Analysis: ‘Why wind & solar are the energy past, not future’ – ‘Fossil fuels are the energy present, & nuclear power is likely the energy future’
Via Energy Bad Boys – By Isaac Orr and Mitch Rolling: It might come as a shock to lawmakers like Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but nearly all the energy used by humans until a few hundred years ago was renewable, and life was not a utopian heaven on Earth. The graph nearby shows the amount of energy used by humans from 1800 through the present. In 1800, humanity used 452 times less energy than humans in 2019, and nearly all of it came from biomass. The “Low Energy” world humans lived in was no paradise. Average life expectancies were less than 40 years. In Germany, every second child died. People’s statures were shorter because poor nutrition and illness limited human growth. Life was indeed nasty, brutish, and short, and it remained this way until humans began using coal at scale in the 1800s.
Wind as an energy source had first been used for sailboats in Mesopotamia. Until the first windmills were invented by the Persians to grind grain and pump water between 500 and 900 A.D., wind energy was primarily used for transportation. Windmills became widespread in Europe in the 17th century, and approximately 200,000 windmills operated at the peak of the technology. Of course, the disadvantages of wind we experience today were still present back then. Because wind power cannot be stored, it was used primarily to mill grain into flour, pump water into livestock tanks, and saw lumber into boards.
In fact, because wind energy was dependent on the weather and wasn’t reliable, horses were used as “backup” sources of power for milling grain during calm stretches in Europe, similar to how natural gas power plants “back up” wind turbines for generating electricity when the wind isn’t blowing on modern electricity grids. …
While each of the “renewable” energy sources above increased the human standard of living, they also had limited availability and reliability. It was the discovery and widespread use of coal that enabled humans to access vast supplies of reliable energy on demand and perform more work than ever before dreamed. This energy powered the industrial revolution.
The widespread use of oil for lighting was short-lived, however, because, in 1882, Thomas Edison built his first commercial electricity plant, ushering in the era of electricity. When it comes to energy, nothing is as powerful, versatile, safe, easy to use, or clean as electricity. …
Unlike other forms of energy, electricity is not a primary source of energy by itself. Instead, electricity is a secondary source of energy that must be generated by converting primary energy sources (such as coal, natural gas, oil, uranium, water, solar, or wind energy) into electric power.
Wind and solar don’t produce much power because they are unreliable and the exact opposite of energy-dense, requiring vast buildouts to produce only a small amount of electricity. As a result, they have an exceedingly low energy return on investment (EROI). …
In fact, if all the electricity you used for 70 years was generated at nuclear facilities, the amount of uranium used would fit inside a soda can. The high energy density of uranium is why nuclear power has the potential to someday generate electricity at a lower cost than fossil fuels and is why it is most likely the future of electricity generation. Unlike wind and solar, it produces carbon-dioxide-free electricity around the clock, so a grid powered by nuclear power won’t experience California-style blackouts.
The ‘green’ scam of the century: ‘Renewables’ increase fossil fuel demands
Solar plants, wind farms, and EVs generally require more minerals to build than their fossil fuel-based counterparts. A typical electric car requires six times the mineral inputs of a conventional car, and an onshore wind plant requires nine times more mineral resources than a gas-fired plant. Since 2010, the average amount of minerals needed for a new unit of power generation capacity has increased by 50% as the share of wind and solar renewables in new investments has risen.
Our electricity is increasingly dependent on rare earth minerals and metals mined for wind turbines, solar panels, and EV batteries under atrocious slave labor and environmental conditions in other countries that the DOE and bureaucrats ignore.
China controls a stranglehold of 80% of the global supply monopoly on rare earth minerals and metals, with the Congo in Africa a 90% source of vital cobalt. …
To manufacture each EV auto battery, you must process 25,000 pounds of brine for lithium, 30,000 pounds of ore for cobalt, 5,000 pounds of ore for nickel, and 25,000 pounds of ore for copper. All told, just one Tesla EV battery requires the processing of more than 500,000 pounds of materials somewhere on the planet.
…
Policymakers setting “green” policies are oblivious to the reality that Electricity came AFTER the discovery of oil 200 years ago.
- ALL electrical generation from hydro, coal, natural gas, nuclear, wind, and solar are ALL built with the products, components, and equipment that are made from the oil derivatives manufactured from crude oil.
- All EVs, solar panels, and wind turbines are also built with products, components, and equipment made from crude oil derivatives.
- Further, all cars, trucks, excavating equipment, cranes, merchant ships, planes, and trains are also made from the oil derivatives manufactured from crude oil.
