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"Save the Whales" was the rallying cry of Greenpeace and other environmental extremists in the 1970s and 1980s, and it might be time for them to pull it out of the attic, dust it off, and use it again. Since 2016, 204 humpback whales have died off the east coast of the United States, most of them in the area of New Jersey to Massachusetts and North Carolina to Virginia. This number is far from norms in numbers, and the clustering is unusual. Many of the whales have been killed by boat strikes, but that still doesn't explain why the number of humpback whale deaths jumped by over 100% from 2015 to 2016.
There are several moving parts here. First, this is not the product of the imagination. The number of humpback whale deaths has skyrocketed since 2016. //
What these two pieces of data have in common is that 1) the first offshore wind farm went into operation in 2016, and 2) there are two wind farms in operation, one off of Cape Henry, VA, and another off Block Island, RI.
If you were a detective, you might call this a clue. //
You'd think the same environmental movement that put national security at risk by forcing the end of sonar testing by US submarines would be up in arms. But you'd be wrong.
The bottom line is that a huge, multi-billion dollar gift is at stake, and government, industry, and their fluffers in the media all know that if offshore wind farms are associated with the kill off of whales and other marine mammals, that industry is dead. This is the same behavior that led to the environmentalists shutting down nuclear power in Germany and replacing it with coal-burning generators.
"The extinction of the human race will come from its inability to emotionally comprehend the exponential function." - Edward Teller
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." - Al Bartlett
Below is a first-order (approximate) description of a fast (potentially very fast) doubling time system for remediation of civilization's environmental damage. The fast doubling time drives exponential growth that could, at enormous profit and in under 15 years, drastically reduce civilization's ecological impact while, incidentally, sequestering large amounts of CO2. It is not intended to overcome Dr. Bartlett's accusation that sustainable growth is impossible and cornucopian thinking is "The New Flat Earth Society". It is intended merely to argue that imminent environmental catastrophes may, with appropriate refinements and corrections of the described system, be averted within the time estimated for environmental catastrophes by some of the more pessimistic projections (usually several decades rather than a mere 15 years).
An important principle to keep in mind is that as baseload electricity costs decrease, recycling beats other sources of raw materials. This means that if one is targeting zero environmental footprint, the most compelling path is through lower baseload electric cost simply because recycling is more economical than waste.
They were found through a quirk of the region’s geopolitical history, which left a photographic trail of WWII aerial photos and declassified Cold War-era spy satellite images.
A group of children were listening to a story beneath the shade of an African juniper tree in a small church forest near Debre Tabor in northern Ethiopia. Three women walked along a path, the sound of their chatting permeating the dense trees as our group of 12 people, clearly foreigners, approached.
When the children spotted us at the forest’s edge, they came running along the dusty path, jumped over a low rock wall, ducked under branches and approached us curiously. I was tagging along with a group of researchers led by ecologist Dr Catherine Cardelús from Colgate University in New York state and Bernahu Tsegay from Bahir Dar University, Ethiopia who were here to learn about the forest’s ecology. The kids, meanwhile, were already experts. They knew every inch of the place; having grown up in these trees, this is the only forest they have ever seen.
I was in a ‘sacred forest’, more than 1,000 of which are scattered across the landscape in a near perfect lattice, each protecting a traditional Ethiopian Orthodox church at its centre. These small, neat clusters of trees, each about 2km away from the next, ensure that the local people are never far from the forests that are so deeply rooted in their social and spiritual lives. They’re used as community centres, meeting places and schools; for religious ceremonies, burial grounds and even bathrooms; and provide the only shade for miles. Although some sacred forests are fairly accessible, like the island forests on Lake Tana that can be visited on a half-day boat tour from the city of Bahir Dar, in the rural, mountainous landscapes of South Gondar, east of Bahir Dar, where I now was, the church forests can be harder to find.
Each dot of green stands out on the landscape because they are some of the only trees left in a country that’s experienced widespread deforestation. Some forests are more than 1,000 years old, and these precious trees have been spared thanks to shadow conservation – conservation as a by-product of religious stewardship. But they are small and threatened by encroaching roads, buildings and farmers' fields. Paradoxically, humans have both protected them yet pose the biggest threat to their future.
