Bi-monthly open thread on climate solutions. Please try to be civil. Remember, climate science questions can be discussed on the Unforced Variations thread.
Not a half-bad video, but it spends almost the entire talk on history and future problems. The only specific “repair” he talks about is ocean iron seeding. Okay, if we do that… we could just about balance our current annual emissions. Nothing about re-powering our civilization without GHG emissions.
Things like this make me shake my head in frustration.
(Yes, I’m back. Life has given me free time again.)
As you ignore, materials and design that can build a wind turbine that isn’t a toy have only been around for about 15 years.
Nonsense. The Smith-Putnam wind turbine was rated at 1 megawatt and was commissioned in 1941 (a full year before Chicago Pile 1). It was built out of aluminum using standard aircraft methods.
It was shorted for repair materials due to the war effort and eventually threw a blade, but even after the war it was not repaired and recommissioned. Not economic. Wind wouldn’t be economic today either without tax credits, RECs and outright mandates.
Solar was laughably expensive 20 years ago. Not anymore
The problem isn’t the PV generation. The problem is that we wouldn’t be able to run our society on it even if it was free. What you don’t understand is that THAT requires stockpiles of energy, which in our current system consists mostly of fossil fuels. Go re-read Roadmap to Nowhere, which you obviously still don’t get.
The truly hard part of running on “renewables” is buying and maintaining enough storage to get through the periods when it is NOT generating. PHS is land-hungry and requires massive amounts of fresh water. Batteries are very expensive and wear out rapidly. I’ve seen stuff about Liquid Air Energy Storage but Highview Power is claiming a storage (not capital) cost around 14¢/kWh. I’d love to see how that cost breaks down.
Then you’ve got everything that is NOT electric. Transport. Industrial process heat. We could easily build nuclear container ships, you know. I think it’s long past time we did.
Noone denies CC. Many, based on past history of climate, and the uncertainties in the science, just don’t believe it’s man-made. I think more are starting to wonder if something is happening,
For implicitly inflated values of ‘many’. Actual numbers are more interesting, albeit not necessarily probative. According to a recent poll:
More than a quarter of Americans questioned in the new CBS News poll consider climate change a “crisis”, with a further 36% defining it as a “serious problem”. Two in 10 respondents said it was a minor problem, with just 16% considering it not worrisome at all.
More than half of polled Americans said they wanted the climate crisis to be confronted right away, with smaller groups happy to wait a few more years and just 18% rejecting any need to act.
IAT:
Many people like Greta and AOC, are terrified and actually believe that we’re doomed unless the governent takes over everything. You can’t make this stuff up. When the left figures out that a man and a woman are not the same thing, and they use different restrooms, we may pay some attention to their “communication”.
What’s this ‘we’ business? Unless you’re referring to imaginary friends, you may be overpluralizing (h/t Hank Roberts). Because it sure looks like you’re making this stuff up. Your strawmen are as silly as always. Just how do you know that Greta and AOC are “terrified and actually believe that we’re doomed unless the governent takes over everything”? Don’t you think that’s a little hyperbolic? Once you’ve clarified ‘terrified’ (heh), tell us how many people “like” them you imagine there are. Got any numbers we can compare? Hmmmm?
IAT:
;)
Jokes signify, you bald-faced bigot. Damn, you’re smooth 8^|.
Talk about discriminating, y’all: Danyoung Kim of the New Yorker credits Bernie Sanders with putting the ‘social’ in ‘socialism’. From a Talk of the Town piece about a new dating app for leftists called RedYenta:
Not since Warren Beatty played John Reed in “Reds” has one person done as much to raise the profile of the socialist cause as Bernie Sanders has. A recent poll shows that nearly half of millennials and Gen Z-ers would prefer to live in a socialist country. A Tinder survey found that seventy-one per cent of online daters consider political differences to be a deal breaker. So what’s a young leftist to do?
I’ll take that poll with a grain of salt too, but whatever. RedYenta is intended to facilitate assortative mating by cultural identity in 21st Century American Homo sapiens, resulting in fewer couples like Mary Matalin and James Carville. I’m not sure that’s good for the country; not that I have any say in the matter, of course.
nigeljsays
Mr. Know It All @94
“None denies CC. Many, based on past history of climate, and the uncertainties in the science, just don’t believe it’s man-made. ”
This is still denialism. This is the core issue and its been well demonstrated by the IPCC that virtually all of the warming since the 1970’s is due to human activities. The evidence is overwhelming and multifaceted, and when explanations are so powerful like that scientists tend to form a consensus.
In my experience most of the people attacking agw science disclose vested interests, or a dislike of government involvement in mitigation so its pretty obvious why they attack the science. Its not genuine doubts about the science, its politically motivated doubts.
“1960s – population bomb will cause us to starve”
And it will cause some real problems for humanity if we don’t get numbers down, but rates of growth have been falling since the 1970’s. The problem has mostly been solved by the demographic transition and government policies, because population on current trends will plateau by 2100 and those numbers can be coped with although it would help if population plateaued before this.
“1970s – ice age will cause us to starve”
This is total nonsense. Most research at the time suggested the climate would warm. A few scientists predicted cooling and got media time but there was never a consensus climate would cool. I still have a physical geography text from the 1970’s so I know these things. Refer also:
Strawman. Nobody has claimed this, but it will reduce crop production and malnutrition in plenty of places.
“Many people like Greta and AOC, are terrified and actually believe that we’re doomed unless the government takes over everything. ”
Greta has never said that to my knowledge, and although she is very motivating she is not in control of policy. Most people do not believe the government should take over everything (including me). You are talking about a fringe element.
“When the left figures out that a man and a woman are not the same thing, and they use different restrooms, we may pay some attention to their “communication”.”
Irrelevant, stupid rubbish that has no place on this website.
I’m being tough on you because I think you know better. I mean I really do hope you know better.
nigeljsays
Oh curse my impatience, and the typos. Correction: “but it (climate change) will reduce crop production and cause malnutrition in plenty of places.”
nigeljsays
The physical geography text I have from the late 1970s is Atmosphere, Weather and Climate by Barry and Chorley. The chapter on climate change talks about evidence that CO2 causes warming, and may have caused part of the warming early last century, and talked about the cooling period from the 1940s to the 1970s, and said they were uncertain what is causing that cooling period, but they never mentioned that it would continue and the overall theme was that future warming was possible. The book never mentioned any consensus that cooling would continue, or anything like that. If there was a consensus, they would have stated this.
You never heard of Hot Dry Rock geothermal, I take it.
Show me where anyone has made it produce electric power, and maintained the output. Even the natural resource at The Geysers in California has depleted quite a bit, the plant losing half its output since it was new.
Hot rock, wet or dry, is just not a very dense source of energy. Rock typically holds about 1 kJ/kg-K; reduce its temp by 200 K and you get 200 kJ. Heating value of coal used by the US electric sector is about 18.9 million BTU per short ton, or about 22 MJ/kg… and you can have it brought to the plant, you don’t have to build the plant on top of it and move the plant when it’s depleted.
Nuclear fuel at a burnup of 35,000 megawatt-days per ton yields about 3 MILLION MJ/kg, 7 orders of magnitude more than your hot rock. The irony is your hot dry rock scheme might very well dissolve and extract more energy as uranium than you get from the hot water. The radon in the natural gas from the Marcellus shale shows that there is a great deal of uranium there. It would be a huge energy resource if it can be produced.
I do know that virtually all metals can be recycled
AB: unless they’ve been used in or around a nuke’s core.
Even if that steel is not usable for consumer products, why do you think it could not be recycled into new nuclear reactors? As steel mills go robotic, you won’t even have worker radiation exposure to worry about if you use ex-reactor scrap as raw material.
Victorsays
“Beneath a roof and with its shadow spins”
Better:
Between a roof and its shadow spins.
Few translators seem to realize that a good translation must above all either make sense or make poetry in the target language.
I hate to cite Mr. Know It All, but credit where credit is due:
1. He cited a source.
2. The source spoke an honest truth (indisputable that e.g. France has vastly better climate performance than “green” Germany().
3. That truth is contrary to Green dogma.
We honestly have SOMETHING THAT IS PROVEN TO WORK. We should do a lot more of that RIGHT NOW, before we place any serious bets on anything that is NOT proven.
It’s really the last 10% of generation in a renewable grid that becomes challenging because of intermittency problems.
The capacity factor of the wind farms in my state, based on average production divided by nameplate rating, is 18%. We do not have a “last 10% problem” here. We have a “last 82% problem”.
This is not a large number
The nuclear plant in my state that is scheduled to shut down provides more energy than all the state’s wind farms. Closing it will be a huge step backwards for the climate, yet “environmentalists” are applauding it. Citizen’s Climate Lobby has made no attempt to save this plant. (Understand why I hold both “greens” and CCL in contempt now?)
If this truly matters, the people who wrote the policies which put Kewaunee, Vermont Yankee, Ft. Calhoun, San Onofre, Three Mile Island, and shortly several more out of business should be tried for crimes against humanity. And so should their political donors.
Several other non lithium battery technologies are well under development
Batteries are orders of magnitude too costly to do anything more than buffer transients between cycles and a few tens of minutes. To manage serious supply/demand mismatches, we need things like 200-hour heat banks and storable chemical fuels. Electric batteries are costly and wear out fast, molten salts are cheap and can last many years with a bit of top-up from e.g. nitric acid. A tank for combustible liquid fuels can last decades; the tank farms at petroleum terminals certainly do.
