In general, the way to upgrade to heat pumps (heating, cooling, water heating, clothes drying, etc) is when your old gas units (or old inefficient AC) need replacing anyway, and you have to spend the money anyway. After the current government incentive, it is often cheaper (sometime significantly) to convert to electric than it is to install another gas appliance. We live in a 100 year old 1150sqft house along the line between heating zones 5 and 6, a climate like lower New Hampshire, southern South Dakota or very northern Illinois. We have a high efficiency, cold temperature mini-split heat pump. Our electricity rates are about US average. We live 100% electrically, and it costs us about $100/month for all our energy usage, including all the driving of our electric car, our electric lawn equipment, etc. It cost us more when back we had to pay the gas company over $250/yr just to be connected, and WAY MORE when we also had to buy gasoline.
Nobody makes fuel form fuel, when you can just use the fuel as is. That's just common sense, no need to invoke thermodynamics.
I never said hydrogen should be directly used as a transportation fuel. I said hydrogen could be used for things like a blast furnace or used as a starting material for transportation fuel and chemical synthesis. SO hydrogen would be used *indirectly* to power planes for example, by using it to make conventional aviation fuel that does not add new carbon to the atmosphere.
You suggest making hydrocarbons out in the desert using cheap solar will be cheaper than fossil fuels. To make hydrocarbons you need air, water, and 8.8 kwh of electrons to make 1 kg of hydrocarbon. A gallon of fuel is about 3.2 kg so this works out to 28.2 kwh per gallon. This is assuming perfect efficiency. Lets assume 50% overall efficiency, which is pretty good, that is 70% efficient CO2 removal from the atmosphere and 70% efficient conversion of CO2 into fuel using some yet-to-be-discovered super-process.
So, to make the gallon of gas we need to input 56 kwh of raw materials. At 4 cents per kwh (this is the lowest price I have seen for any form of electrical power) this works out to $2.2 per gallon (compare to 0 input cost for fossil fuels). And this is just the process inputs. So no, manufactured fuel is never going to be cheaper than fuel that nature has already made from you can you just extract out of the ground.
If we live in a world where most people believe as I do that using fossil fuels has some nasty future climatic side effects* and we properly price in those side effects, we might find that the actual cost of using fossil fuels is not just the $3-4 we pay at the pump but more like $5-6 when we consider the cost of dealing with the climatic side effects in the future. The fuel in the desert people will never be able to compete with $3 gas, but $5 gas, that's a different story.
*People don't really talk about this, but looking at historical sea level and temperatures over the past 400 millennia, one can obtain a relation between sea level and temperature. It suggests 15 feet of future sea level rise is already baked in the cake from the first 1 C rise we have seen. Add another one before were get this under control and we have 30 ft. Florida is going to be underwater in the future. I then look at the forcing associated with this temperature rise and calculate how long it would take for it to melt enough ice to raise sea level by that amount. It's on the order of 1200 years. So that's 2.5 ft per century and if you look it up you see forecasts for sea level rise for the rest of this century are around 2 feet.
What they want is a single wire monopoly to your home and business. They want everything from your car to your dryer to be at the mercy of their hourly pricing. They do not care that much of our gas is a by-product and will simply be flared off - they do not care about the environment. They want a MONOPOLY to your home, ( And they want to stop maintaining the last mile to your home too, a bonus savings of billions ) - They will burn every molecule of gas in centralized turbines, at 3 times the rate of burning it at point of use, the loss in generation, transmission, and conversion back to heat, requires 3X the gas - another win. Electrification is about MONOPOLY. Bryce continues to do a great job
Propane may cost more per btu than gas. But my gas had a $40 per month connection fee on $10 worth of gas. Never again. And I have 250 gallons in my yard they cannot turn off. :)
It's disappointing to see that the author of this article missed the big picture by getting too caught up in the details. The fact is that heat pumps are 300% efficient up to 0 degrees Fahrenheit, not including wind chill, which covers 95%+ of Americans for 355+ days per year. This puts most Americans at current cost parity, and in many areas, heat pumps are actually cheaper to run than natural gas. Acquisition costs can be an issue, but the government can provide assistance to address that. It's incredibly disingenuous that the article failed to mention heat pumps, especially considering that many Americans can heat their homes more affordably with an electric heat pump than with a natural gas furnace. For the sake of fairness, heat pumps should have been addressed.