The substance has a lifetime cancer risk more than 1 million times higher than what the agency usually finds acceptable. //
But the agency now says that those numbers in the consent order do not reflect the cancer risk posed by air from refinery smokestacks. When the consent order said stack emissions, the EPA says, it really meant pollution released from the exhaust of the jets and boats powered by these fuels.
The rule would limit tailpipe emissions so that in order to comply, auto companies would have to sell 60% of new vehicles as electric by 2030. Right now, 6% of new vehicles sold are electric. That would have to rise to 60% to comply with the new rule by 2030 and 67% by 2032.
And I’m all in favor of people who love EVs to buy an EV, but right now EV sales are 6% of total new vehicle sales, and there are many Americans who prefer a car with an internal combustion engine. Because there are four Cs that we have to remember. There’s cost, there’s convenience, there’s climate, and there’s China.
And these are four reasons why many Americans prefer cars with some internal combustion engine, whether it’s a hybrid and internal combustion engine or just a normal gasoline-powered engine by itself.
In May, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed a new rule that would impose such strict emissions limits that carmakers would only be able to comply with them by switching the vast majority of their production to electric vehicles by 2027.
The EPA estimates that under its new rule, nearly 70% of all new cars and trucks produced in America would be fully electric by 2032.
But the proposed rule is based on a flawed interpretation of the Clean Air Act. The act gives the EPA the authority to regulate air pollutants from vehicles, but not to dictate what types of vehicles consumers can own. It requires the EPA to set emissions standards that allow manufacturers enough time “to permit the development and application of the requisite technology, giving appropriate consideration to the cost of compliance within such period.”
The proposed rule would have negligible environmental benefits but enormous economic and social costs. It would increase electricity demand and strain the electric grid, while annihilating funding for building and maintaining highways, which is derived almost entirely from taxes on gasoline and diesel. //
The proposed rule is not only bad policy, it is also “arbitrary and capricious” because the Clean Air Act does not authorize the EPA to force a transition to EVs. //
The switch from traditional cars to EVs is the definition of a major policy decision, and nowhere in the Clean Air Act does it say that Congress wanted the EPA to make the choice of where, how, and when that switch should happen.
Scientists have made a groundbreaking discovery that could change the way we think about air pollution. Researchers at the University of California, Irvine, have found that a strong electric field between airborne water droplets and surrounding air can create a molecule called hydroxide (OH) by a previously unknown mechanism.
This molecule is crucial in helping to clear the air of pollutants, including greenhouse gases and other chemicals. //
The discovery is outlined in a new paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which suggests that the traditional thinking around the formation of OH in the atmosphere is incomplete. Until now, it was thought that sunlight was the primary driver of OH formation, but this new research shows that OH can be created spontaneously by the special conditions on the surface of water droplets.
“You need OH to oxidize hydrocarbons, otherwise they would build up in the atmosphere indefinitely,” said Sergey Nizkorodov, a University of California, Irvine professor of chemistry, who was part of the research team.
Life cycle emissions are the total amount of greenhouse gases emitted throughout a product’s existence, including its production, use, and disposal.
To compare these emissions effectively, a standardized unit called metric tons of CO2 equivalent (tCO2e) is used, which accounts for different types of greenhouse gases and their global warming potential.
Here is an overview of the 2021 life cycle emissions of medium-sized electric, hybrid and ICE vehicles in each stage of their life cycles, using tCO2e. These numbers consider a use phase of 16 years and a distance of 240,000 km. //
- The production emissions for BEVs are approximately 40% higher than those of hybrid and ICE vehicles. According to a McKinsey & Company study, this high emission intensity can be attributed to the extraction and refining of raw materials like lithium, cobalt, and nickel that are needed for batteries, as well as the energy-intensive manufacturing process of BEVs.
