Fossil Fuels are Not the Enemy

[sk47]

It’s probably easier for people to grasp it once they understand that we have the evidence in the geologic record for what happens when it warms up.
A common mistake being made is when people think the Earth, throughout its history, has typically resembled something vaguely similar to what we see now.
The Ordovician period (~450m y/a) is actually a great example. Plenty of carbon dioxide, not much solar irradiance (compared to recent standards), crazy temps.

“In between ice ages, some lesser peaks of temperature have occurred a number of times, especially around 125,000 years ago. At this time, temperatures may have been about 1°C to 2°C degrees warmer than today. Sea level was 5 to 8 metres higher than today – a rise sufficient to inundate most of the world’s coastal cities (IPCC report, pdf format). This peak was triggered by the orbital cycles.”

Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/articl...in-the-past-whats-the-big-deal/#ixzz6mgF27BCb

I wasn’t suggesting that home-owners are the primary issue. I also wasn’t suggesting that PV cells are the way forward for every region.

Hello; For what it is worth I kept up with the science from 1970 until 2004 as part of my job. Not at the cutting edge of any one particular aspect, very much in a general way. I used the information in my science classrooms. I have not kept up as closely since I retired but I do pay attention. I made a point of having units about the environment as well as geologic history.

One thing to consider is while some notions have stayed consistent over time such as exponential population growth, others have waxed and waned. Just a few decades ago there was a lot of confidence the climate was heading toward another period of glaciation. Living thru winters in the 60's and 70 's made such seem possible. while I cannot support this notion, I do speculate our greenhouse emissions may have post phoned that possible event for a while. By some studies the last few thousand years may be an interglacial period. Is this pure fancy? Perhaps but such thinking did happen. ( Note- even if we keep using fossil fuels at the current rates they will be essentially used up in mere hundreds of years at most. Much will depend on how they are used. Oil likely could go to minimal recovery levels first, but such is not clear. Might be natural gas goes first. Coal ought to last longest but that could change if we come up with a practical way to to convert it to a fuel. That is already being done by the way. )

By looking at the records kept on weather and climate by people and by using indirect evidence we can sort of picture climate history for a relatively short time by geologic standards. Even if the numbers are off there are some things for sure. The climate of the earth constantly changes, has been doing so well before man had anything to do with it and will continue regardless of people. Plate tectonics, precession of the earth's spin, solar cycles and more are gigantic forces affecting the earth. We humans are adding a thin layer onto these natural forces. Perhaps the more distinctive actions of people could be a slight change of the pace of global climate changes one way or another.

I do guess an important thing ought to be brought up in these sorts of discussions. That being the time frame of the process as described by those claiming to be in the know. Lets allow for the sake of this point only that human activities are a main cause of the change of climate. Again I ask the question. If we could somehow stop all greenhouse emissions of human origins would the warming stop? Of course those who have kept up know the answer. Based on the current estimates, the warming will not stop and the warming will increase for many decades with the level of greenhouse gases presently in the atmosphere.
So what is to be gained from these current drastic "green" proposals. Perhaps a very minor reduction of warming in the distant future. As another member pointed out in a post. Making such a deal with full understanding of what we are signing up for is OK. However I do not think very many understand the level of sacrifice to come along if these "green" proposals take hold.

It is too early to know for sure if the current situation in Texas can be used as an example of the sort of sacrifice to be expected. I would love to make such a claim but such is not good science nor good faith. I do have doubts about the "green new deal" but will not use hype when facts work better.

Here is my take of the last few decades. It is more than anything else the population of humans at the base of whatever problems can be pointed at. Sure climate change may be a problem but I figure there are a number of other more pressing problems. Overpopulation should be the main focus but it is rarely mentioned any more. Enough from me for a while.

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[Burkey]

Just a few decades ago there was a lot of confidence the climate was heading toward another period of glaciation. Living thru winters in the 60's and 70 's made such seem possible. while I cannot support this notion, I do speculate our greenhouse emissions may have post phoned that possible event for a while.p in these sorts of discussions. a very minor reduction of warming in the distant future.