"Acquisition costs can be an issue" translates to "heat pumps are not affordable for a lot of people" and "government can provide assistance" means taxpayers are on the hook. And not sure how it's cheaper to run a heat pump but my electric bill tops $400-$500 per month in the winter running my heat pump furnace, which I have only because my neighborhood doesn't have a gas utility. Heat pumps might be 300% efficient in a properly insulated newly built home which isn't exactly in the budget of most Americans.
One more thought: How old and what make is your heat pump? It's worth noting that older heat pumps can lose efficiency as high as 50 degrees Fahrenheit. On the other hand, today's newer models are more than 250% efficient to below 0. Surprisingly, wind chill does not matter and can even improve efficiency. It might be worth considering whether upgrading to a newer model heat pump would help lower your heat bills enough to make it worth the investment.
Not knowing your region that does not seem like that high a bill. I live in a very northern climate and for 3 months a year most of the people in my area would see Natural gas and hydro bills over that amount if they are in homes that are not super well insulated. Not all heat pumps are 300% efficient but the insulation rate of the home does not change the efficiency of the heat pump. insulation is a great investment for the most part but heating source does not change that.
I am also a Ph.D engineer, but chemical rather than nuclear. So when in look at replacing a fuel with electricity for heating, this initially makes no engineering sense. Electricity is produced (at high efficiency) from *work*. So using "free" work to produce electricity makes intuitive sense. Hydropower uses water flowing downhill to do work for free (a 900-year-old tech) to generate electricity at high efficiency. So much so that hydro plants were among the earliest power plants used. Wind power uses flowing air to do work for free (another 900-year-old tech) to do the same thing. Solar cells passively generate electricity from sunlight. If the cells are cheap enough this makes intuitive sense.
Work can also be produced from heat using a heat engine, which ideally operates at the Carnot efficiency. In the real world the efficiency is less than ideal and it well under 1. It makes little sense to convert heat into work at a loss, then convert the work into electricity (small loss but big capital) only to convert the electricity back into heat, when you could just create the heat at the point of use (i.e the home furnace).
But here's the kicker. If using fossil fuels to power the furnace is going to cause big externalities, then those externalities need to be captured in the cost of the fossil fuels. It could well be that the *cost* of using the fossil fuel (when externalities are taken into account) to heat the house will be greater than using a home heating system that does not employ fossil fuels.
But of course, nobody is proposing electrical heating. They are proposing heat pumps (e.g. AC) where heat is pumped into and out of the home during the winter and summer. This is more efficient than direct resistive heating, but as I learned in school 40 years ago, most suitable for mid-latitude US states.
Too many of these analyses tacitly assume that rising temperatures are a nothing burger and do not have to be taken into account through the cost of fossil fuel use. Which sort of makes such analyzes useless, except as a polemic.
"They are proposing heat pumps (e.g. AC) where heat is pumped into and out of the home during the winter and summer. This is more efficient than direct resistive heating, but as I learned in school 40 years ago, most suitable for mid-latitude US states."
You are certainly correct about "40 years ago". Heat pump cold weather efficiencies were pathetic back then, and most could hardly, if at all, function below freezing. But cold temperature heat pump performance has made huge and amazing strides in recent years. They are now popular and working well in cold places like Scandinavia and Canada. This is no longer "40 years ago".
"If using fossil fuels to power the furnace is going to cause big externalities, then those externalities need to be captured in the cost of the fossil fuels. It could well be that the *cost* of using the fossil fuel (when externalities are taken into account) to heat the house will be greater than using a home heating system that does not employ fossil fuels."
This false premise / socialist propaganda line of "externalities" is quite popular with the climate cult. Like just about everything else they either say directly or imply, it is a lie. Why? Because if this is true, then it is ALSO true that any externalities resulting in VALUE which the fossil fuel industries provided to humanity but did NOT receive fair compensation for in the prices they charged exist, then "society" then owes the fossil fuel industry because they were "cheated."
Those externalities do indeed exist, and are easy to quantify. WITHOUT fossil fuels, 80-90% of humans alive today simply would not exist - period. The quality of life of that 10-20%, were they forced to live without fossil fuels, would be horrible by comparison. Therefore, the value you and society owe to fossil fuels is too great to possibly be repaid in a thousand years.
So, please push this line of thinking! I want to see the look on you people's faces when you get the bill!
I completely agree with your statement about the importance of fossil fuels TODAY. I further agree that the world would not look like it does now without fossil fuels. They have been a game changer. While fossil fuels have played a significant role in powering our world up until now, it's important to recognize their negative impact on our environment. Even if one does not believe in climate change, it's clear that fossil fuels contribute to air pollution, which can have serious health consequences, especially in densely populated urban areas.