Electricity can charge an iPhone but cannot make the iPhone. Electricity can make the defibrillator work in the hospital, but it cannot make the defibrillator.
So This Is How They Get Their ‘Scientific Consensus’ – Academics are Democrats — therefore, ‘experts’ are Democrats too
Via: Unleash Prosperity Hotline – Weekend Edition – Issue #1117
Energy Lockdowns Have Arrived: Wash Post touts ‘millions of Americans giving up control of their home thermostats’ – Laud ‘utility companies remotely shutting off’ your AC during heat waves to ‘prop up grids’ – WaPo admits solar & wind ‘only make electricity when the wind is blowing & the sun is shining’
Wash Post: – September 24, 2024: Ada Garcia, a Houston homeowner, didn’t have to touch her thermostat to pitch in. Her utility company remotely shut off her air conditioner nine times that day as part of a power-saving strategy that is already propping up grids around the country as they deal with booming demand and a growing share of unpredictable wind and solar power. …
Garcia, who was working in her home office, had no idea that Texas was teetering on the edge of an energy crisis that evening or that Octopus Energy, her power company, was waging a battle in her living room to save the grid. …
Around the state of Texas, Octopus and other power companies raised thermostats, paused electric car chargers and tapped into home batteries in thousands more of their customers’ homes. They also paid stores, data centers and office towers to shut off lights and air conditioners and slow down their computers.
All told, Texas utilities made 2.6 gigawatts of electricity demand disappear in the critical moments when the grid was in crisis — the equivalent of a large nuclear power plant. That’s why programs like this one are called “virtual power plants.” …
Meanwhile, supply is becoming less predictable as power companies replace polluting fossil fuel plants with wind turbines and solar panels that only make electricity when the wind is blowing and the sun is shining.
Tripling the current capacity of virtual power plants by 2030 would help the U.S. grid meet rising electricity demand in a faster, cheaper, and cleaner way than just building new power plants, according to a recent report from the Energy Department. But for that to happen, millions more people would have to give companies power to fiddle with their thermostats and appliances.
WaPo features shock graph showing Earth cooling: ‘Scientists have captured Earth’s climate over last 485 million years’ – ‘Reveals world was in a much warmer state for most of the history of complex animal life’ – ‘History of wild shifts & far hotter temps than scientists previously realized’
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/09/19/earth-temperature-global-warming-planet/ By Sarah Kaplan and Simon Ducroquet September 19, 2024 at 2:01 p.m. EDT Excerpt: An ambitious effort to understand the Earth’s climate over the past 485 million years has revealed a history of wild shifts and far hotter temperatures than scientists previously realized — offering a reminder of how much change the planet has already endured […]
Ford Files Patent to Spy on Drivers: ‘Ford wants to listen to your in-car conversations’
Damion Smy of Drive.com: Ford has filed a patent to eavesdrop on vehicle occupants and play adverts over its infotainment system based on those conversations. Only months after the US launched an investigation into whether Chinese-made cars were being used to spy on its citizens, Michigan-based Ford filed the patent designed to collect voice and data from the vehicle to create targeted advertising within the car.
According to US outlet Motor Trend, the system could also use information such as the destinations in the vehicle’s navigation system to create advertising for, say, an outlet at the shopping centre you’re travelling to – or have frequented.
The US car giant has patented tech enabling it to listen in on your conversations – and play you adverts based on what you and your passengers have said.
#
Martin Armstrong: In September 2024, Ford filed a new patent to eavesdrop on riders. They plan to share this information with third-parties to personalize the advertisements riders hear. Ford will also take the driver’s destination into consideration to determine location-specific advertisements and suggestions.
“Cars have microphones and people have all kinds of sensitive conversations in them. Cars have cameras that face inward and outward,” a researcher with Mozilla Foundation told the Los Angeles Times. In fact, 19 automakers in 2023 admitted that they have the ability to sell your personal data without notice. Law enforcement may subpoena these records as well.
Ford claims that the patent was submitted, but they do not necessarily plan to use the technology. “Submitting patent applications is a normal part of any strong business as the process protects new ideas and helps us build a robust portfolio of intellectual property. The ideas described within a patent application should not be viewed as an indication of our business or product plans.