I‘be grabbed one particular point from your reply that was particularly salient because it highlights the disconnect between the findings of actual scientists (and the consensus between them) and what is reported in the media.
Yes, the media frequently crapped on about an imminent ice-age.
I wonder what actual climatolgists had to say on the issue?
Let’s take a look...

 

[Hobohunter]

Hello Jeff from Jeff; Back in the 1970's I was invited to Oak Ridge TN and had an opportunity to see such a pool. They are indeed clear. Reminded me of water in a cave systemin a karst formation, also very clear water, but not demineralized.

They're definitely cool to see, especially if you can see them shortly after a refueling outage. Spent fuel really does glow blue with Cherenkov radiation, at least under water.

 

[Hobohunter]

Very true. The AP1000 has the backup water in the IRWST in Containment and the CB20 water storage on the roof of the Containment (Shield bldg). All gravity fed. I am actually the construction lead over the fuel handling system for Unit 3 at Plant Vogtle. Quite an interesting system with a lot more safeguards in place than the antiquated AP600 that we run on Units 1 & 2. Units 3 & 4 could be completely shutdown without human intervention in case of catastrophe.

I was an operator at a BWR5 for about 4 years. We had a huge volume of backup water in the lower level of containment but no overhead water storage. It wasn't gravity fed, but we were pretty safe from a Fukushima style accident, seeing as how we were on the far side of a mountain range from the ocean.

 

[sk47]

His Lights Stayed on During Texas’ Storm. Now He Owes $16,752. - The New York Times (nytimes.com)
Hello; I just read this story. Not sure it fits in this thread very well in the main area of the story, but do think there may be a slight relationship. I considered putting the link into a thread I follow about CD players. Might fit in that thread a bit in the sense of how we sometimes adopt a new way of doing things which seems to be better until an unexpected ugly side shows up. In this case the thing which stood out to me was that customers have the freedom of choice in Texas to pick among various online companies to handle their electric bills.
The part which stood out was how during "normal" times the company this man picked could give him cheaper rates. The catch was the rates could be legally changed dramatically and the man had been using a credit card to make payments. That the electric bill may be outrageous is not the point I am trying to make. Point is that without a good understanding of the rules some of the new ways of doing things may have hidden consequences.

How the story may fit in this thread is not so clear but let me try. We are being pushed into adoption of a new technology at a more grand scale in what may be a much too short of a time frame. The time frame may be the critical point.
For a long while hybrid and some all electric EV's have been for sale. Their sales had never reached very high numbers. Even during the time of high gas prices they were not a big seller. Then came a change in how fossil fuels are recovered and fuel prices have been quite low for about four years. So the EV's are not practical financially.
Now we are being told we will have no choice. Also those who favor the move to EV's now seem to have the power to force the issue. The Texas power grid incident may prove instructive depending on how some aspects play out.
I have heard of two stories as to why the natural gas power plants failed and why the wind turbines froze up. Both, if true, may be pointed back to the "green" thinking of those in charge. It seems the old style pumps which have for decades kept the gas pressure up in natural gas pipelines were replaced with electric run pumps. The story I heard was this was to be more "green". The old pumps had been run buy the natural gas it self and apparently were thought to be "more dirty" than an electric pump. Interesting in that natural gas in a very clean burning fossil fuel. It is not clear to me yet if the electric pumps actually froze up or there was just no electricity to run them.. Maybe a combination of both?

For the windmills the story is those who made decisions decided to not spend some extra money to winterize the windmills. Maybe $2000 per unit. This story seems more likely to be confirmed so far.