Furthermore, it's worth noting that not all fossil fuels are created equal. Electricity produced from fossil fuels burned far from cities can be less damaging than those burned in densely populated urban areas. This highlights the importance of considering where and how we produce and consume energy.
I agree with you on the past value of fossil fuels, and that should not be overlooked, but it also should not be the sole factor in our current cost-benefit analysis. By your logic of looking at the past value, no newspaper should go out of business. We should all still have landline phones, radios and be reading paper books. There are many technologies that have played an essential role in shaping our world, but they are now being replaced by new systems. Fossil fuels are simply one great technology of the past that needs to be replaced. While we owe an incalculable debt to these technologies, it's important to recognize that society evolves, and new systems are constantly emerging to take their place. Similarly, while fossil fuels have been a game changer in the past, it's important to consider the current and future impact of our energy choices and work towards a cleaner and healthier future.
While fossil fuels may still be necessary in the short term, we must start taking steps towards a fossil fuel-free future. By doing so, we can work towards a cleaner, healthier, and eventually, we will run out of fossil fuels, so let's start the transition NOW.
"While fossil fuels have played a significant role in powering our world up until now, it's important to recognize their negative impact on our environment."
Except they haven't. The air and water today across America is far cleaner than when I was a child. China is another story - but the argument you are making never gets applied to them. CO2 and the warmer temperatures have been beneficial both to mankind and plants. The temperatures in 1850 were an arbitrary starting point - a momentary DIP in temperatures across the steadily rising temps over the past 40,000 years - so any assumptions about overall impact are nonsense.
I've carefully read the IPCC Report on Climate Change for Policy Makers (various versions across the past decade. If that report is 100% true, then we are in absolutely no "danger" whatsoever. Only the Irwin Allen disaster scenarios presented as fantastical "what if?"s look scary, but the assumptions to make them come true are absolutely ridiculous at face value.
Then there's the other matter. We don't any have real replacements which are cost competitive. None. The currently promoted and heavily subsidized dead-ends cannot possibly get us there. Leaving alone the terratons of materials to be mined and the billions of acres of land they would consume - they are to the energy transition as VHS and Beta were to the future of the video industry: dinosaurs too slow to understand they are already on their way to extinction.
There is nothing to "start." The hubris wrapped into that statement is so staggering as to defy description - the very notion that some magical central planners can and must predict what the innovations will be which will tip the scales is laughable and offensive at the same time. It's right up there with "for the greater good!" as a totalitarian rallying cry. On the stupid scale, it's right up there with the old Dilbert cartoon where the boss demanded his engineers provide him a schedule of the upcoming year's unplanned outages. As a personal opinion, if every person alive who made such assertions were to spontaneously burst into flames as a consequence of their fanatical arrogance, the world would quickly become a better place.
We are already taking the necessary steps through funding research. Progress has been steady - exponential improvement decade over decade, with no indication it will stop any time soon. By 2030, 2040 at the very outside we will actually have clean and reliable solutions which are cheaper, too - and governments will simply get in the way of the natural progression. It is inevitable, and feeble governments are powerless either to "bring it into being" (as if 9 women could have a baby in 1 month) or to stop it from happening. Greed is what will save us - greed to grab a piece of the multi-trillion dollar energy industry while doing so at prices which bring prosperity, not poverty.
We are 3+ million years into the Earth's fifth Ice Age. Ice Ages comprise about 10% of the Earth's history. Within this Ice Age, the Earth has been steadily warming for the past 40,000 years. About 11,500 years ago it finally became warm enough to qualify as an inter glacial period. This is just one of many such periods within the current Ice Age, and is quite unremarkable. In fact, temperatures today are about 8F cooler than during the last inter glacial period about 130,000 years ago. Inter glacial periods make up about 10% of all Ice Ages, or about 1% of the Earth's entire history. Temperatures in these periods are thus the LEAST likely to be called "normal" for the Earth.
There is no "climate crisis." None. Nor will there be. Climate changes at a (pun intended) glacial pace. Innovation is exponential. We probably already have the solution for every form of alternative energy we need. No, it's not the current technologies for wind, solar, and LiIon batteries - arguing about which of these will "win" is like arguing about whether VHS or Beta will rule the video market. We can get unlimited power and winter heat from the earth's heat (Eavor dotcom) and, with a bit of experience in doing it, it will likely become cheaper than natural gas (per the IEAA). Batteries can be made from materials which are nontoxic, non-flammable, plentiful, and available anywhere on the earth - and with a bit more work can move our vehicles 5x further than a Tesla for about the same amount of weight (Influit Energy). For niches in which hydrocarbon fuels still make the most sense, we can make all the clean burning carbon-neutral synthetic substitutes for gasoline and diesel/jet fuel we want from seawater (Low-cost catalyst helps turn seawater into fuel at scale).