- Electricity production is by far the most emission-intensive stage in a BEVs life cycle. Decarbonizing the electricity sector by implementing renewable and nuclear energy sources can significantly reduce these vehicles’ use phase emissions.
Fire has a natural place in the ecosystem; it can be a very healthy thing. Take for example serotinous conifers. (“Serotinous” is a great Scrabble word, by the way.) The pine cones in serotinous conifers require some sort of event like a wildfire to open, drop their seeds and propagate the species.
Fire can also “clean up” a forest and make room for new and healthy plants and trees, so unless a town, power lines, utility plant, or another thing, which are also known as “values,” are threatened, the land management agencies may let a fire burn. This works very well in forests that are somewhere near the “healthy” range, but as any Boy Scout knows, the more fuel, the bigger the fire. So these days, it is not uncommon to get bigger and more destructive fires, which in turn make New Yorkers think that the world is coming to an end. //
Nitro Nora
3 hours ago
Correct, "climate change" has nothing to do with this. Back in the 1990's we had vast tracts of land that were hand planted by the USFS, hundreds of thousands of trees every year. Too big of an investment to let burn. "Prescribed burns" in these plantations were exactly that. Flame height and perimeter was predetermined. The days it was done were approved on a day-by-day basis by the air quality board in the County.
This way, we cleaned up the forest without losing our investment and with no catastrophic air quality disasters. Also, the clear cuts were designed to be fire breaks on a landscape scale. We also had wood cutting areas where people could take all the dead and downed wood on the forest floor. Thousands of people did that & it was a big help keeping the forest clean. And of course the cattle grazing permitees managed the cattle and that also helped keep the forest clean.
Then the "environmentalists" got their foot in the door and eventually took over the agency. After a few years of "doing it naturally," (basically hands off) we now get catastrophic fires almost annually. They have no clue.
Of course we would all like to have a "pristine" forest, but because humans have transformed the landscape with towns, farms, ranches, cities, highways and railroads, we can't allow these giant fires any more. We must take a pro-active management role to keep the forests healthy. The greenies don't have any idea how to manage forests on the landscape scale. The greenies have destroyed our forests. //
https%3A%2F%2Fwww.oregon.gov%2Fodf%2Ffire%2Fdocuments%2Fodf-century-fire-history-chart.pdf
Why is it that greens want everyone to drive electric cars but don’t want people to have electricity? Or, it seems, the cars.
I noted last week in these pages how the people who want everyone to have an electric car in the garage have also been pursuing policies that, per the North American Electric Reliability Corporation’s latest report, are likely to result in rolling blackouts this summer. //
Fossil and nuclear plants are being taken offline (bye, Indian Point!) while their replacement with “renewables” like wind and solar lags and often fails to produce power when it’s most needed.
Nothing has improved on that front. But the thing about electric cars is that they don’t just need electricity, they also need batteries to store it in. And electric motors.
That’s awkward because those cars and batteries require lots of copper and other metals, plus the extraction of “rare earth” minerals that come mostly from China and Africa, where they’re often produced by child or slave labor.
(We used to mine rare earths in America, but the enviros basically got that shut down. It’s easier for companies to get the stuff out of the ground in places where there aren’t sandal-wearing scolds everywhere.) //
These organizations are much quieter about the exploitation of minerals — and people — in places like China and Africa. //
But the bottom line is: If you endorse the spread of electric cars, you by extension endorse the extraction of the resources it takes to build and charge them. //
If you support a policy but oppose its prerequisites, then you’re either a fool or a fraud. Or maybe both.
A realistic and sensible electric-car policy would support reliable, safe, environmentally friendly power to charge them — which means plants fired by nuclear power and fracked gas. //
Honestly, when people start working to bring us cheap energy and metals from the Moon and the asteroids, environmentalists will probably complain about that too. And they’re entitled to complain if they want.
What they’re not entitled to is to be taken seriously.
As whales wash up along East Coast shores at alarming rates, researchers dissect decomposing carcasses, logging whether ship strikes or fishing gear factored into each demise, while some beachgoers wonder if their favorite coastline will be next.