One of the essentials for a climate-friendly economy is not having to expend much energy/carbon rebuilding your worn-out stuff all that frequently.
KIA: Renewables can’t save the plant [sic]. Nuclear can help fairly quickly.
BPL: Nuclear costs more and takes the longest to deploy of any energy source.
Nuclear is the ONLY energy source which has nigh-completely decarbonized a minority-hydro electric grid, and in multiple cases it has decarbonized several times faster than today’s “renewables” are doing… despite several decades more experience that the “renewables” can exploit.
It’s a technological dead end which no one will invest in any more.
Finland is contracting for a new VVER, I recall a Baltic doing something similar, China and the UAE are still going, and Vogtle remains a going concern even in the USA.
The only countries trying to build new nuclear plants are totalitarian countries which don’t have to worry about local resistance.
Finland and the USA are totalitarian countries now? Nice to have you admit it. Does that mean I can start shooting commissars and the Cheka? (not sure if I’m serious or not, ask me in a week.)
Mr. Know It Allsays
Outstanding video: “HOW DARE YOU: 10 reasons not to believe climate change criers | Liz Wheeler LIVE at the Reagan Ranch”.
Liz Wheeler does not talk about science, but sows suspicion on people she disagrees with. No respect. Propaganda based on caricature, cherry picking. So sad. Crazy conspiracy theory about “scientists … these people from NASA … part of the movement”. The USA used to be better than that. The view of the USA from Europe is a bit disturbing. What’s happening over there?
Killiansays
Re 96 Nemesis said @nigelj, #93
” It’s important to try to get society more sustainable, and I have a reasonably low carbon footprint, but I’m not into turning environmentalism into a religion, or seeking impossibly perfect solutions or perfect levels of sustainability.I simply don’t think such things make much sense.”
Good luck.
He still doesn’t get the difference between what he wants/wishes/whines/is politically acceptable and…
Nature. Math. Science.
He thinks an elephant can literally be squished through the eye of a needle and still come out the others side the way it went in.
2+2 does not equal 4.
Sadly, he’s far from the only one.
James Charlessays
This is why H.R.C. ‘lost’?
“And it’s deadly. Doubtless, Crosscheck delivered Michigan to Trump who supposedly “won” the state by 10,700 votes. The Secretary of State’s office proudly told me that they were “very aggressive” in removing listed voters before the 2016 election. Kobach, who created the lists for his fellow GOP officials, tagged a whopping 417,147 in Michigan as potential double voters.” http://www.gregpalast.com/trump-picks-al-capone-vote-rigging-investigate-federal-voter-fraud/
Threats of violence transmitted over the internet are a violation of the Electronics Security Act of 1983 (the Helms Act) and are punishable by fines and/or imprisonment. Watch your mouth.
The problem is people don’t like where the science leads, namely lifestyle changes, carbon taxes, business regulations etcetera, so they attack the science.
Here’s the thing: it doesn’t need to lead to more than minimal lifestyle changes (carbon taxes and business regs, sure). I’ve lived with hot-water heat; it’s quieter than gas forced air. I’m in my 7th year of living with a plug-in hybrid car, and it’s GREAT!
But that’s not how it’s being pitched to the public. The Green ideologues are insisting that everyone has to walk, bike or use “public transit” (which many people avoid because it is dangerous due to the criminal element having free rein). The ideologues say you have to accept a smaller, colder place in a city instead of a suburban house with a yard.
The ideologues demand an end to fossil fuels, but consider nuclear energy anathema.
The ideologues are the loud ones and are the public face of things like the “Green New Deal”. This is tailor-made to polarize the electorate and alienate the bulk of it. Cui bono? The fossil-fuel interests, that’s who. If you could expose the actual donors of the money that gets laundered through foundations and trusts and winds up financing “Greens”, I’m certain that you’d find a lot of it coming from oil and gas interests. An ARCO exec bankrolled anti-nuclear Friends of the Earth; this has always been the case.
“An ARCO exec bankrolled anti-nuclear Friends of the Earth; this has always been the case.”
This is distinct from Friends Of Science based out of Calgary who claim tar sand mining and more CO2 is good for the Earth.
Nemesissays
@Killian, #116
After all:
All rational arguments are futile when it comes to fundamentally criticizing capitalism in a capitalist system, hehe. Wasn’t it exactly the same in communist systems, when it came to criticizing communism in communist systems?^^ Yes, it was, hehe. The sheeples just LOVE capitalism, they love making funny money and they love to consume, consume, consume ever more as that’s just their definition of “freedom” and “progress”, bwahaha, it’s their RELIGION (credit goes to nigelj for that telling term^^, hehe).
Just lay back and relax, we gotta wait until capitalism falls, just like communism fell, hehe. Let’s trust in gravity, it never fails.
Mr. KIA:
1960s – population bomb will cause us to starve
You really are oblivious to the fact that it was frigging scientists who pulled us out of the frigging soup on that one, aren’t you? I mean, in the 1960s famine was a common occurrence in India and much of the developing world. In effect, we survive now because scientists figured out a way to turn petroleum into corn, soy, wheat and rice!
1970s – ice age will cause us to starve
Imbecile, this was never a mainstream view. Yes, there were those who were concerned about aerosols generating cooling–especially in tandem with the fact that Milankovitch cycles were shifting to the cooling phase. The reason they were wrong is that they underestimated CO2’s ability to heat the atmosphere. Nice own-goal there, buckwheat.
1980s – AGW will cause us to starve
And it may well still. The fact that your attention span is measured in minutes does not mean that all effects play out on that scale.
1990s to now – today it’s climate change and no matter what happens we will starve
No, only if we are stupid–and the fact we have people like you voting doesn’t fill me with hope.
Perhaps you would care less about which rest rooms people use if you were not so full of shit!
Mr. Know It Allsays
111 – E-P
Thanks for your informative comments on nuclear. If CO2 is a problem, then nuclear could save us until something better comes along. There are instances where solar makes sense – that’s great.
Roof-top solar is good for those who want it and can afford it, but in cold climates they will need to “burn” something for heat (wood, FFs, atoms, cow farts, Adam Schiff mouth effluent, etc). :) In the northern hemisphere winter, it’s cold and dark around 16 hours per day, or more – that is a YUGE problem. Large wind turbines kill birds. It’s interesting to look at rooftops on Google Earth to see how many homes have rooftop solar. Look in areas with the most sun, the most money, and the most “greenies” – Beverly Hills, other areas in Southern California, etc. I did not do any calcs, but it might be something like 5 to 10%. I’d love to have an off-grid system, but $$.
Your comment about hot water heating is correct. You can move a lot more heat with a pump than with a fan for the same energy cost. Hot water baseboard is very efficient in cold climates. You can’t afford the cost to store enough heat for a week-long cloudy period when it’s 0F outside unless you are talking about a building designed and built specifically for doing that – typical home, WAY too much $$.
115 – rasmus
“… The view of the USA from Europe is a bit disturbing. What’s happening over there?”
The lessons of history are written on the tombstones of others. 2 points if you can cite the source for that. We know, with 100% certainty based on history, the misery that results from socialism. We’ve had to save the butts of Europeans before due to it. SOME OF US learn from history. Do you?
The ideologues are the loud ones and are the public face of things like the “Green New Deal”.
Ah, the good ol’ “straw man” rhetorical tactic: blame the moderate supporters of a policy proposal for cardboard cutouts [block that metaphor! MA] of the most radical ones. It’s the loudmouths who get the public’s attention. That doesn’t mean they speak for anyone but themselves. Talk is cheap. In the US, it’s free! We can’t stop ideologues from talking even if we want to.
Anyway, ideological posturing looks pretty silly when you recognize that AGW is affecting literally everyone on Earth one way or another. Admittedly, it’s worked for the Republican party for at least 16 years, but the money is on their side (or is their side). At least some fossil-carbon money recognizes its revenue streams will end eventually, but is determined to be the near-term ‘winner’. Yet climate change won’t have any winners, only relative losers. In a global scope, all costs are internal. How hard can that be to understand? Climate realists, at least yours truly ;^), simply acknowledge AGW as a collective, existential threat overshadowing particular agendas, and wish progress to be made on decarbonizing the global economy as fast as feasible. It’s a historical accident that voting for Democrats is presently my obvious choice.
Look, capping the warming inescapably requires some form of collective action, hence the Drama of the Commons. Republicans haven’t always been dogmatically opposed to collective action per se, and some who weren’t are still eligible to vote (they may be ex-Republicans, however). There’s no reason why it has to be one big collective action, if smaller-scale actions add up to enough. Smaller collective decisions are easier, though they still must be judicious. Encourage ‘natural’ gas production to replace coal, or corn ethanol to replace gasoline? False economies. Eliminate subsidies for all energy sources, not just fossil fuels? Now you’re talking, but directly subsidizing alternative technologies like rooftop solar and distributed storage could help achieve a lower GMST at equilibrium: let’s pencil it out honestly. Place a market price on fossil carbon emissions? Duh, although not just any old implementation. Include beef in a carbon price? A good enough reason to reduce my beefeatin’. Stop leasing public lands for fuel production and grazing at an aggregate loss? Works out in the math. Build more nuclear power plants? Okay, if the full risks and costs are commensurated first. Ramp up renewable energy? Yah shoor yoo betcha, bearing TANSTAAFL in mind. Net metering? ‘Smart’ grids? Fossil-fuel industry worker retraining with full buy-outs? Yes, yes, yes.