These are not cheaper - yet. But they, or something very much like them, will be.
You are making my point. I agree that we will engineer our way out of this. But as an industrial engineer, I know that nothing happens without the suits in headquarters deciding to do it. Are the oil companies the bad guys. NO! They are going to be part of the solution. But they are a business, and they have to respond to the environment in which they operate. And that environment is set by the political environment over which we are arguing. As I have argued previously, I believe this will change fairly dramatically in the 2030's. For the sake of our posterity, I hope it does, but I will be long dead before its fruits ripen.
About 15 years ago, I spent about six months learning enough climate science to construct a toy model on a spreadsheet to aid my understanding of this thing since so many people were objecting to it like you are. As a result, I have sufficient understanding to know when a claim is BS, and am able to come to my own conclusions *without* having to reference someone else's work.
"...I know that nothing happens without the suits in headquarters deciding to do it."
Fortunately, not all the suits are in a single room. There are tens of thousands of suits doing nothing all day long but dreaming of a way to grab a piece of the trillion dollar energy pie. Leaders like Eavor dotcom and Influit Energy are showing that we can have all the clean, reliable, CHEAP energy we want without compromise. Everything takes a bit of time - someone has to go first to make the other investors comfortable a product isn't a scam. Eavor's first plant comes online next July; Influit is (or shortly will be) delivering product to their first customers (the US military). So long as they don't fail, they will scale.
Geothermal (what Eavor does) was one of the hot techs that was touted back in the 1970's. It along with oil sands (fracking), wind, concentrated solar, and biofuels made far more sense to my mind back then than did solar cells and batteries. And yet here we are. Fracking and wind panned out, but the other "likley candidates" did not. Eavor is trying their hand at geothermal, making use of advances in directional drilling that did not exist in the 1970's. Maybe they will be successful. We'll see what happens. I hope they are successful, it would be good to have more baskets into which to put our energy generation eggs. The other company is a battery company looking to replace lead-acid batteries in things like forklifts and other heavy industrial equipment. I hope they are successful too (and the guys with the iron batteries). One of my concerns is the fixation on solar-battery as THE solution for green energy. It is certainly A solution, as is wind and nuclear, and perhaps other things like geothemal. But it has a LOT of batteries: in a solar world, the electricity with which you charge your electric car battery overnight will come from another battery.
Personally, I favor solar-generated hydrogen for use in high temperature industrial processes (where it can serve as a drop-in replacement for natural gas) and for use as a reducing agent for chemical and aviation-fuel synthesis. (I find the idea of battery-powered aircraft as nutty). But I'll probably be wrong on that too.
I remember clearly. People SPOKE of closed loop geothermal in the 1970s, just as they SPOKE of cold fusion. There was no technology available at that time to make such a dream even remotely plausible, let alone financially competitive. Only in the past decade have such technologies become available (directional drilling; microwave drills; pipe-less rock bores), and Eavor has only been pursuing them for 7 years. Whether they do or not, at this point it's either that or nuclear - and of the 2, only geothermal shows the promise of becoming economically competitive.
Influit is not a replacement for lead acid. It is a replacement for LiIon. It already possesses superior energy density, and is expected to achieve 4-5x the energy density of LiIon in their gen2 product. That would be a 1,500 mile Tesla.
I agree with you that neither solar/battery nor wind/battery are even remotely candidates to replace fossil fuels. The terratons of materials which must be mined to allow for a week's worth of "unreliable outages" places it squarely into the realm of science fiction.
If you're going to use energy to make stored energy such as hydrogen, why not use fuels which are vastly more practical and require no changes to our infrastructure instead? Google "Low-cost catalyst helps turn seawater into fuel at scale" Hydrogen was the "fuel of the future" when I was a kid in the 60s, it's still the "fuel of the future," and it probably will be in another 30 years... :)
I'm an economist, and so am an expert in the analysis of externalities. The problem with your comment is that it only contemplates negative externalities for hydrocarbon usage. Hysterical political "analysis" is nothing close to the sober analysis of externalities. The so-called social cost of carbon is an attempt to net the positive and negative externalities of the use of hydrocarbons. A glance at the literature shows that the estimates vary wildly based on discount rates and other parameters of choice. Of course, those who select the values for these important parameters are themselves politically motivated. Such is the nature of academic grant funding. A recent study by CERES notes that, contrary to the alarmist IPCC "analysis" increasing temperatures are mostly due to measurement problems and cycles in solar radiation. https://www.ceres-science.com/post/new-study-suggests-global-warming-could-be-mostly-an-urban-problem
The use of externalities to defend draconian, regressive taxes and more extreme measures such as outright bans will always be a political issue. The analysis of externalities includes some notion of utility maximization, which, again, is subjective and thus open to the whims of political actors.
