IT, lol. I even like it, believe it or not. I’m hoping to see single payer medical care, legal pot, every body truly equal before the law, etc, before I’m gone. I understand that when the cops can beat the shit out of a black man, and get away with it, it sets the stage for them to beat the shit out of white men as well, when it suits the mood of the cops to do so.
But I refuse to pretend it’s all one way or the other, culturally or historically.
I earned the ONLY C ever rewarded by a PC professor back in the eighties, or maybe it was the nineties, at VCU for a grad class, which required a B to count towards a masters degree.
I was dead on for an A, as were about ninety percent of the other students ( PC means everybody must get an A or a B at least, nobody can fail, nobody is average, everybody is above average, lol) until I contradicted her when she accused the USA of being a racist sexist society forcing it’s values on other countries…. by way of military force. This is true of course, but only to a certain extent. I pointed out that such questions are not sharply defined black and white.
I pointed out that women in Iran and Iraq, etc, were in WAY WORSE circumstances than in the USA, legally and culturally, where as she was in effect defending these societies….. so she TOLD ME to prove my point.
So I told her, and the whole class, about my sister, now long retired but back then a commissioned officer in the American army, and who was at one time there as part of a medical team, not as a uniformed soldier , but in a civvie capacity, so as to keep the peace with the locals.
Never the less, some of the local women saw with their own eyes, to their enormous satisfaction and surprise , that uniformed MEN who actually paid her the ultimate in terms of listening without argument, etc, and did precisely what she told advised or them to do, that she not only had power over men, but also that she was well paid, and that she held a couple of graduate degrees as well. It didn’t take them long to discover that she not only had a driver’s license, but that she also owned a couple of cars, one of them new. That she owned her own home. To them, to actually SEE such a woman as my sister was about equal to you seeing … an actual alien?
So my pc professor sputtered and raged, and gave me a C. But it didn’t matter, because I was only taking the course to renew my so called professional educators license, and punching the ticket only required that I PASS the course.
There’s always some truth on both sides of any social or cultural question. If you are a partisan, you simply define the truth as being the same as your own position.
OFM asked “Now tell me WHY YOU THINK Trump is president? ”
The simple reason is that we do not have a democracy. If the people were allowed to vote on individual items such as abortion instead of having to vote in a whole nebulous platform of items in the form of a representative/presidential candidate just to get one or two items, people like DT would never come to power (no need for individual power). But each time we have to choose between the devil and the deep blue sea.
The system has been scammed, it’s rigged and it runs on political donations and favors.
Open the system up and see what happens. The only ones afraid of that are the power elite and the politicians. Anyone with a brain is sick of the system.
The voters and non voters deserve their share of the blame
“Anyone with a brain is sick of the system”
If it’s the difference between having a good job and education or not, you better pay attention.
Let us not forget that Trump got three million fewer votes than did Hillary Clinton. It is only because of our very stupid electoral college system that that stupid ignorant sonofabitch is in there.
Trump is president not because of the will of the people, but in spite of the will of the people.
OFM, No I didn’t miss the point! I get it. I just happen to disagree with it.
Here’s how I see things.
Do you think Trump would be president if it had NOT been for these changes being forced on people who didn’t want them, and had no other way to resist them, other than either rioting in the streets, or at the ballot box?
Of course! And I even understand that deep resentment. It is the same reason Jair Bolsonaro is in power in Brazil right now. Or for that matter Victor Orban in Hungary, I have deep personal ties to both those countries. And it is the same thing in dozens of other countries today It is why we are seeing the economic suicide of the UK via Brexit, etc… I fully expect and already have seen with my own eyes rioting in the streets of Brazil and suspect we might see it in other places as well in the near future.
Brazil is a good example of this phenomenon. When I was growing up there it was a mostly Catholic country with deep economic disparities, The political leadership was deeply corrupt and there was a reaction which lead to a military coup followed by years of military dictatorship. Then things swung the other way for a while. There was social and constitutional reform, democratically elected leaders, a lucky stint of temporary economic prosperity based on Brazil’s enormous mineral and natural resource wealth coupled with it’s unparalled agricultural potential. This so called economic miracle brought untold millions out of poverty and set the stage for industrial modernization.
Fast forward to about a decade ago. The things started to hit the fan due to the global economy hitting physical limits circa 2008. We had the first indications of peak oil hitting state run Petrobras, more corruption in the government, the many scandals such as ‘Car Wash’. The group in power were led by Lula and then Dilma, they were obviously also corrupt and their socialist liberal policies bore the brunt of the current back lash.