I for one wouldn’t require them all up front, however. I want whatever will cost-effectively (when full costs, benefits, risks and rewards are honestly counted) decrement the rate of warming, and at least compensate for foreclosing anything else that would help! I’m not necessarily opposed to certain sweeping changes, mind you. I want as much social justice as I can get. At a minimum, that issue underlies the specific causes of global warming. There’ll be time to keep pushing for it iff[sic] we fend off this freaking metaphorical world-eating monster that showed up about 30 years ago. Good grief! Pardon my privilege, but resisting the accelerating depauperation of Earth’s biosphere, still so lovely, so rich with diverse life including my own, feels to me like the line worth dying on. It may be a rear-guard action at best, but it buys time!
No proposal will ever be supported by everyone in all its details. Fortunately (relatively speaking), public decisions in the US ‘merely’ require a plurality. If you don’t like the GND, give us something we can literally live with. Be sure to make your case with numbers. Buy us time.
nigeljsays
Killian @116 says “He still doesn’t get the difference between what he wants/wishes/whines/is politically acceptable and…Nature. Math. Science.”
I get the difference. Our technology based society isn’t sustainable leaving future civilisation to have to eventually adopt a more basic form of life. Killians solution is he wants us to conserve resources by living like aboriginees or as close as we can reasonably get.
I subscribe to the more mainstream compromise solution where we waste less, recycle more and get population down, use public transport, and have zero gdp growth, but we maintain plenty of technology. If we still run out of resources, and so have to become like aboriginees, I dont understand why this worries Killian because he keeps telling us how great they are.
nigeljsays
Engineer-Poet @112, an 18% wind farm capacity factor is rather low. We do better. But go nuclear if you want. I just really struggle to take sides too much on this nuclear power issue. It’s not fence sitting, because civilisation has long had a mix of electricity generating systems and simple, singular idealistic solutions don’t grab me much.
—————
Engineer Poet @119, I agree lifestyle changes don’t have to be unpleasant or difficult, and can end up saving money in many cases. EV’s save money in the long run, so does a well insulated home, solar roof panels, and cutting air travel.
“The Green ideologues are insisting that everyone has to walk, bike or use “public transit” (which many people avoid because it is dangerous due to the criminal element having free rein). ”
Well they dont. They suggest these things are better, and they also include the EV option in my country at least. I suspect one green lobby group has been a bit strident and so you are generalising.
I doubt that many green lobby groups knowingly or willingly take fossil fuel money. You would need to provide robust proof.
nigeljsays
Killian @95 says that everyone with some moderate scepticism about climate change and who tries to not be a total twit is a concern troll apparently. I dont think thats always the case. Some are, some aren’t.
Scepticism is on a continuum or spectrum, shades of grey. The people like DDS and KIA are at the extreme end, and a total pain and the kneck at times but not everyone is the same. DDS plays the conern troll game sometimes.
No wonder America is having a tribal war, with people with that get so paranoid about sceptics and start to see anyone remotely sceptical as evil, and others so paranoid about warmists.
—————
Killian @96, fine you are not authoriatarian. My typo. Let me clarify what I really meant. You are bossy, and also highly personally abusive, egotistical, and have a very inflated opinion of yourself. You prove this everytime you write things. It’s quite comical at times.
What ideology do you think I have? You wont find a less ideologial person than me. I’m politically centrist, said it before.
“Don’t you? You can’t quit me, Brokeback.”
I have totally ignored you for months and only replied because you addressed a comment specifically at me.
Some months back you said you were never going to reply to any of my posts again. That didn’t last long did it. So YOU cant quit ME. Once again you are confused as to the facts.
nigeljsays
Engineer-Poet @102 says renewables need a lot of storage. Australia is building a lot of wind and solar power with a lot of pumped hydro storage with a lot more planned as below. They are not the most enthusiastic country about mitigation (they have a lot of coal)so probably wouldn’t be doing this if it wasn’t economic.
Of course their topography probably suits this, but parts of America must be the same surely?
nigeljsays
Engineer Poet @119. “The ideologues are the loud ones and are the public face of things like the “Green New Deal”. This is tailor-made to polarize the electorate and alienate the bulk of it. Cui bono?”
Some of the social provisions should have been kept out of the GND climate plan. But the electorate is already polarised. It can’t get much worse, and the fact is carbon taxes dont stand a chance in a country like America with such an anti tax ideology, so governmnet spending like the GND may be the only viable option. Print a bit of money you have done plenty of that lately.
James Charlessays
“The IPCC report that the Paris agreement based its projections on considered over 1,000 possible scenarios. Of those, only 116 (about 10%) limited warming below 2C. Of those, only 6 kept global warming below 2C without using negative emissions. So roughly 1% of the IPCC’s projected scenarios kept warming below 2C without using negative emissions technology like BECCS. And Kevin Anderson, former head of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, has pointed out that those 6 lone scenarios showed global carbon emissions peaking in 2010. Which obviously hasn’t happened.
So from the IPCC’s own report in 2014, we basically have a 1% chance of staying below 2C global warming if we now invent time travel and go back to 2010 to peak our global emissions. And again, you have to stop all growth and go into decline to do that. And long term feedbacks the IPCC largely blows off were ongoing back then too.” https://www.facebook.com/wxclimonews/posts/455366638536345
Maybe there can be change?
“Today’s global consumption of fossil fuels now stands at roughly five times what it was in the 1950s, and one-and-half times that of the 1980s when the science of global warming had already been confirmed and accepted by governments with the implication that there was an urgent need to act. Tomes of scientific studies have been logged in the last several decades documenting the deteriorating biospheric health, yet nothing substantive has been done to curtail it. More CO2 has been emitted since the inception of the UN Climate Change Convention in 1992 than in all of human history. CO2 emissions are 55% higher today than in 1990. Despite 20 international conferences on fossil fuel use reduction and an international treaty that entered into force in 1994, manmade greenhouse gases have risen inexorably.” https://medium.com/@xraymike79/the-inconvenient-truth-of-modern-civilizations-inevitable-collapse-8e83df6f3a57
James Charlessays
” . . . the writer is not making common cause with right-wing reactionary criticisms of Thunberg and unpleasant attacks on the young woman from a personalized “hater” perspective but instead offers a savvy critique of monopoly capitalism and the contemporary network of non-profit agencies, lenders, military equipment suppliers, and deep state agencies that has cooperated on such projects as selling wars around the planet and making perpetual war a reality, expanding the surveillance state to Orwellian proportions, installing an explicitly Neo Nazi government in Ukraine, and a fascist government in Honduras (note that eight out of ten asylum seekers who show up a the US-Mexico border are from that country), . . . ” https://solarian.ca/a-defence-of-cory-morningstar/?fbclid=IwAR3j9Xw–15uMuh6-OxVlDhwQuf88tKoyidIPw8llnkewqCvkqxWoVS2rJo
E-P 102: Wind wouldn’t be economic today either without tax credits, RECs and outright mandates.
BPL: It’s cheaper than fossil fuels now even without subsidies. I’ll eliminate all subsidies for wind if you eliminate all subsidies for fossil fuels and nukes.
E-P 112: The capacity factor of the wind farms in my state, based on average production divided by nameplate rating, is 18%. We do not have a “last 10% problem” here. We have a “last 82% problem”.
BPL: You are conflating the capacity factor of a plant with the energy mix. Go back and read what he wrote again.
E-P 119: The Green ideologues are insisting that everyone has to walk, bike or use “public transit” (which many people avoid because it is dangerous due to the criminal element having free rein).
BPL: You mean black people? You keep circling around back to that, don’t you? Here’s a hint for future reference: Nobody cares about your racism. BTW, I use public transit often.
Killed In Action 120: Roof-top solar is good for those who want it and can afford it, but in cold climates they will need to “burn” something for heat
BPL: You do know that cold climates are cold because they are tilted more away from the sun and that the tilt of a solar panel can be adjusted for latitude, don’t you?
mikesays
EP says: “Here’s the thing: it doesn’t need to lead to more than minimal lifestyle changes (carbon taxes and business regs, sure). I’ve lived with hot-water heat; it’s quieter than gas forced air. I’m in my 7th year of living with a plug-in hybrid car, and it’s GREAT!”
BBC Chief Environmental Correspondent Justin Rowlatt sees things a little differently. I guess Justin is the ideologue and EP is the voice of reason?
“Another application of hydroelectricity is Pumped-storage hydroelectricity which does not create a net gain in power but enables peak demand balancing.”
126 – nigelj
“Some of the social provisions should have been kept out of the GND climate plan. But the electorate is already polarised. It can’t get much worse, and the fact is carbon taxes dont stand a chance in a country like America with such an anti tax ideology, so governmnet spending like the GND may be the only viable option. Print a bit of money you have done plenty of that lately.”
1 – It can get A LOT worse. It has in the past – see 1861-1865.
2 – Some US states have enacted carbon taxes.
3 – So, AOC’s $93 trillion is what you refer to as “a bit of money”? Got it.
nigeljsays
Mr. Know It All @120, wind, solar and geothermal power and nuclear power are obviously all low carbon. Which is best probably depends entirely on local geography and societies attitudes, and concerns about safety. Anyone with any sense would be cautious about nuclear power given its history, and it needs to be well regulated, but it has its place.