Economics isn't engineering and pretending it is will lead you to very very harmful conclusions. Best to leave the analysis of externalities to those of us equipped to do so with a full view of the issues at hand and stick to your energy equations.
Yep - see my response adjacent. 80-90% of humanity simply would not exist. Most of those remaining would live a drastically lower standard of living, if not abject poverty. I'd love to see the faces of climate cult members when they get the bill for externalities, lol!
Greenhouse gases fall into the same category of externalities as pollution. Look at groundwater contamination. Industial firms allowed all sorts of organic compounds to flow into the environment just as we continue to add greenhouse gases to the environment today. Much later we find the contamination of the soil and groundwater had negative externalities that were later realized so now we have the former sites of these enterprises unusable without expensive cleanup which has to be paid for by the government as the original polluter is long out of the business in many cases. Similarly, when the externalities from global warming come home to roost, it will be government who is stuck with the tab. So, OF COURSE, determining externalities is a political matter, since dealing with the mess it creates will fall to the government.
As for positive externalities coming from using hydrocarbon fuels, these come from the properties of the hydrocarbon, not its point of origin. The plane will fly just as well if the carbon atoms in its aviation fuel came from the atmosphere instead of out of the ground. Hydrocarbon fuels can be manufactured. Right now, my understanding is oil companies are working on carbon capture. I am sure this is just PR because capturing CO2 so you can burn more fossil fuel can never work thermodynamically, which they sure know. But assuming they build some pilot facilities they will have CO2 on tap onsite. And solar units are going up all over. They aren't going to be able to build enough batteries for all of this so sooner or later they will convert some of the excess power during the daytime into hydrogen to earn a process credit. And so in the future there will be hydrogen available. With CO2 and hydrogen you can make hydrocarbon fuels. The tech is very old, we did a class project in engineering design class forty years ago to do that very thing and the tech was old then. The fuel is going to be more expensive that the fuel you make from crude oil, but if the political worm has turned and fossil fuels carry some politically implemented cost, then this will make sense, and the oil companies will make their product instead of mine it.
As for the politics, in ten years a majority of the Legislature will be consist of people for whom global warming has been a thing all their adult lives. And ten years and a majority of the electorate will consist of folks for which global warming has been a thing for their entire lives.
Scientists discovered smoking caused cancer back in the 1930's. Major restrictions on where you can smoke did not come about until the first decade of this century. It took 70 years for the worm to turn on tobacco. Global warming was established as a correct theory in 1967. I except the worm to turn sometime during the next decade. I suspect the oil companies exploring carbon capture is a way to hedge their bets.
We already have all the carbon sequestration we need, and it's free. Thanks to Global Greening - the ONLY model to come from AGW theory for which real world observations exactly match predictions - plants today take up 20% more CO2 each year now than they did in 1850.
"Global warming was established as a correct theory in 1967."
No, it wasn't. They were still predicting the inter glacial period would end in the 1970s. Nor has global warming been fully validated today. Is there SOME effect? Yes. Are they certain the degree and whether it is linear, exponential, self-stabilizing or inherently unstable (the "tipping point" theory)? Absolutely not. However, 4.5 billion years of the Earth's geological / climate history strongly suggest that the predictions of doom are directly proportional to the size of the grants.
Who is the *they* who were predicting the ice age in the 1970's? A handful of scientists, just like a handful of scientists were proclaiming nuclear fusion at room temperature a decade or so later, and some were proclaiming superconductivity at ambient temperatures and pressures.
When I say global warming was established in 1967 I am referring to the first formal theory making testable predictions. That model predicted an average temperature rise of 0.16 degrees per decade. In the 53 yrs from1967 to 2020 that works out to around 0.8-0.9 degrees warmer. The actual increase is the same.
