Month: May 2023

Daily News 10 May 2023

That’s Entertainment?

There was a time when going to the pictures was a treat. We went there to be entertained, to have fun, and to indulge in a bit of escapism. Not any more.

This week I received an email from my local small theatre and occasional cinema, inviting me to attend a couple of screenings. The first title didn’t exactly send my pulse racing: “Thriving – A Journey into Regenerative Farming”:

By visiting farmers who are adopting regenerative practices along the route Clare wanted to see firsthand how people are simultaneously producing food whilst boosting biodiversity and mitigating climate change.

I can’t wait. And the Q&A session afterwards sounds fun…

The second film, however, really plumbs the depths of misery. “Finite -The Climate of Change”. It’s about as interesting and escapist as one might expect from something which – as the email tells me – “…is organised by a group of local climate change activists and is sponsored by Friends of the Earth and Extinction Rebellion North Lakes.”

There is an extensive write-up to encourage us to attend, though it didn’t do it for me:

Inside the core of the climate movement, concerned citizens in Germany put their bodies on the line to save the ancient Hambach forest from one of Europe’s biggest coal mines. Every year since the 1970s, a section of the forest has been cut by Europe’s biggest CO2 emitter, energy giant RWE. Now just 10% remains. Robin, Indigo and Clumsy are part of a secretive community of dedicated activists who have spent years living in self-built treehouses to halt the chainsaws. They are heading for a final showdown with RWE and the police to decide whether the forest is wiped off the map forever, or if the all powerful fossil fuel industry can be stopped before we fall off the cliff of climate breakdown. The activists form an unlikely alliance with a frustrated but tight-knit community in rural northeast England who have spent 30 years fighting plans for a new coal mine next to their homes. Julia, June and their neighbours have exhausted all legal avenues to protect the beautiful valley where their children grew up. With mining about to begin, the community feel they have no choice but to occupy the valley to halt work commencing.

FINITE is a cinematic, timely insider’s view of the world of direct action and climate activism; a raw, shocking, intimate and emotional insight into the David and Goliath battle between ordinary people and fossil fuel corporations. A localised chapter of the story that will define humanity. FINITE lays bare what the green leaders of the world are really doing to our natural environment but also how collective action can turn the tide against all odds.

After the film there will be a Q&A panel and a social with local and national climate activists.

It sounds a barrel of laughs. What worries me is that the organisers at my local theatre-cum-cinema think this is likely to be of interest and to generate a decent attendance. Even more worrying is the thought that others might agree and that the place might be full for the evening.

What with my local building society urging me to check the carbon footprint of my finances, my professional body demanding that I save the planet and my local library pushing climate change indoctrination at me we do seem to have entered a new age of Puritanism. Where did all the fun go?

Pass me the popcorn.

via Climate Scepticism

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May 10, 2023 at 09:06AM

Daily News 10 May 2023

“Real Men”

According to Liz Cheney, real men bomb children, wear masks and shoot their hunting partners in the face, 1:02 PM · Jun 26, 2020 Cheney shoots hunting partner – The Denver Post

via Real Climate Science

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May 10, 2023 at 08:49AM

Daily News 10 May 2023

The wind and solar power myth has finally been exposed

[image credit: latinoamericarenovable.com]

All the arguments here have been expressed elsewhere – usually by climate sceptics – many times, but now the national press is more willing to let the cat out of the bag. The basic problem for renewables is energy storage, or lack of it and as the Telegraph article says, ‘The necessary miracle doesn’t exist’.
– – –
Many governments in the Western world have committed to “net zero” emissions of carbon in the near future, says The Telegraph.

The US and UK both say they will deliver by 2050. It’s widely believed that wind and solar power can achieve this.

This belief has led the US and British governments, among others, to promote and heavily subsidise wind and solar.

These plans have a single, fatal flaw: they are reliant on the pipe-dream that there is some affordable way to store surplus electricity at scale.

In the real world a wind farm’s output often drops below 10 per cent of its rated “capacity” for days at a time. Solar power disappears completely every night and drops by 50 per cent or more during cloudy days.

“Capacity” being a largely meaningless figure for a wind or solar plant, about 3000 megawatts (MW) of wind and solar capacity is needed to replace a 1000 MW conventional power station in terms of energy over time: and in fact, as we shall see, the conventional power station or something very like it will still be needed frequently once the wind and solar are online.

The governments of countries with a considerable amount of wind and solar generation have developed an expectation that they can simply continue to build more until net zero is achieved. The reality is that many of them have kept the lights on only by using existing fossil fired stations as backup for periods of low wind and sun.

This brings with it a new operating regime where stations that were designed to operate continuously have to follow unpredictable fluctuations in wind and solar power. As a result operating and maintenance costs have increased and many stations have had to be shut down.

In fact it’s already common to see efficient combined-cycle gas turbines replaced by open-cycle ones because they can be throttled up and down easily to back up the rapidly changing output of wind and solar farms. But open-cycle gas turbines burn about twice as much gas as combined cycle gas turbines.