Actually rooftop solar works well in many cold climates even in winter as below in Norway. It would be enough to power a heat pump. It would obviously not provide enough electric heating in the very coldest northern climates.
Mal Adapted wrote a bunch of stuff I consider partly or wholly mistaken:
Place a market price on fossil carbon emissions? Duh, although not just any old implementation.
The most straightforward and hard-to-game, the better.
Include beef in a carbon price? A good enough reason to reduce my beefeatin’.
Why do that? Cattle may generate methane, but they are also one of the few ways to produce food from permaculture grasslands. Regenerating grasslands may be one of our best options for sequestering atmospheric carbon as soil-building glomalin.
Stop leasing public lands for fuel production and grazing at an aggregate loss?
A great deal of that “public” land was legitimately homesteaded a century ago, until the Feds re-declared itself owner contrary to the Homestead Act and without compensation. Most if not all BLM land in active use should be ceded to the lessees and BLM should shrink in authority and manpower accordingly.
Build more nuclear power plants? Okay, if the full risks and costs are commensurated first.
Oddly specific. “Full risks and costs” should be evaluated for everything.
Ramp up renewable energy? Yah shoor yoo betcha, bearing TANSTAAFL in mind.
Only worthwhile if it is displacing more-polluting energy. But if e.g. wind is forcing nuclear plants to be turned down, with gas plants filling in for the new gaps left by the loss of nuclear base load, more renewables are WORSE in all respects: higher cost, higher emissions, stranded assets.
There are some very obvious (well, to me) ways to use the intermittent generation of wind and PV a lot better. I’ve not seen them so much as proposed, even in California which has been paying Arizona to take its excess power on an increasing number of days each year. Something funny’s going on.
Net metering? ‘Smart’ grids? Fossil-fuel industry worker retraining with full buy-outs? Yes, yes, yes.
Schemes with massive cost-transfers to other parties are abominations, and net metering is one of them. It pays the net-meterer for the costs of transmission and grid maintenance, instead of the net-meterer paying to transmit power as they ought to. It doesn’t ask the net-meterer to pay for the cost of intermittency. It doesn’t account for the depression of wholesale prices during peak generating hours, grossly over-paying the net-meterer for what they put on the grid.
Smart grids present massive new vulnerabilties, plus the parasitic power consumption of the “brains” and their comm systems. This is a scheme we are going to regret.
The one thing I could agree with is re-training FF workers. Let them be rare-earth and actinide miners, pulling these essential elements out of acid mine drainage and coal-ash dumps. They’d produce significant amounts of resources like iron and nickel in the process. What we need is methods of doing the energy-intensive processing with off-peak energy, and also a system of environmental credits to properly account for the remediation of toxic hazards.
Killiansays
Is there not a ban on discussing nuclear on this site?
I’m all for enforcing that.
Nemesissays
@nigelj, #122
Technology isn’t bad per se, it’s just a question of how to use or abuse it. Technology will never ever save us from greed and ignorance (these are ethical, not technological problems) within a materialist society.
Capitalism is driven by greed, greed for more and ever more, they call it “growth”, but wtf about growing up as individuals, as a society, as a human race? There will be no survival without growing up inside and that has almost nothing to do with technology:
The materialist worldview is a failure, a mistake, a prescription for total desaster.
Australia is building a lot of wind and solar power with a lot of pumped hydro storage with a lot more planned as below.
Apparently, this is being done in the few places where there are two freshwater (can’t use seawater without contaminating groundwater) reservoirs relatively close by with a large ΔH between them (for Snowy 2.0 it’s 700 meters):
The escalating price tag for Snowy 2.0 apparently is attracting strong opposition. Further, what happens if there isn’t enough water to keep the reservoirs full? Suddenly you have power reliability problems too. This is a recipe for cascading system collapse. And cost… from your link:
The same is needed for the Marinus interconnector to stack up. In an initial study, TasNetworks estimated the capital cost of the Marinus Link would range from $1.3 – $1.7 billion for the 600 MW link or $1.9 – 3.1 billion for 1,200 MW of capacity.
That’s not the price tag for generating power. That’s for a transmission line just to move it. True, it’s an under-sea link but such things are not all that cheap even overland.
Of course their topography probably suits this, but parts of America must be the same surely?
The places with plenty of both slope and water tend to be in the Pacific northwest. People there are already asking for existing dams to be removed; massive new reservoirs (upper AND lower, unless you can rely upon river flows to supply your pumps) would go over like lead balloons.
I’m fairly familiar with the PHS plant at Ludington. Originally specced at 1872 MW(e), its pump-turbines are being upgraded to 2172 MW(e) (312 up to 362 MW each x 6 units). Efficiency has been increased a bit. By comparison, even the upgraded Ludington does not match the nameplate rating of the 4 nuclear power plants in the state, let alone all the fossil capacity.
Michigan just isn’t that good for wind. Wikipedia gives 5330 GWh of generation in 2018, an average of 608.4 MW. Out of 1925 MW nameplate, this is a capacity factor of just 31.6% (2016 appears to have been an exceptionally bad year). And of course with high latitude and clouds, Michigan is pretty lousy for solar as well. Solar is almost a total loss in winter.
The Palisades nuclear plant at South Haven is rated at 805 MW(e). It generates more emissions-free electricity than all the wind farms and PV in the state put together, and there are 2 more reactors at the Cook plant and a fourth at Fermi II on Lake Erie. So guess what’s scheduled to shut down?
Some of the social provisions should have been kept out of the GND climate plan.
Some of them? Try “all of them”. But these people cannot resist any opportunity to grab more power. It is Not Who They Are.
But the electorate is already polarised. It can’t get much worse
Don’t say that. Things can ALWAYS get worse, and they will get worse before there’s any chance of them getting better. The crazy behavior of the globalists and their NPC pawns guarantees it.
the fact is carbon taxes dont stand a chance in a country like America with such an anti tax ideology
People who are doing much worse than their parents and grandparents are understandably reluctant to vote to pay more taxes, especially for the benefit of people who had no part in building what this country was… but are responsible in no small part for their own poor prospects.
I recently voted in a tax election. Two millages were on the ballot. One was for farmlands purchase/preservation, I forget what the other one was. I looked at the hikes proposed and calculated what they would cost me personally, and voted “NO” on both. Too much for too little. Both millages failed.
Another millage not too long ago was for improvements to the schools. Most of it was earmarked for athletics, so I voted no; this district needs much more concentration on academics. That millage passed, but from what I’m hearing about the “student” body having lots of children of illegal aliens, the next one might not. Who wants to pay taxes for children who have no business being here?
governmnet spending like the GND may be the only viable option.
You can print money, but you can’t print steel or cement or oil or any of the things to buy with it. To print money is to steal wealth from the people who worked to create it. If you do too much of this you become another Zimbabwe. Incidentally, Zimbabwe is doing it again. I am looking forward to being able to buy a stack of million or trillion-dollar bills to use as gag gifts. I missed my last chance to get them cheap but it won’t be too long.
Rex Tashasays
37 Steve Dombroski
“Its a shame when a scientist researches and explains his findings and is willing to put it out for pier review.” Judging by quality indeed many works are reviewed by random people on the Santa Monica Pier.
48 Ray Ladbury
Please watch your language many alarmists (not just Greta) have minds of children.
If you don’t like the GND, give us something we can literally live with. Be sure to make your case with numbers.
To be fair to Engineer-Poet, he’s given us “build more nukes” with some numbers. I’m skeptical he’s honestly accounted for all costs as well as perceived benefits, bearing in mind there are no externalities in the scope of the biosphere. Those would include the costs of overcoming political resistance. To be sure, the broader problem of decarbonization encounters the same challenges. One difference is that broad decarbonization requires collective (usually government), while specific investments in the energy market are made privately. Our ire is properly directed at fossil-fuel investors, who’ve successfully re-invested a fraction of their annual profits in official denial of anthropogenic climate change. Political opposition, from any source, specifically to nuclear power doesn’t get the full resources of the KochKlub. In the medium-to-long term, E-P’s best bet would be to support a collectively-imposed carbon price, then interest investors in nuclear projects once a corrected price signal is in place.
OTOH, E-P’s explicit ‘contempt’ for ‘”greens”‘ in general and Citizens’ Climate Lobby in particular raises a red flag. He’s punching cardboard cutouts [gotta love metaphor. MA]. James Hansen, who is on CCL’s advisory board, prominently co-wrote an Op-Ed in the Guardian during COP21, calling for nuclear in the carbon-neutral mix. That’s nonetheless tangential to CCL’s goal, which is to enact legislation imposing a carbon price similar to revenue-neutral national Carbon Fee and Dividend with Border Adjustment Tariff, leaving investment decisions to the energy market once that’s in place. Their strategy is to work levers of political will. Propping up individual power plants isn’t in their brief, for cryin’ out loud! Perhaps E-P is merely working those levers on RC ;^), on behalf of nuclear power. IMHO it doesn’t appear he’s actually trying to help with decarbonization, however. He’s already got a blog to prosecute his particular agenda, but talk is cheap. His next step might be to set up a lobbying organization, whether for- or non-profit. He may notice his low ROI here anyway, eventually.
Mal Adaptedsays
Drat. “broad decarbonization requires collective (usually government) intervention in ‘free’ (of collective intervention) markets, while specific investments in the energy market are made privately.”
Yes, there are suitable sites in the USA, but there is no one willing to fund new pumped hydro in the USA. I have posted about this on a different thread of the BNC Discussion Forum site.