No skeptic has come up with an alternate explanation for the observed temperature increase that has obviously happened (half of the summer ice cap at the North Pole has disappeared), sea level has risen in accordance with measured temperature increases and we have observed stratospheric cooling as expected for a greenhouse warming mechanism (as predicted in 1967 paper) that would NOT happen if the mechanism was solar in nature. And there is the fact that the sun's intensity has been *measured* via satellite since 1979 and it has not increased.
Every skeptic I have seen uses nothing by hand waving arguments. That may work for politics, but not for natural science.
"Who is the *they* who were predicting the ice age in the 1970's?"
Try Google.
AGW was and still is a framework. I have not and never will dispute that there is some truth to it. I will however categorically state that if the IPCC Report on Climate Change (for "decision makers" version - I have no interest in becoming a climatologist) is 100% correct, then claims of a crisis are bald faced lies.
Why?
Climate is changing (pun intended) glacially. Innovation is exponential. For example, the cost of solar panels (price divided by the lifetime expected kwh delivered) have dropped by half about ever 3.5 years since 1960. That's exponential. Batteries have done the same, with a periodicity of about 6.5 years (the chemistry and manufacturing have changed, but they are still "batteries").
The world will begin in earnest to switch to alternative energy sources when they are clean, reliable, and cheaper than fossil fuels. That day is not today, but the arrival of that day can easily be calculated to within a decade. The day when no new fossil fuel plants will get built is probably within 15-20 years (quite likely Eavor dotcom). The earth won't warm enough more for anyone to care in the time it will take to transition.
AGW may be science, but "climate crisis" is a hoax.
Innovation isn't always exponential. The ancient Greeks and Romans were aware of steam power, but did nothing with it--no innovation. A thousand years ago there were many advanced civilizations with the necessary scientific knowledge to launch exponential innovation. All but one of them did not.
I remember the 1970's oil crisis and did my thesis on alcohol fuel in the 1980's. The original Alcohol Fuels program was launched in the height of the oil crisis to look into restarting the WW II alcohol from wood project to see if technologically advancements since then would enable development of alcohol as a supplement to gasoline to make the US less dependent on Mideast oil. The program was discontinued in the 1980's, but not before it had spawned an alcohol from corn program that serves to this day as an agricultural subsidy.
Another old tech being re-assessed to address the oil crisis was fracking, with shale oil as the source. That delivered. You know what was *not* considered? Solar-power battery cars. That was too-pie in the sky in the 1970's. That assessment was correct, fracking was the way to go, there was no need for solar cell and battery innovation to deal with the problem of oil dependence. No solar/battery innovation would have happened had the driver been energy shortage.
The reason *why* there has been exponential innovation on solar cells and batteries is *because* greenhouse warming became a thing. The idea of the greenhouse effect was advanced in 1896 and disproven shortly after. As late as 1950, meteorological textbooks were still saying the greenhouse effect had been proven false. Had the skeptical viewpoint remained mainstream, greenhouse warming would have stayed fringe.
Solar cells in the 1970's already had a niche utility: Space. As space fizzled out, further work on solar cells wouldn't make sense until SpaceX restarted interest in space. Working would be going on now, but they would be 30 years behind where we are now.
But greenhouse warming did NOT stay fringe. Your side did not win the debate. And so we have had this innovation now.
The rich world has been able to pay for addressing externalities because it is rich. Poor countries have no such options. For them to adopt "free" energy (I assume you mean chaotic weather-dependent energy sources) they will sacrifice future economic growth. The consequences of that will inevitably mean more fossil fuel burning , not less, and, due to lack of progress on poverty, higher birth rates than would be the case if they were rich. What about the population externality?
I assumed that a carbon tax would be a domestic affair, US law does not apply outside of the US. So why do you assume poor countries would do this? That is silly.
If the tech is so old, why is it not implemented? Ah yes, cost. Cost that cannot be ignored. Cost that, if the cheaper alternative is banned by psychotic, anti-human engineers such as yourself, will have the effect stated in the article. Climate hysteria is a regressive tax. There are 7 billion people on the planet who are nowhere near our standard of living. If they are to ever get there, adaptation to the (poorly) forecasted warming is the only way.
The magical thinking that inherently weather-dependent, non-dispatchable, intermittent energy generation will ever create a higher standard of living for the 7 billion people who live outside the West and the Far East is quite dangerous. Far more dangerous than a 2 degree celsius increase in the "average temperature" (whatever that means) of the planet. Note well that I'm the only one who has cited published empirical work on the subject. You've leaned on nothing but hysteria.
Thankfully, the reality of "green" energy is being felt and your idiotic prediction of the political future will not come true. Your attempt to indoctrinate the youth with climate hysteria is no longer working.