At least 14 humpbacks and minke whales have been found dead thus far in 2023 in waters off New York and New Jersey — up from 9 in the entirety of last year. //
There’s little doubt humans are involved in whales dying: 40% of dead humpbacks examined by scientists since 2016 showed evidence of being hit by ships or caught in fishing nets. So, what’s causing more dead whales on our beaches?
The National Fire Protection Association found that four-fifths of cooking fires involve electric stoves. They correlated with significantly inflated rates of reported fires (2.6 times higher than gas stoves), civilian fire death rates (3.4 times higher), civilian fire injury rates (4.8 times higher), and average fire dollar loss (3.8 times higher). //
A proposed DOE standard, published in May, would require dishwashers to use significantly less water and power. Moreover, federal regulations have, historically, skyrocketed average cycle times, driving consumers to choose the far less water-efficient practice of handwashing dishes.
Prescription for the Planet -- Tom Blees
Robert Hargraves
5.0 out of 5 stars
Rx: nuclear power + boron fuel + plasma waste gasification
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 7, 2008
This is a book about three world-wide problems and three technologies to solve them. It's a book about technologies written by an Alaskan fisherman for understanding by the general public.
Nuclear power can solve global warming primarily by eliminating CO2 emissions from coal power plants, and secondarily by enabling new vehicle fuels. Nuclear power reactors in the US have not changed design in decades, and the public's perception seems to be acceptance of the mysterious domed plants, but with concern for the spent nuclear fuel waste.
There are newer, better nuclear technologies than these solid fueled, water-cooled reactors, which are generally unknown to the public. Tom Blees describes one: The Integral Fast Reactor consumes spent fuel reactor waste, generates power from the 95% of potential energy left in the waste, and does not involve any transport of weapons-proliferation-sensitive plutonium outside the plant. The IFR project, developed and tested for a decade at Argonne National Laboratories, was two years from fruition when it was killed in 1984 by President Bill Clinton, Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary, and Senator John Kerry.
The IFR would have solved the coal-burning energy crisis, consumed existing nuclear power plant waste, and not isolated inventories of plutonium (as does the French power program.) I nearly cried when I first heard of the death of the IFR, and Blees tells the story well. Since Blees wrote this book he has learned about the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor, which has these same advantages at lower cost.
Boron fuels were completely new to me. Cars, trucks, and airplanes require portable energy supplies, such as gasoline, diesel oil, or natural gas (the Pickens Plan). Electric batteries can provide this stored energy for cars. Liquid or compressed hydrogen is another (impractical) energy carrier. Blees points out that boron metal can be a portable fuel. Boron metal is combined with oxygen in a special engine to generate power. The resulting boron-oxide is later brought to a refueling station to be exchanged for a new supply of boron metal fuel. The refueling station uses electricity to convert the boron oxide back to boron metal fuel.
Boron fuel eliminates carbon dioxide emissions from vehicles, and it eliminates dependence on foreign oil. (I think there is much more boron fuel R&D work to be done.)
Plasma arc gasification of waste is another technology new to me. Four states of matter are solid, liquid, gas, and plasma. Plasma is so hot (4,000 - 17,000 C) that electrons are torn free, molecular bonds are broken, and elemental nucleii are freed. Toxic chemicals are destroyed. The cooled plasma becomes a glass-like slag. It takes a lot of electric power to operate a plasma arc torch, but in the case of municipal solid waste, the process can generate 28x more natural gas energy than electric energy consumed.
There are solutions for our environmental and energy problems! Blees' Prescription for the Planet is nuclear power + boron fuel + plasma waste gasification.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/review/1419655825/R2X21JGKLSMBBY
Wikipedia's information is a little ambiguous:
The booster's tanks were reported as holding 3,600 t (7,900,000 lb) of propellant, consisting of 2,800 t (6,200,000 lb) of liquid oxygen and 800 t (1,800,000 lb) of liquid methane. However, current booster prototypes can only hold 3,400 t (7,500,000 lb) of propellant.