While I do not think those pushing the EV agenda will stop and reconsider their plans, I do think we who are not convinced ought to raise the questions and ask for some answers. Seems a better way might be to let those who favor adoption of EV's get to do so and if their consumption is great enough to support a new class of vehicles, then such is fine. At the same time if enough of us wish to continue to drive ICE vehicles to support their manufacture, then this is also fine.
If at some point one sort of vehicle outcompetes the other in all aspects then a more natural change will be had. The winner will have to prove to be not just more efficient, but also more practical and without unintended consequences. It is the unknown consequences that ought to be of concern. If we get pushed into a point of no return with the EV experiment and have a Texas sized winter storm like event of some sort, then we are as stuck as some Texans are this day.

 

[Hobohunter]

His Lights Stayed on During Texas’ Storm. Now He Owes $16,752. - The New York Times (nytimes.com)
Hello; I just read this story. Not sure it fits in this thread very well in the main area of the story, but do think there may be a slight relationship. I considered putting the link into a thread I follow about CD players. Might fit in that thread a bit in the sense of how we sometimes adopt a new way of doing things which seems to be better until an unexpected ugly side shows up. In this case the thing which stood out to me was that customers have the freedom of choice in Texas to pick among various online companies to handle their electric bills.
The part which stood out was how during "normal" times the company this man picked could give him cheaper rates. The catch was the rates could be legally changed dramatically and the man had been using a credit card to make payments. That the electric bill may be outrageous is not the point I am trying to make. Point is that without a good understanding of the rules some of the new ways of doing things may have hidden consequences.

How the story may fit in this thread is not so clear but let me try. We are being pushed into adoption of a new technology at a more grand scale in what may be a much too short of a time frame. The time frame may be the critical point.
For a long while hybrid and some all electric EV's have been for sale. Their sales had never reached very high numbers. Even during the time of high gas prices they were not a big seller. Then came a change in how fossil fuels are recovered and fuel prices have been quite low for about four years. So the EV's are not practical financially.
Now we are being told we will have no choice. Also those who favor the move to EV's now seem to have the power to force the issue. The Texas power grid incident may prove instructive depending on how some aspects play out.
I have heard of two stories as to why the natural gas power plants failed and why the wind turbines froze up. Both, if true, may be pointed back to the "green" thinking of those in charge. It seems the old style pumps which have for decades kept the gas pressure up in natural gas pipelines were replaced with electric run pumps. The story I heard was this was to be more "green". The old pumps had been run buy the natural gas it self and apparently were thought to be "more dirty" than an electric pump. Interesting in that natural gas in a very clean burning fossil fuel. It is not clear to me yet if the electric pumps actually froze up or there was just no electricity to run them.. Maybe a combination of both?

For the windmills the story is those who made decisions decided to not spend some extra money to winterize the windmills. Maybe $2000 per unit. This story seems more likely to be confirmed so far.

While I do not think those pushing the EV agenda will stop and reconsider their plans, I do think we who are not convinced ought to raise the questions and ask for some answers. Seems a better way might be to let those who favor adoption of EV's get to do so and if their consumption is great enough to support a new class of vehicles, then such is fine. At the same time if enough of us wish to continue to drive ICE vehicles to support their manufacture, then this is also fine.
If at some point one sort of vehicle outcompetes the other in all aspects then a more natural change will be had. The winner will have to prove to be not just more efficient, but also more practical and without unintended consequences. It is the unknown consequences that ought to be of concern. If we get pushed into a point of no return with the EV experiment and have a Texas sized winter storm like event of some sort, then we are as stuck as some Texans are this day.