Debunked: The myth that Biden is the ‘Drill, Baby, Drill’ Prez – ‘Increase in fossil energy production on federal lands during Biden admin clearly is result…of strong leasing…activity in 2019-2020’ – Leasing ‘fell dramatically during the 2021-2023 period’
Via Pielke Jr.’s website: By Benjamin Zycher, Senior Fellow (and colleague of mine) at the American Enterprise Institute
Excerpt: Zycher: Fossil energy production from federal lands is the end result of a lengthy process comprising complex preliminary analyses, leasing, exploration, permitting, and development; pursuit of a lease on specific federal acreage is highly speculative, driven by some perceived potential for fossil production years in the future, under market conditions that are uncertain at best, and which may or may not yield an actual resource economically viable
…
As discussed above, the number of new drilling permits issued in a given year is driven heavily by leases approved in prior years, followed by the geologic and other analyses needed to determine if a drilling permit is worth pursuing.
…
The increase in fossil energy production on federal lands observed during the Biden administration clearly is the result in substantial part of strong leasing and leasing acreage activity in 2019-2020. Both fell dramatically during the 2021-2023 period. The central conclusions to be drawn are that Mr. Biden is not the “drill, baby, drill” president, and that fossil energy production on federal lands is likely to decline during the next two to four years.
LA Times: ‘To fix climate anxiety (and also climate change), we first have to fix individualism’ – Feels ‘like we’re just counting down the days to our own extinction’
Rosanna Xia – La Times How do you cope? I feel the sorrow, the quiet plea for guidance every time someone asks me this question. As an environmental reporter dedicated to helping people make sense of climate change, I know I should have answers. But the truth is, it took me until now to face my own grief. …With each new heat record shattered, and each new report declaring a code red for humanity, I can’t help but feel like we’re just counting down the days to our own extinction. …
How can they feel hopeful about the future, they asked, when, on top of everything already stacked against them, they also have to worry about wildfires, extreme heat and air pollution getting out of control?
‘Climate Anxiety and the Kid Question’ asks: With American society feeling more socially and politically polarized than ever, is it right to bring another person into the world?
When talking about climate anxiety, it’s important to differentiate whether you’re assessing these emotions as a mental health condition, or as a cultural phenomenon. Let’s start with mental health: Polls show climate anxiety is on the rise and that people all around the world are losing sleep over climate change. Organizations like the Climate-Aware Therapist Directory and the American Psychiatric Assn. have put together an increasing number of guides and resources to help more people understand how climate change has affected our emotional well-being.
But you can’t treat climate anxiety like other forms of anxiety, and here’s where the cultural politics come in: The only way to make climate anxiety go away is to make climate change go away, and given the fraught and deeply systemic underpinnings of climate change, we must also consider this context when it comes to our climate emotions.
“Climate anxiety can’t be limited to just a clinical setting — we have to take it out of the therapy room and look at it through a lens of privilege, and power, and the economic, historical and social structures that are at the root of the problem,” said Sarah Jaquette Ray, whose book “A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety” is a call to arms to think more expansively about our despair. “Treating a person’s climate anxiety without challenging these systems only addresses the symptoms, not the causes… and if white or more privileged emotions get the most airtime, and if we don’t see how climate is intersecting with all these other problems, that can result in a greater silencing of the people most impacted.”
The trick to fixing climate anxiety is to fix individualism, she said. Start small, tap into what you’re already good at, join something bigger than yourself. … And by fixing individualism, as many young activists like Patel have already figured out, we just might have a better shot at fixing climate change.
Elon Musk incorrectly claims rising CO2 will cause ‘headaches’ – Reality Check: MIT’s Dr. Lindzen: ‘CO2 is essential for life on our planet & levels as high as 5000ppm are considered safe on our submarines & on the space station’ & OSHA agrees
Donald Trump is clearly not buying Elon Musks’s obsession with Climate change & CO2. Musk is again creating fear: – CO2 levels below 150ppm = humans extinction – We are currently at circa. 423ppm. Alot closer to extinction than the 1000ppm that would make us ‘uncomfortable’. pic.twitter.com/SPuSJw2LdE — Marwan Nawaz (@MarwanNawaz) August 13, 2024 Experts […]
Electric car fiasco: Profits at Mercedes plunge as EV sales go into ‘freefall’ – Porsche abandons sales targets for EVs – Tesla’s profits drop 45% – Ford losing nearly $50,000 on every EV it sells
Unending EV disaster: “Profits at the German auto giant Mercedes plunged on Friday as sales of its slick new range of electric vehicles (EVs) went into freefall. Porsche abandoned its sales targets for battery-powered cars amid waning demand from customers. Ford is losing nearly… pic.twitter.com/p5v51YLsLv — Steve Milloy (@JunkScience) July 27, 2024 https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/07/27/heads-should-roll-over-the-electric-car-fiasco/ Heads should […]