Of course it is cost. Both water and wind power have been around for 900 years, old tech. Yet water power was harnessed immediately for power generation while it is only recently that wind has. Why? Water is much denser and so easier (cheaper) to figure out how to harness. Wind was a lot harder until we got the computer power to do computational fluid dynamics. And voila we have wind turbines that look remarkably similar to the hydrofoil impellers developed 35 years ago. These were designed to produce maximum fluid motion (mixing) for minimum power input. In the wind case it is the reverse, how to recover maximum power from fluid motion. So, while hydropower always was economic, wind power is harder, but one you solve the problems, it is economic too. The same thing is true of solar power. Look, there are *no moving parts* nothing to wear out. It's like software, once it's in place it generates power (revenue) for almost nothing. The issue was the cost of the solar panel. This is not complicated. Average solar insolation is 240 watts per sq meter (this is an average and included nights). Assume 10% efficiency and you get 24 watts average output. Multiply by 8766 hours per year and divide by 1000 and you get 210 kwh per year/per sq meter. Calculate the present value of this stream of kwh over a 20 year lifetime and you get the value of a solar panel in kwh. Multiply by price of that kwh and you get maximum dollar value for the panel. If the cost of the panel if more than this, it is too expensive, like wind (but not water) was 130 years ago. But since they are building these things all over the place, this is obviously not the case anymore. You can read that the rapid fall in the price of solar panels is what started the boom. Duh, of course it did. This is capitalism 101.
Great piece as always. Looking at the affordability of electricity vs gas, would the efficiency of the appliance not make an impact too? i.e. yes electricity may be more expensive than gas per btu, but if the electric heat pump needs less btu to produce the same heat output, should that not be considered too?
Extract from EDF Energy:
"A well-designed heat pump installation may have a coefficient of performance (CoP) of 3.5 or better. This sounds complicated, but what it simply means, is that for every unit of energy it uses, it produces 3.5 units of heat."
"This makes it about four times more efficient than gas central heating! And, based on standard tariffs, on a par with running costs."
Good point, but you also need to factor in the inefficiency of electricity generation, as pointed out by Ducat. The CoP for an electric heat pump varies from 1 to 4, but the energy efficiency is only half that due to generator loss. So the heat pump with a CoP of 3.75 has an energy conversion efficiency of 1.875, still greater than simply burning gas, which cannot be greater than 1, but not as dramatically greater.
My friends have had a positive experience with heat pumps and the cost of heating their homes because we/they don't pay for the generator losses. The homeowner only pays for how many watts of electricity I use. In talking with my friends who have switched from gas furnaces to heat pumps, they tell me that for the six months of the heating season, when they add their hydro and gas bills together, the total they got has gone down after installing a heat pump. I admit acquisition costs are more for the heat pump than a gas furnace. The government rebate almost covered the difference. Heating with a heat pump, means that they can now add solar to their roofs and further reduce their monthly bills, and in a couple of years when batteries are more affordable, they can add batteries and weather a power failure easily. Given that solar is so cheap to deploy these days, the question is over the next ten years, forgetting about climate change and air quality, and all the other reasons to switch off of gas heat from a purely economic point of view, do we expect that gas or electricity rates will rise more.
Given that we are seeing massive technological advancements that will allow us to generate electricity at cheaper and cheaper rates, I am fairly certain the free market would see fossil fuel rates go up more than electricity.
Efficiency is diminishing returns against exponential investment. I looked at installing a geothermal heat pump (500' vertical well used as a "heat sink" to expel heat into in the summer and draw heat from in the winter). Government offered about a 33% "subsidy" to install it - which would have brought the $36,000 price tag down to "only" $24,000. For reference, it would have save about half the energy vs an efficient gas furnace and AC. Instead, for $4,000 I replaced the furnace and AC with higher efficiency versions. To repay the difference in price would "only" have taken about 27 years.
Your best investment today? Superior insulation for your home. Lasts forever, requires no maintenance. Spray-foam sealed homes use so little energy that even a 10 SEER AC would not result in an uncomfortably high electric bill in August.
Best investment for the nation? Keep innovating, come up with something that is clean, reliable, endlessly renewable, and CHEAP. Then we won't care how much we use.
I am refering to air heat pumps. ground source heat pumps are 20 year plus BUT after 20 years they are super cheap. beacause 20K of the 36 k was drilling the holes and that has a 100 year life expectancy. If your in a forever home for wich a 20 year pay back can be justified and you can phisically instlall ground source its LONG LONG term the best. My friends I was talking about was baced on air source heat pumps.