Adam Leasays
119: The Green ideologues are insisting that everyone has to walk, bike or use “public transit” (which many people avoid because it is dangerous due to the criminal element having free rein). The ideologues say you have to accept a smaller, colder place in a city instead of a suburban house with a yard.”
That is something that needs to be rebuked, that travelling anywhere is dangerous unless you put yourself in a steel cage (car). If it is genuinely true in your country, then there are serious problems with your society that need addressing – now.
I strongly suspect the real truth is people use cars because it is the easiest option, not because of safety issues (which is an excuse attempting to justify their transport choice). In other words, a natural tendency to take the path of least resistance/energy expenditure.
Russell wrote:
Not a half-bad video, but it spends almost the entire talk on history and future problems. The only specific “repair” he talks about is ocean iron seeding. Okay, if we do that… we could just about balance our current annual emissions. Nothing about re-powering our civilization without GHG emissions.
Things like this make me shake my head in frustration.
(Yes, I’m back. Life has given me free time again.)
And back in August, Al Bundy wrote:
Nonsense. The Smith-Putnam wind turbine was rated at 1 megawatt and was commissioned in 1941 (a full year before Chicago Pile 1). It was built out of aluminum using standard aircraft methods.
It was shorted for repair materials due to the war effort and eventually threw a blade, but even after the war it was not repaired and recommissioned. Not economic. Wind wouldn’t be economic today either without tax credits, RECs and outright mandates.
The problem isn’t the PV generation. The problem is that we wouldn’t be able to run our society on it even if it was free. What you don’t understand is that THAT requires stockpiles of energy, which in our current system consists mostly of fossil fuels. Go re-read Roadmap to Nowhere, which you obviously still don’t get.
The truly hard part of running on “renewables” is buying and maintaining enough storage to get through the periods when it is NOT generating. PHS is land-hungry and requires massive amounts of fresh water. Batteries are very expensive and wear out rapidly. I’ve seen stuff about Liquid Air Energy Storage but Highview Power is claiming a storage (not capital) cost around 14¢/kWh. I’d love to see how that cost breaks down.
Then you’ve got everything that is NOT electric. Transport. Industrial process heat. We could easily build nuclear container ships, you know. I think it’s long past time we did.
IAT:
For implicitly inflated values of ‘many’. Actual numbers are more interesting, albeit not necessarily probative. According to a recent poll:
IAT:
What’s this ‘we’ business? Unless you’re referring to imaginary friends, you may be overpluralizing (h/t Hank Roberts). Because it sure looks like you’re making this stuff up. Your strawmen are as silly as always. Just how do you know that Greta and AOC are “terrified and actually believe that we’re doomed unless the governent takes over everything”? Don’t you think that’s a little hyperbolic? Once you’ve clarified ‘terrified’ (heh), tell us how many people “like” them you imagine there are. Got any numbers we can compare? Hmmmm?
IAT:
Jokes signify, you bald-faced bigot. Damn, you’re smooth 8^|.
Talk about discriminating, y’all: Danyoung Kim of the New Yorker credits Bernie Sanders with putting the ‘social’ in ‘socialism’. From a Talk of the Town piece about a new dating app for leftists called RedYenta:
I’ll take that poll with a grain of salt too, but whatever. RedYenta is intended to facilitate assortative mating by cultural identity in 21st Century American Homo sapiens, resulting in fewer couples like Mary Matalin and James Carville. I’m not sure that’s good for the country; not that I have any say in the matter, of course.
Mr. Know It All @94
“None denies CC. Many, based on past history of climate, and the uncertainties in the science, just don’t believe it’s man-made. ”
This is still denialism. This is the core issue and its been well demonstrated by the IPCC that virtually all of the warming since the 1970’s is due to human activities. The evidence is overwhelming and multifaceted, and when explanations are so powerful like that scientists tend to form a consensus.
In my experience most of the people attacking agw science disclose vested interests, or a dislike of government involvement in mitigation so its pretty obvious why they attack the science. Its not genuine doubts about the science, its politically motivated doubts.
“1960s – population bomb will cause us to starve”
And it will cause some real problems for humanity if we don’t get numbers down, but rates of growth have been falling since the 1970’s. The problem has mostly been solved by the demographic transition and government policies, because population on current trends will plateau by 2100 and those numbers can be coped with although it would help if population plateaued before this.
“1970s – ice age will cause us to starve”
This is total nonsense. Most research at the time suggested the climate would warm. A few scientists predicted cooling and got media time but there was never a consensus climate would cool. I still have a physical geography text from the 1970’s so I know these things. Refer also:
https://skepticalscience.com/ice-age-predictions-in-1970s.htm
“1980s – AGW will cause us to starve”
Strawman. Nobody has claimed this, but it will reduce crop production and malnutrition in plenty of places.
“Many people like Greta and AOC, are terrified and actually believe that we’re doomed unless the government takes over everything. ”
Greta has never said that to my knowledge, and although she is very motivating she is not in control of policy. Most people do not believe the government should take over everything (including me). You are talking about a fringe element.
“When the left figures out that a man and a woman are not the same thing, and they use different restrooms, we may pay some attention to their “communication”.”
Irrelevant, stupid rubbish that has no place on this website.
I’m being tough on you because I think you know better. I mean I really do hope you know better.
Oh curse my impatience, and the typos. Correction: “but it (climate change) will reduce crop production and cause malnutrition in plenty of places.”
The physical geography text I have from the late 1970s is Atmosphere, Weather and Climate by Barry and Chorley. The chapter on climate change talks about evidence that CO2 causes warming, and may have caused part of the warming early last century, and talked about the cooling period from the 1940s to the 1970s, and said they were uncertain what is causing that cooling period, but they never mentioned that it would continue and the overall theme was that future warming was possible. The book never mentioned any consensus that cooling would continue, or anything like that. If there was a consensus, they would have stated this.
95 – Mark US
“USED LABCOATS NEEDED ASAP…”
Found it for ya:
https://www.amazon.com/Fun-Costumes-Boys-Straight-Jacket/dp/B012YIEVTG/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=straight+jackets&psc=1&qid=1571261405&sr=8-2
:)
BPL wrote:
Show me where anyone has made it produce electric power, and maintained the output. Even the natural resource at The Geysers in California has depleted quite a bit, the plant losing half its output since it was new.
Hot rock, wet or dry, is just not a very dense source of energy. Rock typically holds about 1 kJ/kg-K; reduce its temp by 200 K and you get 200 kJ. Heating value of coal used by the US electric sector is about 18.9 million BTU per short ton, or about 22 MJ/kg… and you can have it brought to the plant, you don’t have to build the plant on top of it and move the plant when it’s depleted.
Nuclear fuel at a burnup of 35,000 megawatt-days per ton yields about 3 MILLION MJ/kg, 7 orders of magnitude more than your hot rock. The irony is your hot dry rock scheme might very well dissolve and extract more energy as uranium than you get from the hot water. The radon in the natural gas from the Marcellus shale shows that there is a great deal of uranium there. It would be a huge energy resource if it can be produced.
Al Bundy wrote:
Even if that steel is not usable for consumer products, why do you think it could not be recycled into new nuclear reactors? As steel mills go robotic, you won’t even have worker radiation exposure to worry about if you use ex-reactor scrap as raw material.
“Beneath a roof and with its shadow spins”
Better:
Between a roof and its shadow spins.
Few translators seem to realize that a good translation must above all either make sense or make poetry in the target language.
I hate to cite Mr. Know It All, but credit where credit is due:
1. He cited a source.
2. The source spoke an honest truth (indisputable that e.g. France has vastly better climate performance than “green” Germany().
3. That truth is contrary to Green dogma.
We honestly have SOMETHING THAT IS PROVEN TO WORK. We should do a lot more of that RIGHT NOW, before we place any serious bets on anything that is NOT proven.
nigelj wrote:
The capacity factor of the wind farms in my state, based on average production divided by nameplate rating, is 18%. We do not have a “last 10% problem” here. We have a “last 82% problem”.
The nuclear plant in my state that is scheduled to shut down provides more energy than all the state’s wind farms. Closing it will be a huge step backwards for the climate, yet “environmentalists” are applauding it. Citizen’s Climate Lobby has made no attempt to save this plant. (Understand why I hold both “greens” and CCL in contempt now?)
If this truly matters, the people who wrote the policies which put Kewaunee, Vermont Yankee, Ft. Calhoun, San Onofre, Three Mile Island, and shortly several more out of business should be tried for crimes against humanity. And so should their political donors.
Batteries are orders of magnitude too costly to do anything more than buffer transients between cycles and a few tens of minutes. To manage serious supply/demand mismatches, we need things like 200-hour heat banks and storable chemical fuels. Electric batteries are costly and wear out fast, molten salts are cheap and can last many years with a bit of top-up from e.g. nitric acid. A tank for combustible liquid fuels can last decades; the tank farms at petroleum terminals certainly do.
One of the essentials for a climate-friendly economy is not having to expend much energy/carbon rebuilding your worn-out stuff all that frequently.
Barton Paul Levinson wrote:
Nuclear is the ONLY energy source which has nigh-completely decarbonized a minority-hydro electric grid, and in multiple cases it has decarbonized several times faster than today’s “renewables” are doing… despite several decades more experience that the “renewables” can exploit.
Finland is contracting for a new VVER, I recall a Baltic doing something similar, China and the UAE are still going, and Vogtle remains a going concern even in the USA.