In my opinion it is not a coincidence that there has also been a rise in evangelical christianity in Brazil and a swing toward a much less tolerant society. These are precisely the people who are Bolsonaro supporters and are being manipulated into a similar Make Brazil Great Again nationalism. Unfortunately while I understand what is happening and why it is happening I don’t see any of this ending well.
When things are going well economically and there is plenty of bread and circus, carnaval,soccer and cold beer. The average person does not go out into the streets and they do not vote for change. Unfortunately very few in the general population understand peak resources and physical limits. They are more prone to accept certain groups as the enemy and scapegoats offered them by authoritarian demagogues who promise a return to the golden past..
That is why both Trump and Bolsonaro are in power today!
For the record I don’t bear any ill will towards the common people who are Bolsonaro and Trump supporters, some of them are my friends and family. The system has failed them as well. I certainly don’t pretend to have easy answers.
all humans are resistant to change.
If the rule of law, democractic principles and at least a functioning justice system is no longer going to be accepted by the majority, regardless of their personal ideologies and religious beliefs then we may as well all just throw in the towel, because we will be headed for a repeat of what happened in Germany Weimar Republic circa 1920s and 30s and we all know how that movie ended.
So in final analysis, I know exactly why Trump and Bolsonaro are presidents, I just don’t agree that cutting their supporters any slack at this particular juncture in history is very helpful.
“the rot runs so deep that never a peep did I hear about the D’s doing a goddamned thing about the actual SOURCE of the opioids that are killing people”
“God Moves in a Mysterious Way” is a Christian hymn
God moves in a mysterious way
His wonders to perform;
He plants His footsteps in the sea
And rides upon the storm.
Deep in unfathomable mines
Of never failing skill
He treasures up His bright designs
And works His sov’reign will.
Ye fearful saints, fresh courage take;
The clouds ye so much dread
Are big with mercy and shall break
In blessings on your head.
Judge not the Lord by feeble sense,
But trust Him for His grace;
Behind a frowning providence
He hides a smiling face.
His purposes will ripen fast,
Unfolding every hour;
The bud may have a bitter taste,
But sweet will be the flow’r.
Blind unbelief is sure to err
And scan His work in vain;
God is His own interpreter,
And He will make it plain.
OFM, last month I visited the South. The motels didn’t have MSNBC and Fox Propaganda is blasted at the public in common areas such as McDonalds. The fix is in. Your friends are a victim of themselves and vote against their own interest.
“the whole world may well go up in flames BECAUSE Trump is president, and because the R’s control so much of the country politically”
So I’m an independent redneck and I’m with the Democrats on treatment, and with the R’s on punishment…… ESPECIALLY punishing dealers who because they are rich motherfuckers able to donate tons of money to museums, etc, believe they are ABOVE THE LAW.
The REAL dealers are pharma companies.
Carrots and sticks together work better than either alone, most of the time.
The answer isn’t treatment or punishment. It’s jobs and education. This isn’t going to get fixed over night or maybe not at all. We know punishment hasn’t got it done in the last 40 years and treatment is a patch on a flat tire.
More lies and disinformation from Michael Shellenberger! I find this guy especially despicable!
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/05/27/we-shouldnt-be-surprised-renewables-make-energy-expensive-since-thats-always-been-the-greens-goal/#a7eb6534e6d6
We Shouldn’t Be Surprised Renewables Make Energy Expensive Since That’s Always Been The Greens’ Goal
Really?! From the guy who advocates for that ‘Too Cheap to Meter’, clean nuclear energy and calls himself a hero of the environment!
“and calls himself a hero of the environment!”
Just look at those lovely new wildlife sanctuaries around Chernobyl and Fuckupshima courtesy of nuclear.
NAOM
It’s worth mentioning that Texas oilmen have never been big fans of cheap oil. For some reason, they like the prices high. Does that make them Greens?
If you want energy to be cheap, you must not think you could ever be a net energy producer. But anyone who owns his own house could be a net energy exporter. One of my neighbors here in cloudy Germany is, because he put a bunch of solar panels on his roof.
The last thing nuclear advocates want is for hug numbers of people to sell energy. They prefer to keep the popular in the slave mentality of begging for mercy (in the form of low energy prices) and being grateful when they get it. The alternative is to throw off your chains and join the producing class.
Some NE port is going to see some new industrial activity soon-
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/orsted-us-offshore-wind-supply-chain-decisions-coming-soon#gs.el0ff6
Speaking of the energy economy, I don’t think Jay Inslee will make it to president this time- but he and his Evergreen Plan will be great as energy secretary-
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/jay-inslees-climate-plan-is-every-wonks-dream#gs.el100m
Honda is about to enter the small EV market in Europe- sales beginning in 1 yr in Germany, France, UK, and Norway. Reservations for the 1st batch now.
https://insideevs.com/news/343055/honda-e-prototype-revealed-production-bound-small-sporty-ev/
Perhaps some here will find this of interest?