Depending on how current "current" was when that was written, the booster carries no more than around 800 tons of methane fully loaded; 14% would be 112 tons. Add another 30% or so for Starship and we're up to 145 tons.
The total amount of methane in the atmosphere is about 5,000,000,000 tons, so this is an increase of about 0.0000029%.
Note that the FTS is designed to get combustion started, so most of the remaining methane was actually burned. Even if none of the methane burned, the destruction of another 344,000 Super Heavy boosters late in ascent would increase atmospheric methane by 1%. //
for comparison May 22, 2023 Pipeline Technology Journal: Two Fields In Turkmenistan Leak More Greenhouse Gases Than The UK: Leaks Could Be Easily Fixed estimates 2.6+1.8=4.4 million tons per year (2022) for just these two newly-discovered leaks. So the max here is 0.0002 "newly-discovered annual Turkmenistan leak units". It is true that burning it and converting it to CO2+H2O might be greener, but... –
uhoh
11 hours ago
President Joe Biden’s latest push for electric vehicles is reminiscent of a soliloquy by Don Quixote: short on facts, long on rhetoric, and filled with unrealistic expectations. Sadly, though, Biden’s policy mistakes are moving beyond fiction to a reality that confines consumers to cars that are unaffordable and unwanted.
Like Don Quixote tilting at harmless windmills he thinks are giants, Biden is attacking American energy and the auto industry for daring to use fossil fuels. And as Don Quixote went from quest to quest attempting to free imaginary prisoners, Biden is hellbent on freeing Americans from the imaginary captivity of their reliable, safe, flexible, and economical gasoline- and diesel-fueled engines.
That disconnect from reality perfectly encapsulates Biden’s energy policy. His Environmental Protection Agency recently proposed such strict regulations for cars and trucks that effectively mean that 54% of new vehicles sold domestically must be electric vehicles, or EVs, by 2030.
Even if Biden managed a 500% increase in EV sales by the end of the decade, he’d still fall woefully short of his goal. The only conceivable way to make half of new vehicle sales EVs by 2030 would be if Americans were so poor that they could afford few new cars, and thus the small number of electric vehicles still could amount to half of all new vehicles. That’s right out of Mao’s Great Leap Forward.
Just from the standpoint of raw materials, Biden’s EV goal is fictitious. We simply can’t get the needed materials in sufficient volume in time. Furthermore, the schizophrenic energy policy of this administration simultaneously is ramping up demand for those raw materials while hamstringing the supply. Biden continues blocking mining of lithium, graphite, nickel, and rare earth metals.
That’s inexplicable, since Biden’s green energy transition would increase demand for those materials by 4,200%, 2,500%, 1,900%, and 700%, respectively, in less than 20 years.
But when you consider that “it has taken on average over 16 years to move mining projects from discovery to first production,” then Biden’s proposals aren’t unachievable—they’re laughable.
And from where does Biden think the electricity to power these electric vehicles will come? The strained electrical grid already has brownouts and blackouts in parts of the country and couldn’t handle millions more EVs, especially when Biden also is blocking copper mining, the main ingredient in electrical wires.
The grid’s transmission capacity would need to grow 60% in less than seven years and grow 200% in less than 30 years. And this is just the grid infrastructure, not what would be needed to power it.
“You wrote, for instance, in a Forbes column last year that renewables actually increase global emissions. Do you stand by that comment?” he said.
Furchtgott-Roth explained the piece.
“Yes. Because they’re made with coal-fired power plants in China. I did explain that if renewables were the wind turbines and solar panels are made and batteries are made with coal-fired plants in China,” she said. “I did explain that if these were made with emissions-free energy such as nuclear power, then the benefits to the environment would be much greater. But many environmentalists who are in favor of renewables are against dense emission nuclear power, and therefore making these renewables often raises emissions.” //
When Whitehouse questioned her about the human component of climate change, she was ready for him again. She pulled out a book and waved it.
“Yes. Scientists disagree on the human component of global warming,” she said. “And in this book, ‘Unsettled’ by Steve Koonin, who was under secretary of energy under President Obama, and who taught for 30 years at CalTech and has a PhD in physics from MIT, he says that, ‘It is uncertain how much human activity affects global warming. The case is unsettled,’ and I’m no better scientist than he is.”