Finland and the USA are totalitarian countries now? Nice to have you admit it. Does that mean I can start shooting commissars and the Cheka? (not sure if I’m serious or not, ask me in a week.)
Outstanding video: “HOW DARE YOU: 10 reasons not to believe climate change criers | Liz Wheeler LIVE at the Reagan Ranch”.
All 47 minutes, 20 seconds are excellent.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-qBOyrD0-0
Liz Wheeler does not talk about science, but sows suspicion on people she disagrees with. No respect. Propaganda based on caricature, cherry picking. So sad. Crazy conspiracy theory about “scientists … these people from NASA … part of the movement”. The USA used to be better than that. The view of the USA from Europe is a bit disturbing. What’s happening over there?
Re 96 Nemesis said @nigelj, #93
” It’s important to try to get society more sustainable, and I have a reasonably low carbon footprint, but I’m not into turning environmentalism into a religion, or seeking impossibly perfect solutions or perfect levels of sustainability.I simply don’t think such things make much sense.”
Good luck.
He still doesn’t get the difference between what he wants/wishes/whines/is politically acceptable and…
Nature. Math. Science.
He thinks an elephant can literally be squished through the eye of a needle and still come out the others side the way it went in.
2+2 does not equal 4.
Sadly, he’s far from the only one.
This is why H.R.C. ‘lost’?
“And it’s deadly. Doubtless, Crosscheck delivered Michigan to Trump who supposedly “won” the state by 10,700 votes. The Secretary of State’s office proudly told me that they were “very aggressive” in removing listed voters before the 2016 election. Kobach, who created the lists for his fellow GOP officials, tagged a whopping 417,147 in Michigan as potential double voters.”
http://www.gregpalast.com/trump-picks-al-capone-vote-rigging-investigate-federal-voter-fraud/
E-P,
Threats of violence transmitted over the internet are a violation of the Electronics Security Act of 1983 (the Helms Act) and are punishable by fines and/or imprisonment. Watch your mouth.
nigelj wrote:
Here’s the thing: it doesn’t need to lead to more than minimal lifestyle changes (carbon taxes and business regs, sure). I’ve lived with hot-water heat; it’s quieter than gas forced air. I’m in my 7th year of living with a plug-in hybrid car, and it’s GREAT!
But that’s not how it’s being pitched to the public. The Green ideologues are insisting that everyone has to walk, bike or use “public transit” (which many people avoid because it is dangerous due to the criminal element having free rein). The ideologues say you have to accept a smaller, colder place in a city instead of a suburban house with a yard.
The ideologues demand an end to fossil fuels, but consider nuclear energy anathema.
The ideologues are the loud ones and are the public face of things like the “Green New Deal”. This is tailor-made to polarize the electorate and alienate the bulk of it. Cui bono? The fossil-fuel interests, that’s who. If you could expose the actual donors of the money that gets laundered through foundations and trusts and winds up financing “Greens”, I’m certain that you’d find a lot of it coming from oil and gas interests. An ARCO exec bankrolled anti-nuclear Friends of the Earth; this has always been the case.
EP said:
This is distinct from Friends Of Science based out of Calgary who claim tar sand mining and more CO2 is good for the Earth.
@Killian, #116
After all:
All rational arguments are futile when it comes to fundamentally criticizing capitalism in a capitalist system, hehe. Wasn’t it exactly the same in communist systems, when it came to criticizing communism in communist systems?^^ Yes, it was, hehe. The sheeples just LOVE capitalism, they love making funny money and they love to consume, consume, consume ever more as that’s just their definition of “freedom” and “progress”, bwahaha, it’s their RELIGION (credit goes to nigelj for that telling term^^, hehe).
Just lay back and relax, we gotta wait until capitalism falls, just like communism fell, hehe. Let’s trust in gravity, it never fails.
In the meantime let’s have some fun:
“What’s wrong with capitalism (Part I) | ContraPoints”
https://youtu.be/gJW4-cOZt8A
“What’s wrong with capitalism (Part II) | ContraPoints”
https://youtu.be/AR7ryg1w_IQ
Mr. KIA:
1960s – population bomb will cause us to starve
You really are oblivious to the fact that it was frigging scientists who pulled us out of the frigging soup on that one, aren’t you? I mean, in the 1960s famine was a common occurrence in India and much of the developing world. In effect, we survive now because scientists figured out a way to turn petroleum into corn, soy, wheat and rice!
1970s – ice age will cause us to starve
Imbecile, this was never a mainstream view. Yes, there were those who were concerned about aerosols generating cooling–especially in tandem with the fact that Milankovitch cycles were shifting to the cooling phase. The reason they were wrong is that they underestimated CO2’s ability to heat the atmosphere. Nice own-goal there, buckwheat.
1980s – AGW will cause us to starve
And it may well still. The fact that your attention span is measured in minutes does not mean that all effects play out on that scale.
1990s to now – today it’s climate change and no matter what happens we will starve
No, only if we are stupid–and the fact we have people like you voting doesn’t fill me with hope.
Perhaps you would care less about which rest rooms people use if you were not so full of shit!
111 – E-P
Thanks for your informative comments on nuclear. If CO2 is a problem, then nuclear could save us until something better comes along. There are instances where solar makes sense – that’s great.
Roof-top solar is good for those who want it and can afford it, but in cold climates they will need to “burn” something for heat (wood, FFs, atoms, cow farts, Adam Schiff mouth effluent, etc). :) In the northern hemisphere winter, it’s cold and dark around 16 hours per day, or more – that is a YUGE problem. Large wind turbines kill birds. It’s interesting to look at rooftops on Google Earth to see how many homes have rooftop solar. Look in areas with the most sun, the most money, and the most “greenies” – Beverly Hills, other areas in Southern California, etc. I did not do any calcs, but it might be something like 5 to 10%. I’d love to have an off-grid system, but $$.
Your comment about hot water heating is correct. You can move a lot more heat with a pump than with a fan for the same energy cost. Hot water baseboard is very efficient in cold climates. You can’t afford the cost to store enough heat for a week-long cloudy period when it’s 0F outside unless you are talking about a building designed and built specifically for doing that – typical home, WAY too much $$.
115 – rasmus
“… The view of the USA from Europe is a bit disturbing. What’s happening over there?”
The lessons of history are written on the tombstones of others. 2 points if you can cite the source for that. We know, with 100% certainty based on history, the misery that results from socialism. We’ve had to save the butts of Europeans before due to it. SOME OF US learn from history. Do you?
Engineer-Poet:
Ah, the good ol’ “straw man” rhetorical tactic: blame the moderate supporters of a policy proposal for cardboard cutouts [block that metaphor! MA] of the most radical ones. It’s the loudmouths who get the public’s attention. That doesn’t mean they speak for anyone but themselves. Talk is cheap. In the US, it’s free! We can’t stop ideologues from talking even if we want to.
Anyway, ideological posturing looks pretty silly when you recognize that AGW is affecting literally everyone on Earth one way or another. Admittedly, it’s worked for the Republican party for at least 16 years, but the money is on their side (or is their side). At least some fossil-carbon money recognizes its revenue streams will end eventually, but is determined to be the near-term ‘winner’. Yet climate change won’t have any winners, only relative losers. In a global scope, all costs are internal. How hard can that be to understand? Climate realists, at least yours truly ;^), simply acknowledge AGW as a collective, existential threat overshadowing particular agendas, and wish progress to be made on decarbonizing the global economy as fast as feasible. It’s a historical accident that voting for Democrats is presently my obvious choice.
Look, capping the warming inescapably requires some form of collective action, hence the Drama of the Commons. Republicans haven’t always been dogmatically opposed to collective action per se, and some who weren’t are still eligible to vote (they may be ex-Republicans, however). There’s no reason why it has to be one big collective action, if smaller-scale actions add up to enough. Smaller collective decisions are easier, though they still must be judicious. Encourage ‘natural’ gas production to replace coal, or corn ethanol to replace gasoline? False economies. Eliminate subsidies for all energy sources, not just fossil fuels? Now you’re talking, but directly subsidizing alternative technologies like rooftop solar and distributed storage could help achieve a lower GMST at equilibrium: let’s pencil it out honestly. Place a market price on fossil carbon emissions? Duh, although not just any old implementation. Include beef in a carbon price? A good enough reason to reduce my beefeatin’. Stop leasing public lands for fuel production and grazing at an aggregate loss? Works out in the math. Build more nuclear power plants? Okay, if the full risks and costs are commensurated first. Ramp up renewable energy? Yah shoor yoo betcha, bearing TANSTAAFL in mind. Net metering? ‘Smart’ grids? Fossil-fuel industry worker retraining with full buy-outs? Yes, yes, yes.
I for one wouldn’t require them all up front, however. I want whatever will cost-effectively (when full costs, benefits, risks and rewards are honestly counted) decrement the rate of warming, and at least compensate for foreclosing anything else that would help! I’m not necessarily opposed to certain sweeping changes, mind you. I want as much social justice as I can get. At a minimum, that issue underlies the specific causes of global warming. There’ll be time to keep pushing for it iff[sic] we fend off this freaking metaphorical world-eating monster that showed up about 30 years ago. Good grief! Pardon my privilege, but resisting the accelerating depauperation of Earth’s biosphere, still so lovely, so rich with diverse life including my own, feels to me like the line worth dying on. It may be a rear-guard action at best, but it buys time!
