By Jim Steele

Around 400 million years ago during the Devonian, carbon dioxide concentrations were over 2000 ppm, 5 times higher than today’s level (graphic A). That allowed evolving land plants to rapidly spread across the land. Plant species diversified and increased so rapidly it was called the Devonian Explosion. Marine species likewise multiplied enabling greater fish speciation, so the Devonian was called the Age of Fishes. However, by the end of the Devonian, the increase in photosynthesizing plants had greatly reduced CO2 concentrations to near dangerous levels.

During the following geologic period known as the Carboniferous, great forests of primitive Lycopod trees now covered the earth’s wetlands. Trees buried in the swamps were slow to decompose, creating some of the earth’s greatest coal deposits (graphic G). That further sequestered CO2. Some research suggests CO2 levels fell as low as 150 ppm, plant starvation levels.  That led to the Carboniferous Rainforest Collapse around 305 million years ago (graphic B). Low CO2 levels also correlated with a die-off of ocean algae known as the “Phytoplankton Blackout” (graphic D). This dramatic collapse in primary production on land and in the sea, disrupted the earth’s Permian food web and set in motion a series of long-drawn-out extinctions known as “Dead Clades Walking”.

The vigorous photosynthesis of the Carboniferous had also generated the earth’s greatest levels of oxygen (graphic C). Compared to our atmospheric oxygen of 21%, oxygen levels reached 30 to 35%. High levels of oxygen allowed giant arthropods to evolve (graphic E). It also enabled amphibian ancestors, that breathed by absorbing oxygen through their skin, to better colonize the land. However, as forest species and phytoplankton went extinct, oxygen levels plummeted (graphic C). As a result, the giant arthropods, as well as primitive amphibians like Euryops, (graphic F) adapted to more abundant oxygen, were the first to go extinct by the early Permian around 295 million years ago. Falling oxygen concentrations also reduced land animals’ ability to use high altitude ecosystems.

Starting with the Olson Extinction land plants experienced >60% extinction rates, rates lasting into the middle Triassic period. Plant eating reptile-like species, such as Diadactes and Edaphosaurus (graphic F), went extinct by 272 million years ago, along with the Dimetrodon predators, further restructuring ecosystems. Mid-Permian extinctions continued culminating in another mass extinction event known as Capitanian orLate Guadalupian extinctions between 262 and 259 million years ago with some regions indicating extinction of 74-80% of all vertebrate genera. Driven by the phytoplankton blackout, 35-45% of marine invertebrate species went extinct during this time, and all caused a cascade of biological disruptions.

The subsequent Great Dying or end Permian Extinction 252 million years ago was simply the culmination of “dead clades walking” that began with CO2 starvation, the rain forest collapse, and phytoplankton blackout. The end Permian saw 81% of the remaining marine species and 70% of remaining terrestrial vertebrate species go extinct. The loss of forests and their ecosystem continued throughout the entire Permian as reflected by the absence of coal deposits (graphic G).

However, biased by the rapid extinction event 66 million years ago when a meteor struck earth, many researchers looked for a similarly rapid extinction event, like a volcanic eruption. Despite the life-promoting benefits from high CO2 and increased biodiversity during the Devonian, researchers were biased by recent narratives suggesting rapidly rising CO2 is a deadly killer. So, several researchers blamed end Permian extinctions on a series of volcanic eruptions, the Siberian Traps, narrowly centered around 252 million years ago for the release of copious amounts of CO2. If history teaches us anything, because that release raised CO2 concentrations back to over 2000 ppm, it more likely enabled the new expansion of life on earth, like it did during the Devonian (graphic A),  now with the rapid spread of flowering plants, the Age of Dinosaurs, and the further evolution of birds and mammals.

And again, if history teaches us anything, we must ensure that attempts to reduce CO2 concentrations do not result in devastating CO2 starvation ever again.

For more details watch   “How CO2 Starvation & Plate Tectonics Caused the Greatest Mass Extinction, the Permian Great Dying.”

From the MANHATTAN CONTRARIAN

For a number of years, I’ve been observing demands of activists and promises of politicians that we transition our electrical grid to being supplied mainly by the intermittent renewables, wind and solar, with all large dispatchable sources (fossil fuel and nuclear) banished. Early on, I thought it was obvious that such a transition would inevitably mean that the only way to make the grid function full-time would be energy storage — on a vast scale never before contemplated or attempted.

How much storage, and at what potential cost? This is actually an arithmetic problem, somewhat cumbersome but conceptually very elementary, and easily done with today’s widely-available spreadsheet programs. To help matters along, in December 2022 I produced my energy storage Report (“The Energy Storage Conundrum”), laying out the main options and the calculations involved. My conclusion was that I could not see any way that this could be done at remotely feasible cost. (Anybody who disagrees is welcome to prove me wrong.) Today, if somebody wants to effect an energy transition in a state or country, they can just look to my Report to quickly understand the nature and extent of the energy storage challenge.

What has actually occurred since December 2022 is that our “climate leader” jurisdictions — in the U.S., that would be New York and California — have moved forward with energy storage proposals that any moron can easily see will not work. Both states are in the process of spending huge sums of money on storage capacity that is so small as to be meaningless to address the problem, and at the same time not technically capable of meeting the challenge no matter the cost. Naturally, the federal government is also involved to pick up a big chunk of the wasted cost from its infinite pile of money.