It seems to be less about any green thinking, and more about not wanting to spend the money to have equipment be reliable during colder than expected weather. From an extremely cursory look it seems like the last time Texas had enough cold to shutdown power generators was about a decade ago. Having such a large amount of time between significant cold spells might make it make sense to not have as robust a system when it gets cold. It all depends on how Texas handles it. They're apparently their own isolated electrical island. I knew they had their own transmission authority, but wasn't quite sure if that meant no interconnections outside the state, but that seems to be how they do it. That has it's ups and downs, and seems to work well enough for the state in most cases.
Another problem they encountered is that their grid is geared to handle loading associated with cooling more than heating. Cooling is the predominant electrical need for houses in Texas, as it generally doesn't get this cold. And I'd be willing to bet that a large proportion of houses in Texas aren't well insulated, so when a cold snap like this hits you will see a huge load on the system as everyone's thermostats kick their heat on, and never turn off since it's cold and so much of their heat will escape their poorly insulated houses.
Electrical distributors have to account for thermostats in this way during cold months. Say a whole distribution line goes down for a few hours, when they fix the problem they may have to further isolate that line to incrementally bring customers back online because they know every house on that line will be cold enough for their thermostats to be calling for heat as soon as power is restored. That amount of loading can be more than the line will normally run, and be high enough to trip that line's feeder breaker and dump everyone again, right of the bat.
Another thing to think about, is that winter is probably a traditional time for electrical generators in Texas to do maintenance outages. It's likely the least electrically taxing season for the state, so a higher number of generating plants will be down in the winter than in other seasons to do shutdown maintenance.

 

[sk47]

It seems to be less about any green thinking, and more about not wanting to spend the money to have equipment be reliable during colder than expected weather.

Hello; My reasons for citing "green thinking" has to do with some specific things. One being the move , if confirmed, that the natural gas powered pumps were replaced with electric pumps.
Another reason being their energy grid has somewhere around 25% of it's a capacity based on windmills and solar panels. Not an indictment in and of itself since as you point out Texas has a lot of sun and wind much of the year. Makes sense to take advantage of an available resource.

Does not make sense to fail to take steps to handle extreme cold so some of the fault likely will be doing things on the cheap. It is known the windmills can be cold hardened. I will make a guess that the electric pumps can be cold hardened as well. So at least some of the disaster may be laid onto being too cheap to pay for the cold applications on the pumps and windmills.

So let me try to make my point again. First by not getting too deep into some of the details about Texas. Another way to look at it is Texas has had this sort of bad winter weather throughout it's history. While the last few days events are not common, they are not unknown. Texas as well as the rest of the states have been able to deal with such events in the past. What are the new elements in place? My thinking is if the old style pumps that run on the natural gas had been left in place, then at least the pressure in the gas lines would have held up. If I am proven wrong about the switch to electric pumps, then my speculations hold much less weight.

Near as I can tell from the media, magazines and other sources there is a definite push to do away with fossil fuels to power our vehicles and our electric grid across the nation and perhaps the world. I do not hear much about keeping coal and natural gas power plants around in fifteen or twenty years. The dream of some is to get to zero carbon emissions and do it soon as possible. Perhaps I have this scenario wrong but such is how it seems to me.

Again my point is the "green new deal" sort of thinking is behind such things as entire states banning ICE vehicles by 2035. I also understand the coal fired power plants are to be shut down as soon as possible. So the point is what are we to do when all the green stuff is in place and we have one of these unexpected weather episodes or some other such unexpected thing. If it becomes too much of a distraction then dismiss the events in Texas. Once we are dependent on a "green" grid what will be our backup.

One more example. I have a number of power tools. Some battery powered. I use them . I also have some hand saws I keep around. I hardly ever use them but they are here if I need them.

 

[shogun32]

I for one commend the Chinese for helping keep Amazonian plants alive.
China emits more C02 in 16 days than Australia does in 1 year

Given the scale of the "problem" you can go full greenie-weeny and EV all you damn well please and it won't matter a whit if India, China (and soon Africa) don't care.

 

[sk47]

Hello; I record nature programs such as NOVA and the like off PBS. I was watching such a program this morning recorded within the last few weeks. It is about chemical reactions. In one segment the host was explaining about how cement is made from limestone. Key items which stood out to me were the amounts of energy needed to make cement and the amount of CO2 off gassed.
What is my point?
Again we have over time become dependent on a lifestyle which requires energy to keep going. I can only figure the "green police" will come after more than the fuel for our vehicles as time passes.
I could add from the same program the segment about artificial fertilizer (ammonium nitrate) which also requires a lot of energy to make. A telling statement from that segment was that the chemical process which gave us artificial fertilizer is also responsible for being able to feed around two billion people. That if we stopped making the stuff two billion people will starve.