No proposal will ever be supported by everyone in all its details. Fortunately (relatively speaking), public decisions in the US ‘merely’ require a plurality. If you don’t like the GND, give us something we can literally live with. Be sure to make your case with numbers. Buy us time.
Killian @116 says “He still doesn’t get the difference between what he wants/wishes/whines/is politically acceptable and…Nature. Math. Science.”
I get the difference. Our technology based society isn’t sustainable leaving future civilisation to have to eventually adopt a more basic form of life. Killians solution is he wants us to conserve resources by living like aboriginees or as close as we can reasonably get.
I subscribe to the more mainstream compromise solution where we waste less, recycle more and get population down, use public transport, and have zero gdp growth, but we maintain plenty of technology. If we still run out of resources, and so have to become like aboriginees, I dont understand why this worries Killian because he keeps telling us how great they are.
Engineer-Poet @112, an 18% wind farm capacity factor is rather low. We do better. But go nuclear if you want. I just really struggle to take sides too much on this nuclear power issue. It’s not fence sitting, because civilisation has long had a mix of electricity generating systems and simple, singular idealistic solutions don’t grab me much.
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Engineer Poet @119, I agree lifestyle changes don’t have to be unpleasant or difficult, and can end up saving money in many cases. EV’s save money in the long run, so does a well insulated home, solar roof panels, and cutting air travel.
“The Green ideologues are insisting that everyone has to walk, bike or use “public transit” (which many people avoid because it is dangerous due to the criminal element having free rein). ”
Well they dont. They suggest these things are better, and they also include the EV option in my country at least. I suspect one green lobby group has been a bit strident and so you are generalising.
I doubt that many green lobby groups knowingly or willingly take fossil fuel money. You would need to provide robust proof.
Killian @95 says that everyone with some moderate scepticism about climate change and who tries to not be a total twit is a concern troll apparently. I dont think thats always the case. Some are, some aren’t.
Scepticism is on a continuum or spectrum, shades of grey. The people like DDS and KIA are at the extreme end, and a total pain and the kneck at times but not everyone is the same. DDS plays the conern troll game sometimes.
No wonder America is having a tribal war, with people with that get so paranoid about sceptics and start to see anyone remotely sceptical as evil, and others so paranoid about warmists.
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Killian @96, fine you are not authoriatarian. My typo. Let me clarify what I really meant. You are bossy, and also highly personally abusive, egotistical, and have a very inflated opinion of yourself. You prove this everytime you write things. It’s quite comical at times.
What ideology do you think I have? You wont find a less ideologial person than me. I’m politically centrist, said it before.
“Don’t you? You can’t quit me, Brokeback.”
I have totally ignored you for months and only replied because you addressed a comment specifically at me.
Some months back you said you were never going to reply to any of my posts again. That didn’t last long did it. So YOU cant quit ME. Once again you are confused as to the facts.
Engineer-Poet @102 says renewables need a lot of storage. Australia is building a lot of wind and solar power with a lot of pumped hydro storage with a lot more planned as below. They are not the most enthusiastic country about mitigation (they have a lot of coal)so probably wouldn’t be doing this if it wasn’t economic.
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2019/03/26/pumped-hydro-to-triple-australias-storage-capacity/
Of course their topography probably suits this, but parts of America must be the same surely?
Engineer Poet @119. “The ideologues are the loud ones and are the public face of things like the “Green New Deal”. This is tailor-made to polarize the electorate and alienate the bulk of it. Cui bono?”
Some of the social provisions should have been kept out of the GND climate plan. But the electorate is already polarised. It can’t get much worse, and the fact is carbon taxes dont stand a chance in a country like America with such an anti tax ideology, so governmnet spending like the GND may be the only viable option. Print a bit of money you have done plenty of that lately.
“The IPCC report that the Paris agreement based its projections on considered over 1,000 possible scenarios. Of those, only 116 (about 10%) limited warming below 2C. Of those, only 6 kept global warming below 2C without using negative emissions. So roughly 1% of the IPCC’s projected scenarios kept warming below 2C without using negative emissions technology like BECCS. And Kevin Anderson, former head of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, has pointed out that those 6 lone scenarios showed global carbon emissions peaking in 2010. Which obviously hasn’t happened.
So from the IPCC’s own report in 2014, we basically have a 1% chance of staying below 2C global warming if we now invent time travel and go back to 2010 to peak our global emissions. And again, you have to stop all growth and go into decline to do that. And long term feedbacks the IPCC largely blows off were ongoing back then too.”
https://www.facebook.com/wxclimonews/posts/455366638536345
Maybe there can be change?
“Today’s global consumption of fossil fuels now stands at roughly five times what it was in the 1950s, and one-and-half times that of the 1980s when the science of global warming had already been confirmed and accepted by governments with the implication that there was an urgent need to act. Tomes of scientific studies have been logged in the last several decades documenting the deteriorating biospheric health, yet nothing substantive has been done to curtail it. More CO2 has been emitted since the inception of the UN Climate Change Convention in 1992 than in all of human history. CO2 emissions are 55% higher today than in 1990. Despite 20 international conferences on fossil fuel use reduction and an international treaty that entered into force in 1994, manmade greenhouse gases have risen inexorably.”
https://medium.com/@xraymike79/the-inconvenient-truth-of-modern-civilizations-inevitable-collapse-8e83df6f3a57
” . . . the writer is not making common cause with right-wing reactionary criticisms of Thunberg and unpleasant attacks on the young woman from a personalized “hater” perspective but instead offers a savvy critique of monopoly capitalism and the contemporary network of non-profit agencies, lenders, military equipment suppliers, and deep state agencies that has cooperated on such projects as selling wars around the planet and making perpetual war a reality, expanding the surveillance state to Orwellian proportions, installing an explicitly Neo Nazi government in Ukraine, and a fascist government in Honduras (note that eight out of ten asylum seekers who show up a the US-Mexico border are from that country), . . . ”
https://solarian.ca/a-defence-of-cory-morningstar/?fbclid=IwAR3j9Xw–15uMuh6-OxVlDhwQuf88tKoyidIPw8llnkewqCvkqxWoVS2rJo
E-P 102: Wind wouldn’t be economic today either without tax credits, RECs and outright mandates.
BPL: It’s cheaper than fossil fuels now even without subsidies. I’ll eliminate all subsidies for wind if you eliminate all subsidies for fossil fuels and nukes.
E-P 108: Hot rock, wet or dry, is just not a very dense source of energy.
BPL: Who the hell cares how “dense” it is? I don’t power my car or my house on “dense” energy.
E-P 112: The capacity factor of the wind farms in my state, based on average production divided by nameplate rating, is 18%. We do not have a “last 10% problem” here. We have a “last 82% problem”.
BPL: You are conflating the capacity factor of a plant with the energy mix. Go back and read what he wrote again.
E-P 119: The Green ideologues are insisting that everyone has to walk, bike or use “public transit” (which many people avoid because it is dangerous due to the criminal element having free rein).
BPL: You mean black people? You keep circling around back to that, don’t you? Here’s a hint for future reference: Nobody cares about your racism. BTW, I use public transit often.
Killed In Action 120: Roof-top solar is good for those who want it and can afford it, but in cold climates they will need to “burn” something for heat
BPL: You do know that cold climates are cold because they are tilted more away from the sun and that the tilt of a solar panel can be adjusted for latitude, don’t you?
EP says: “Here’s the thing: it doesn’t need to lead to more than minimal lifestyle changes (carbon taxes and business regs, sure). I’ve lived with hot-water heat; it’s quieter than gas forced air. I’m in my 7th year of living with a plug-in hybrid car, and it’s GREAT!”
BBC Chief Environmental Correspondent Justin Rowlatt sees things a little differently. I guess Justin is the ideologue and EP is the voice of reason?
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-49997755?utm_campaign=RevueCBWeeklyBriefing&utm_medium=email&utm_source=Revue%20newsletter
headline in the beeb: Climate change: Big lifestyle changes are the only answer
I find the beeb to be pretty mainstream in their reporting and editorial choices.
I have no doubt that time will prove that Justin is correct and that EP is wrong. I can wait that out. It’s going to happen.
Warm regards
Mike
Been little-connected, the last few weeks, with a couple more of that to go.
Whole lot of ‘ho-hum’ going on, apparently. Ah, well. See you again in a bit…
#120, KIA–
No, it can’t, for reasons already discussed at length–EP’s failure to accept evident reality notwithstanding.
Plus, that’s a seriously bogus “if clause.”
125 – nigelj
Hydropower in the USA:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroelectric_power_in_the_United_States
“Another application of hydroelectricity is Pumped-storage hydroelectricity which does not create a net gain in power but enables peak demand balancing.”
126 – nigelj
“Some of the social provisions should have been kept out of the GND climate plan. But the electorate is already polarised. It can’t get much worse, and the fact is carbon taxes dont stand a chance in a country like America with such an anti tax ideology, so governmnet spending like the GND may be the only viable option. Print a bit of money you have done plenty of that lately.”
1 – It can get A LOT worse. It has in the past – see 1861-1865.
2 – Some US states have enacted carbon taxes.
3 – So, AOC’s $93 trillion is what you refer to as “a bit of money”? Got it.
Mr. Know It All @120, wind, solar and geothermal power and nuclear power are obviously all low carbon. Which is best probably depends entirely on local geography and societies attitudes, and concerns about safety. Anyone with any sense would be cautious about nuclear power given its history, and it needs to be well regulated, but it has its place.