Nearly 2 million local National Grid customers could be seeing red over hefty proposed rate hikes pushing them to get more green.
The natural gas and electric utility giant has proposed gas-use increases of 17% for its New York City residential customers and 16% for Long Islanders, with the company blaming inflationary costs and government green-energy requirements.
More than 90% of used solar panels get thrown in the trash, and the world's wind industry is estimated to produce 43 million tons of blade waste each year. But some companies have found recycling solutions. Ben Tracy reports.
Earth Day is Saturday! Hooray?
“Saving humanity from the climate crisis,” says EarthDay.org, requires us to “push away from the dirty fossil fuel economy.” //
“Three billion people in the world still use less electricity than a typical refrigerator,” explains Alex Epstein, author of “The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels.” If they’re going to have “their first well-paying jobs,” “their first consistent supply of clean water,” “a modern life,” “that’s going to depend on fossil fuels.”
But the greens say we have a better replacement: wind and solar power. //
So I push back at Epstein: “Solar is getting cheaper all the time. It’s already cheaper than fossil fuels.”
“When we look at solar and wind around the world,” he answers, “it always correlates to rising prices and declining reliability. Why? Because solar and wind are intermittent. At any time, they can go near zero.” //
That means wind turbines and solar farms don’t replace fossil-fuel plants. You have to build them in addition to fossil-fuel plants.
Backing up all solar and wind with batteries would cost “multiples of global” gross domestic product, responds Epstein. “This is a total fantasy.”
“You say unaffordable,” I push back, “but who’s to determine what that is?”
“The general narrative is we’re destroying the planet with fossil fuels, so who cares how much energy costs?” Epstein says. “The truth is, the planet is only livable because of low-cost, reliable energy from fossil fuels.”
Before fossil fuels, “Life expectancy was below 30. Income was basically nonexistent. The population was stagnant because people had such a high death rate. The basic reason is that nature is not a very livable place for human beings.”
By contrast, thanks to cheap fossil fuels, “We make it unnaturally safe by producing all forms of climate protection. We produce drought relief . . . sturdy buildings. We produce heat when it’s cold, we produce cold when it’s hot. We have this amazing, productive ability. That’s the only reason we experience the planet as livable.” //
If we want more of the poorest people to have decent lives, we need to invest in both fossil fuels and nuclear power.
For all leftists, climate alarmists, and other dwellers in fantasy land, happy Earth Day! Unfortunately for “climate change” true believers, not only have climate predictions been consistently and wildly wrong for 50 years now, but “clean” or “green” energy is toxic for the environment, inefficient, and unprofitable. //
First, it’s literally impossible to produce the amount of energy and electricity society currently uses with “green” energy. That’s why climate propagandists like World Economic Forum tell people to get used to being poorer. But also, much of that “green” energy is actually terrible for the environment. Solar panels and wind turbines have killed billions of birds, and offshore wind turbines can be deadly for whales. //
EV batteries, which have to be replaced every few years, are very toxic to dispose of. The “mining, manufacturing, and disposal of [EV] batteries threatens to be a major environmental concern in the coming years.” Solar panels and wind turbines also generate lots of toxic waste. //
Any reasonable person who has seen wind or solar farms has to notice they take up massive amounts of land. In other words, to put up wind turbines or solar panels, huge swathes of natural scenery and farmland must be ruined. This includes killing literally millions of trees.
Back in 2016, a planned solar panel farm in New Jersey required cutting down 15,000 trees. 200-year-old rainforest trees were axed in Tasmania in 2019 to clear land for a wind farm. In Scotland, as of 2020, almost 14 million trees had been cut down to make way for wind turbines. By 2021, Scotland was reportedly still cutting down an estimated 1,600 trees a day to make way for wind turbines. In 2022, Germany was planning to clear a large swathe of the thousand-year-old forest known as the “treasure house of European forests” to make way for a wind power plant.