Something not in the program, but which I have read about is how the military is the biggest user of fossil fuels bar none. Not sure how the military will be able to use battery vehicles.

 

[sk47]

I for one commend the Chinese for helping keep Amazonian plants alive.
China emits more C02 in 16 days than Australia does in 1 year

Given the scale of the "problem" you can go full greenie-weeny and EV all you damn well please and it won't matter a whit if India, China (and soon Africa) don't care.

Hello; A story I have been hearing is China will start to go green at some future date when they have enough "green infrastructure" in place. That they now need to burn mostly unregulated coal for a few years or decades until such "green" structures are in place and can take over. This sort of rationalization is supposed to make it OK for them to build and start running new coal fired power plants at the rate of more than one new one per month currently. I guess if you are a true believer this sort of story is easier to swallow. Frankly sounds fishy to me.
I do not know about any such plans for India and Africa, so will figure they do not have any such pie in the sky future plans.

 

[Burkey]

I for one commend the Chinese for helping keep Amazonian plants alive.
China emits more C02 in 16 days than Australia does in 1 year

Given the scale of the "problem" you can go full greenie-weeny and EV all you damn well please and it won't matter a whit if India, China (and soon Africa) don't care.

I guess it’s a good thing that China has committed to the Paris agreement then.
Can you explain how a continent (Africa) would go about doing it? Wouldn’t that be the responsibility of the nations Individually?
I‘m particularly fond of how you skipped the part where the US and China combined, account for roughly 40% of global CO2 emissions, despite only accounting for roughly 25% of global population.
Whilst we’re doing facts, with a population that’s 55 times larger, China is actually doing a much better job on CO2 emissions than Australia. In fact, China managed to hit their 2020 CO2 target nearly 3 years early.
The Australian government has a LOT of work to do.

 

[HoosierDaddy]

Hello; I record nature programs such as NOVA and the like off PBS. I was watching such a program this morning recorded within the last few weeks. It is about chemical reactions. In one segment the host was explaining about how cement is made from limestone. Key items which stood out to me were the amounts of energy needed to make cement and the amount of CO2 off gassed.

Not a problem. Green new deal means vast majority will be jobless. Using production and "supervision" methods pioneered by the pharaohs they will stay busy making carbon neutral mud bricks to take the place of concrete.

 

[Burkey]

Not a problem. Green new deal means vast majority will be jobless. Using production and "supervision" methods pioneered by the pharaohs they will stay busy making carbon neutral mud bricks to take the place of concrete.

Yeah, cos no new jobs could possibly emerge from new technologies. Damn you must have a top quality crystal ball.

 

[HoosierDaddy]

Yeah, cos no new jobs could possibly emerge from new technologies. Damn you must have a top quality crystal ball.

You bet. It can benefit you as well. Just search: Sister Fatima LLC.

For full restoration five dollars an hour and with each consultation a free holy flower.

 

[Burkey]

Hello; I record nature programs such as NOVA and the like off PBS. I was watching such a program this morning recorded within the last few weeks. It is about chemical reactions. In one segment the host was explaining about how cement is made from limestone. Key items which stood out to me were the amounts of energy needed to make cement and the amount of CO2 off gassed.
What is my point?
Again we have over time become dependent on a lifestyle which requires energy to keep going. I can only figure the "green police" will come after more than the fuel for our vehicles as time passes.
I could add from the same program the segment about artificial fertilizer (ammonium nitrate) which also requires a lot of energy to make. A telling statement from that segment was that the chemical process which gave us artificial fertilizer is also responsible for being able to feed around two billion people. That if we stopped making the stuff two billion people will starve.

Something not in the program, but which I have read about is how the military is the biggest user of fossil fuels bar none. Not sure how the military will be able to use battery vehicles.

Worth the read.
https://theconversation.com/bendabl...ould-dramatically-cut-global-emissions-152544

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