As to New York, a reader sends me a link to this June 2023 federal Department of Energy letter to the New York bureaucrats, approving a loan guarantee for construction of a 300 MW battery storage facility for grid backup. The facility in question is proposed to be placed on some large barges and anchored in the East River in the bay that once was the site of the Brooklyn Navy Yard. In some respects 300 MW is a very large battery storage facility. These are 4-hour duration batteries, so we are talking 1200 MWh of storage. My Report had a picture of a 150 MWh battery storage facility then under development in Queensland, Australia:

This one for New York would be eight times bigger! But would it be a meaningful amount of storage for backing up wind and solar generation? No. My report found, based on calculations from various jurisdictions, that about a month’s worth of storage would be the minimum needed to get through a full year without running out of power. A (30 day) month is 720 hours. New York State’s average electricity demand (from a 2023 NYISO Report linked in my previous post) is about 17,000 MW. So the 1200 MWh battery provides storage to back up the grid for — about 4.2 minutes. To get your 720 hours of backup, you will need about 10,200 of them. Bloomberg NEF gives the average 2024 price of a lithium ion battery as $150 per kWh. So this one 1200 MWh facility will run about $180,000,000 for the batteries alone. (Note that they are putting the batteries on barges and dredging the harbor to make it deep enough to anchor them there. Without doubt the final cost will be well more than double the $180 million.). 10,200 of these at the highly optimistic $180 million each will run close to $2 trillion.

Nobody in New York government is making these simple calculations. Instead, they forge ahead undeterred, without any idea how much storage is needed or how it is going to work or how much it will cost. This August 2023 article from Canary Media says that the Governor has set a goal of 6000 MW of battery storage by 2030:

[Governor Hochul] is pushing to increase the state’s battery storage capacity from about 300 megawatts today to 6,000 megawatts in 2030, to complement an expansive buildout of renewable generation.

As always, they speak of the wrong units, MW instead of MWh. But if these are the usual 4-hour batteries, 6000 MW would be 24,000 MWh. Now we’re up to about an hour and 25 minutes of storage for the State, versus a basic requirement of 720 hours. And that paltry amount will run us (at $150/kWh) at least $3.6 billion.

And California is no more numerate. Here’s a Los Angeles Times piece from October 2023 with figures on California’s plans for battery storage to back up its wind/solar-based grid:

If California is going to meet its ambitious goals to transition from electricity using fossil fuels, the state will need energy storage to shoulder a significant amount of the load. . . . Four years ago, the state counted a mere 250 megawatts of battery storage available to the California Independent System Operator, which manages the grid for 80% of the state and a small part of Nevada. By the end of this year, that number is expected to grow to 8,000 megawatts. And the amount of battery storage integrated fully into the grid is expected to increase to 19,500 megawatts by 2035 and 52,000 megawatts by 2045.

Once again, it’s the usual MW instead of MWh. But assume that that 52,000 MW in 2045 will be 4-hour duration batteries, so 208,000 MWh. At $150/kWh, that will cost California a cool $31.2 billion. And how long will that last if it starts fully charged and the wind is calm at night? This federal Department of Energy webpage gives California’s current annual electricity demand as 259.5 TWh, or 259,500 GWh. Divide by 8760 (hours in a year) and you get average demand of about 30,000 MW. So the 208,000 MWh of storage will last about seven hours. You’ll need about a hundred times that amount — at a cost of $3+ trillion — to get the 720 hours of storage that you will need.

The amounts of storage that they are talking about are so ridiculously inadequate that I won’t even bother getting to the issue of whether these lithium ion batteries can handle the physical task at hand, which in the real world would involve storing energy for a year and more before it is used, without having it drain away. But before closing, I would be remiss not to mention that both the Canary Media and LA Times pieces linked above devote considerable space to the issue of lithium ion battery fires. It seems that in both New York and California, the really tiny amounts of grid-scale battery storage built to date have been plagued by repeated major fires. From New York:

New York state is grappling with how to adjust its ambitious buildout of clean energy storage after fires broke out at three separate battery projects between late May and late July [2023]. . . . First, on May 31, a battery that NextEra Energy Resources had installed at a substation in East Hampton caught fire. . . . Then, on June 26, fire alarms went off at two battery units owned and operated by Convergent Energy and Power in Warwick, Orange County; one of those later caught fire. On July 27, a different Convergent battery at a solar farm in Chaumont caught fire and burned for four days straight.

Funny that these fires don’t seem to be news in the mainstream press. Here from the Canary piece is a picture of the fire at the Chaumont facility:

It’s the same exact story in California — repeated fires at the handful of grid battery storage facilities that have so far gone operational. From the LA Times piece:

[A] persistent problem keeps coming up — fires igniting at battery storage facilities. Most recently, a fire broke out at the Valley Center Energy Storage Facility in San Diego County on Sept. 18 [2023]. Although fire officials said the blaze was put out in about 45 minutes and extinguished by the site’s internal fire prevention system, businesses and the small number of homes within a quarter-mile of the industrial park where the facility is located were evacuated and shelter-in-place orders were in effect within a half-mile of the site. . . . In September 2022, a Tesla Megapack caught fire at a battery storage facility operated by Pacific Gas & Electric in the Northern California town of Moss Landing. No injuries were reported, but California Highway Patrol closed a section of Highway 1 and redirected traffic away from the site for hours.

Just wait until they have 208,000 MWh worth of these things out there.