STUDY CORROBORATES THE INFLUENCE OF PLANETARY TIDAL FORCES ON SOLAR ACTIVITY
“In principle, it is not unusual for the magnetic activity of a star like the sun to undergo cyclic oscillation. And yet past models have been unable to adequately explain the very regular cycle of the sun. The HZDR research team has now succeeded in demonstrating that the planetary tidal forces on the sun act like an outer clock, and are the decisive factor behind its steady rhythm. To accomplish this result, the scientists systematically compared historical observations of solar activity from the last thousand years with planetary constellations, statistically proving that the two phenomena are linked. “There is an astonishingly high level of concordance: what we see is complete parallelism with the planets over the course of 90 cycles,” said Frank Stefani, lead author of the study. “Everything points to a clocked process.””
phys.org/news/2019-05-corroborates-planetary-tidal-solar.html
Here is a good example of why I think even lousy AI is better than the average human when it comes to paying attention to the little details. Though somehow just I can’t imagine that there were no flashing red lights and warning bells going off to tell them this hatch was open and water was flooding in.
Rashid, I have a flashing message saying the port hatch on the stern below the water line is open and the nuclear power plant is being flooded… Don’t worry about it, it’s probably just a computer virus, call our tech support line in Moscow!
https://taskandpurpose.com/indian-navy-nuclear-submarine-hatch
A Foreign Navy Screwed Up Its New $3 Billion Nuclear Missile Sub By Leaving Its Hatch Open
Juicy chart I saw on reddit.
Sehr interessant! 😉
Cool chart.
I’d love to see that for the 50 states US.
There is a state by state map by fuel source posted some months back.
https://www.eia.gov/state/maps.php
Thanks for that info source.
There is a lot of rich data embedded there to digest!
Here is the link to the excellent USA graphic display from last year, state by state, that I was looking for.
Its very interesting to see all the variation between state sources, and the trends of production over time.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/12/24/climate/how-electricity-generation-changed-in-your-state.html
We have a shitload of work to get done this coming decade.
https://www.jayinslee.com/issues/evergreen-economy
btw- solar , wind, and geothermal combine to provide about 3.1% of total usa energy consumption
Pitiful.
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/?page=us_energy_home
China Gears Up to Weaponize Rare Earths in Trade War
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-29/china-gears-up-to-weaponize-rare-earths-dominance-in-trade-war
Things are getting interesting—-
Animals will ‘downsize’ over the next century, new study says. Here’s why.
By David Freeman
https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/animals-will-downsize-over-next-century-new-study-says-here-ncna1009321
In the animal kingdom, it seems big is out and little is in.
New research suggests that large long-lived birds and land mammals will face extinction over the next century as small insect-eating animals that reproduce quickly and die young will predominate. Among the likely losers in the emerging world will be rhinos, hippos, gorillas, giraffes and caribou as well as large birds like eagles, condors and vultures.
The likely winners? Rodents and songbirds.
The research, described in a paper published May 23 in the journal Nature Communications, points to several causes of the looming shift in the world’s fauna, including climate change, deforestation, hunting and increasing urbanization and agriculture. As their world changes, large birds and land mammals — which are known to be less adaptable to changing conditions than their smaller peers — will seemingly have a hard time surviving.
The downsizing of the world’s animals might sound like welcome news if you’re fond of teensy creatures like dwarf gerbils and the white-browed sparrow-weaver — not so welcome if you’re particular to rhinos and other “charismatic” species. But since big mammals often “engineer” their habitats in important ways — think of elephants uprooting trees to create open areas and condors scavenging carcasses that might otherwise spread disease to other species — their loss might put other animal species in jeopardy.
A) Insects? What insects?
B) Humans are large animals that engineer their environment.
A) Insects? What insects?
Those were my thoughts exactly!
Good Luck!
Battery wars. Scaling up cell production is a Giga risk. Warren Buffet has it right with BYD.
https://youtu.be/m82DtUN1nrI
Mona Lisa for president 2020!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2uZF-5F1wI
AI brings Mona Lisa to life
That’s both very cool and very terrifying!
Mr.Dalliard we ve been activated!.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usrl2FUWhEE
Any similarity to comments and discourse on this website or to the character portrayed is merely coincidental and a personal point of view of the listener.