Actually rooftop solar works well in many cold climates even in winter as below in Norway. It would be enough to power a heat pump. It would obviously not provide enough electric heating in the very coldest northern climates.
https://phys.org/news/2018-03-solar-cells-nordic-climate.html
Do appreciate wind power kills far fewer birds than domestic cats and cell towers.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2014/09/15/wind-turbines-kill-fewer-birds-than-cell-towers-cats/15683843/
Mal Adapted wrote a bunch of stuff I consider partly or wholly mistaken:
The most straightforward and hard-to-game, the better.
Why do that? Cattle may generate methane, but they are also one of the few ways to produce food from permaculture grasslands. Regenerating grasslands may be one of our best options for sequestering atmospheric carbon as soil-building glomalin.
A great deal of that “public” land was legitimately homesteaded a century ago, until the Feds re-declared itself owner contrary to the Homestead Act and without compensation. Most if not all BLM land in active use should be ceded to the lessees and BLM should shrink in authority and manpower accordingly.
Oddly specific. “Full risks and costs” should be evaluated for everything.
Only worthwhile if it is displacing more-polluting energy. But if e.g. wind is forcing nuclear plants to be turned down, with gas plants filling in for the new gaps left by the loss of nuclear base load, more renewables are WORSE in all respects: higher cost, higher emissions, stranded assets.
There are some very obvious (well, to me) ways to use the intermittent generation of wind and PV a lot better. I’ve not seen them so much as proposed, even in California which has been paying Arizona to take its excess power on an increasing number of days each year. Something funny’s going on.
Schemes with massive cost-transfers to other parties are abominations, and net metering is one of them. It pays the net-meterer for the costs of transmission and grid maintenance, instead of the net-meterer paying to transmit power as they ought to. It doesn’t ask the net-meterer to pay for the cost of intermittency. It doesn’t account for the depression of wholesale prices during peak generating hours, grossly over-paying the net-meterer for what they put on the grid.
Smart grids present massive new vulnerabilties, plus the parasitic power consumption of the “brains” and their comm systems. This is a scheme we are going to regret.
The one thing I could agree with is re-training FF workers. Let them be rare-earth and actinide miners, pulling these essential elements out of acid mine drainage and coal-ash dumps. They’d produce significant amounts of resources like iron and nickel in the process. What we need is methods of doing the energy-intensive processing with off-peak energy, and also a system of environmental credits to properly account for the remediation of toxic hazards.
Is there not a ban on discussing nuclear on this site?
I’m all for enforcing that.
@nigelj, #122
Technology isn’t bad per se, it’s just a question of how to use or abuse it. Technology will never ever save us from greed and ignorance (these are ethical, not technological problems) within a materialist society.
Capitalism is driven by greed, greed for more and ever more, they call it “growth”, but wtf about growing up as individuals, as a society, as a human race? There will be no survival without growing up inside and that has almost nothing to do with technology:
The materialist worldview is a failure, a mistake, a prescription for total desaster.
nigelj writes:
Apparently, this is being done in the few places where there are two freshwater (can’t use seawater without contaminating groundwater) reservoirs relatively close by with a large ΔH between them (for Snowy 2.0 it’s 700 meters):
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-49202175
The escalating price tag for Snowy 2.0 apparently is attracting strong opposition. Further, what happens if there isn’t enough water to keep the reservoirs full? Suddenly you have power reliability problems too. This is a recipe for cascading system collapse. And cost… from your link:
That’s not the price tag for generating power. That’s for a transmission line just to move it. True, it’s an under-sea link but such things are not all that cheap even overland.
The places with plenty of both slope and water tend to be in the Pacific northwest. People there are already asking for existing dams to be removed; massive new reservoirs (upper AND lower, unless you can rely upon river flows to supply your pumps) would go over like lead balloons.
I’m fairly familiar with the PHS plant at Ludington. Originally specced at 1872 MW(e), its pump-turbines are being upgraded to 2172 MW(e) (312 up to 362 MW each x 6 units). Efficiency has been increased a bit. By comparison, even the upgraded Ludington does not match the nameplate rating of the 4 nuclear power plants in the state, let alone all the fossil capacity.
Michigan just isn’t that good for wind. Wikipedia gives 5330 GWh of generation in 2018, an average of 608.4 MW. Out of 1925 MW nameplate, this is a capacity factor of just 31.6% (2016 appears to have been an exceptionally bad year). And of course with high latitude and clouds, Michigan is pretty lousy for solar as well. Solar is almost a total loss in winter.
The Palisades nuclear plant at South Haven is rated at 805 MW(e). It generates more emissions-free electricity than all the wind farms and PV in the state put together, and there are 2 more reactors at the Cook plant and a fourth at Fermi II on Lake Erie. So guess what’s scheduled to shut down?
nigelj wrote:
Some of them? Try “all of them”. But these people cannot resist any opportunity to grab more power. It is Not Who They Are.
Don’t say that. Things can ALWAYS get worse, and they will get worse before there’s any chance of them getting better. The crazy behavior of the globalists and their NPC pawns guarantees it.
People who are doing much worse than their parents and grandparents are understandably reluctant to vote to pay more taxes, especially for the benefit of people who had no part in building what this country was… but are responsible in no small part for their own poor prospects.
I recently voted in a tax election. Two millages were on the ballot. One was for farmlands purchase/preservation, I forget what the other one was. I looked at the hikes proposed and calculated what they would cost me personally, and voted “NO” on both. Too much for too little. Both millages failed.
Another millage not too long ago was for improvements to the schools. Most of it was earmarked for athletics, so I voted no; this district needs much more concentration on academics. That millage passed, but from what I’m hearing about the “student” body having lots of children of illegal aliens, the next one might not. Who wants to pay taxes for children who have no business being here?
You can print money, but you can’t print steel or cement or oil or any of the things to buy with it. To print money is to steal wealth from the people who worked to create it. If you do too much of this you become another Zimbabwe. Incidentally, Zimbabwe is doing it again. I am looking forward to being able to buy a stack of million or trillion-dollar bills to use as gag gifts. I missed my last chance to get them cheap but it won’t be too long.
37 Steve Dombroski
“Its a shame when a scientist researches and explains his findings and is willing to put it out for pier review.” Judging by quality indeed many works are reviewed by random people on the Santa Monica Pier.
48 Ray Ladbury
Please watch your language many alarmists (not just Greta) have minds of children.
Me:
To be fair to Engineer-Poet, he’s given us “build more nukes” with some numbers. I’m skeptical he’s honestly accounted for all costs as well as perceived benefits, bearing in mind there are no externalities in the scope of the biosphere. Those would include the costs of overcoming political resistance. To be sure, the broader problem of decarbonization encounters the same challenges. One difference is that broad decarbonization requires collective (usually government), while specific investments in the energy market are made privately. Our ire is properly directed at fossil-fuel investors, who’ve successfully re-invested a fraction of their annual profits in official denial of anthropogenic climate change. Political opposition, from any source, specifically to nuclear power doesn’t get the full resources of the Koch Klub. In the medium-to-long term, E-P’s best bet would be to support a collectively-imposed carbon price, then interest investors in nuclear projects once a corrected price signal is in place.
OTOH, E-P’s explicit ‘contempt’ for ‘”greens”‘ in general and Citizens’ Climate Lobby in particular raises a red flag. He’s punching cardboard cutouts [gotta love metaphor. MA]. James Hansen, who is on CCL’s advisory board, prominently co-wrote an Op-Ed in the Guardian during COP21, calling for nuclear in the carbon-neutral mix. That’s nonetheless tangential to CCL’s goal, which is to enact legislation imposing a carbon price similar to revenue-neutral national Carbon Fee and Dividend with Border Adjustment Tariff, leaving investment decisions to the energy market once that’s in place. Their strategy is to work levers of political will. Propping up individual power plants isn’t in their brief, for cryin’ out loud! Perhaps E-P is merely working those levers on RC ;^), on behalf of nuclear power. IMHO it doesn’t appear he’s actually trying to help with decarbonization, however. He’s already got a blog to prosecute his particular agenda, but talk is cheap. His next step might be to set up a lobbying organization, whether for- or non-profit. He may notice his low ROI here anyway, eventually.
Drat. “broad decarbonization requires collective (usually government) intervention in ‘free’ (of collective intervention) markets, while specific investments in the energy market are made privately.”
nigelj @125 — the post just prior to http://bravenewclimate.proboards.com/thread/678/australian-grid?page=3#post-6013
leads one to an article on the controversy over Snowy 2.0 due to it’s ever growing cost estimate. The article you linked stated nothing about the costs of the various schemes.
Yes, there are suitable sites in the USA, but there is no one willing to fund new pumped hydro in the USA. I have posted about this on a different thread of the BNC Discussion Forum site.
119: The Green ideologues are insisting that everyone has to walk, bike or use “public transit” (which many people avoid because it is dangerous due to the criminal element having free rein). The ideologues say you have to accept a smaller, colder place in a city instead of a suburban house with a yard.”
That is something that needs to be rebuked, that travelling anywhere is dangerous unless you put yourself in a steel cage (car). If it is genuinely true in your country, then there are serious problems with your society that need addressing – now.
I strongly suspect the real truth is people use cars because it is the easiest option, not because of safety issues (which is an excuse attempting to justify their transport choice). In other words, a natural tendency to take the path of least resistance/energy expenditure.