Switching to high-emissions machinery as part of an effort to reduce emissions is, frankly, madness!
. . .
Wind and solar need to be backed up, close to 100 per cent, by some other means of power generation. If that backup is provided by open-cycle gas or worse, coal, net zero will never be achieved: nor anything very close to it.

There is one technology that can provide a cheap and reliable supply of low-emissions electricity: nuclear power. Interest in nuclear power is increasing as more and more people realise that it is safe and reliable.

If regulators and the public could be persuaded that modern stations are inherently safe and that low levels of nuclear radiation are not dangerous, nuclear power could provide all the low cost, low emissions electricity the world needs for hundreds or thousands of years.

But if we had 100 per cent nuclear backup for solar and wind, we wouldn’t need the wind and solar plants at all.

Wind and solar are, in fact, completely pointless.

Full article here.

via Tallbloke’s Talkshop

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May 10, 2023 at 08:09AM

Daily News 10 May 2023

EV Illusions

By Paul Homewood

No one can really say whether widespread adoption of EVs will cut carbon emissions.

A dozen states have joined California and many countries in passing legislation to ban the sale of conventional cars and push everyone into electric vehicles (EVs), many within the decade. Similarly, in a feat of regulatory legerdemain, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has proposed emissions rules that would effectively require automakers to sell mostly EVs. And of course, the ill-named Inflation Reduction Act, a.k.a. the Green New Deal, gushes subsidies across the EV ecosystem.
The rush to subsidize and mandate EVs is animated by a fatal conceit: the assumption that they will radically reduce CO2 emissions. That assumption is embedded orthodoxy not just among green pundits and administrators of the regulatory state but also among EV critics, who take issue with a forced transition mainly on grounds of lost freedoms, costs, and market distortions.
But the truth is, because of the nature of uncertainties in global industrial ecosystems, no one really knows how much widespread adoption of EVs could reduce emissions, or whether they might even increase them. (And no, this has nothing to do with the truth / joke that Teslas are coal-fired when fueled at night in many places.) While grid realities will indeed matter more than most realize, the relevant and surprising emissions wildcard comes from the gargantuan, energy-hungry processes needed to make EV batteries. This is one of those technical issues that tends to attract slogans, simplifications, and illusions of accuracy; a better understanding requires some patience.
EV emissions realities start with physics. To match the energy stored in one pound of oil requires 15 pounds of lithium battery, which in turn entails digging up about 7,000 pounds of rock and dirt to get the minerals needed—lithium, graphite, copper, nickel, aluminum, zinc, neodymium, manganese, and so on. Thus, fabricating a typical, single half-ton EV battery requires mining and processing about 250 tons of materials. (These figures hold roughly true for all lithium chemistries.) For the carbon-counters tracking such things, the global mining and minerals sector uses 40 percent of all industrial energy—dominated by oil, coal, and natural gas—and that’s before we take into consideration the massive expansion that would be required to supply all the battery factories planned for widespread EV adoption.
The inherent uncertainties about calculating real-world EV emissions arise from myriad “known unknowns” about mining and refining activities. Those all happen elsewhere, upstream, before assembly at a battery or EV factory—that is, before the first mile driven on a grid-supplied kilowatt-hour. Of course, a conventional car also has upstream emissions, though these derive mainly from steel and iron, which account for 85 percent of its weight. For conventional cars, those upstream emissions are a minor factor; burning gasoline dominates the CO2 footprint. But the need for far more materials, and different types, dominates an EV’s total footprint. Production of those metals, such as copper, nickel, and aluminum, uses on average three to ten times more energy per pound than does steel production. All the other EV minerals are similarly energy-intense.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) flagged these realities in a 2021 report. While that report focused on the inadequacy of the supplies of “energy minerals” (something that has since, finally, become widely known), the researchers noted that upstream CO2 emissions from fabricating an EV can “vary considerably across companies and regions.” Indeed. Changing the source of copper or nickel, for example, can lead to doubling or more than tripling those metals’ emissions intensities, depending on a facility’s age, process types, and locations. Building an EV requires several hundred more pounds of copper than building an internal-combustion car.
Assumptions about aluminum matter too, because EVs also typically require several hundred pounds more of that material, and two-thirds of global aluminum production comes from coal-fired grids in China, Russia, and India. (The U.S. produces just 2 percent.) In general, refineries in China, which account for 50 percent to 80 percent of global “energy minerals” supply, have emissions 1.5 times greater than those in the European Union or U.S.
A review of dozens of studies of upstream emissions revealed that the bottom-line estimates of EV lifecycle emissions varied by fivefold. It gets worse. That same review found that, across those studies, the median size of the battery assumed for the analyses was 30 kilowatt-hours. But the overwhelming majority of U.S. EVs bought last year sported batteries two to three times bigger. Tripling battery size triples the upstream emissions.
None of these variabilities appears in government forecasts for “zero emissions” cars. In fact, the range of upstream emissions is so wide that it renders meaningless any use of an average number to calculate an EV’s overall carbon footprint. But that’s what analysts do, whether at the IEA or EPA.
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