Had that kind of heat pump in my last home. GA has short spring / fall. Summer is a push with an equivalent seer AC. Winter it won't work below a threshold temp. Then they changed the laws on the coolant, rendering it useless. Over 5 years, we didn't save any money. It's much noisier than a furnace.
We moved in 2011 from a 2,700 sq ft home to a 6,800 sq ft home (sweet deal - a foreclosure). It was upscale build, 16" of attic insulation, superior windows and doors, fully sealed, etc. Got a 16 seer AC and 97% efficient furnace. Gas has been cheap for heating, and our heating / cooling bills in this home have been lower than in the old home - primarily because of the superior insulation. The newest homes with the spray foam and enclosed attic space are even better. Exponentially increasing cost for exponentially diminishing returns from that point on, i.e. spend twice as much to save half as much.
The best answer? Clean cheap reliable energy. Then nobody will care how efficient your system is. It will probably be closed loop geothermal. How to get it? Stop obsessing over it and trying to "regulate it" - you cannot legislate innovation. Just wait a few more years. It's coming.
So, I'm not against them but they really only provide super value in the right climate.
Our Beeg Guy, a Rich Man North of Richmond if ever there was one, could take a few lessons from King Canute who realized that commanding tides and a few other things on a human time-scale were above his pay grade.
Mr Bryce, please chime in about the relationship between increase greenhouse gas concentration and global temperature rise. It seems your readers don’t understand the basic physical science. It would make a great new column.
Utterly irrelevant. Innovation is exponential; climate change proceeds at a (pun intended) glacial pace. 3+ million years our Ice Age has been ongoing; warming for 40,000 years; 12,500 years ago we got warm enough to call an inter glacial period (about 1% of the Earth's history). This inter glacial is totally unremarkable, about 8F cooler than the last one 130,000 years ago, while innovation is exponential in terms of decades, not millennia. We will switch to better solutions because they are cheaper, not mandated, and everyone will be just fine.
The climate cult can only make things appear "alarming" by presenting data viewed through a soda straw. Put into context, our weather is just fine and will be for the next millennia.
Professor Kelder, as you know, the risks of climate change have three components: the direct Hazard risk of climate events caused by rising CO2, Exposure to those climate events, and Resilience to that exposure to climate events.
Historically, the huge decrease in global climate-related mortality is because of increased Resilience. Robert Bryce’s work focuses on the impediments to Resilience caused by restricting fossil fuel use by prioritizing CO2 Hazard mitigation.
So, you come on this message board faux-humbly stating that denialists simply don’t grasp the magnitude of the Hazard risk, and then you’re perplexed that you are met with the usual menagerie of denialist talking points presented in a rude and condescending manner.
Here’s what the academic climate science community seems to ignore: It’s true that humans do not instinctually understand principles of scientific inference. Rather, human social awareness is designed to have intuitions about what other people think about abstract ideas; they skip to the probabilistic inferences of arguments. So, when you present visions of apocalyptic fires and floods, people intuit a value proposition imbedded there. They see a stratum of energy secure elites, which includes global academia, who are willing to prescribe energy poverty for the 3 billion people without access to reliable electricity and increasing energy poverty in developed nations, out of their own anxiety about future worst case scenarios. This feels immoral to many people, regardless of how this climate change predicament plays out.
Why don’t you explain it. Compare the monotonous 2ppm rise of co2 per year every year with the up downsideways graph of temperature over the last 50 years.
It's not that simple as many Climate Scientists have pointed out. Global temperatures rise & fall moreseo than they are at present without a rise, or even with a fall in CO2 concentration. Human CO2 forcing does occur, but it may be swamped out by other factors, such as volcanic eruptions, water vapor, solar cycles, cloud levels and more. So without a thorough understanding of what is going on, and with many scientists of contrary opinion, you don't go balls-to-the-walls on destroying our civilization based on little better than speculation.
I wish energy realists from across the Western world would wake up and start pushing back on this nonesense. Want to know what the future looks like? Come to the UK.
Over the last 10 years, we have seen this agenda take a hold of our energy policymaking establishment. Energy costs have increased and we've become more exposed to Putin's energy weapon. People are so ignorant and we are yet to see a backlash. This is because the media and politicians refuse to talk about what is actually happening. And the funders you mention in this article are the very same ones pushing the same barmy policies here in the UK. They do this through a network of third-party campaigns who are in turn amplified by agenda-setting Big Media. They fund think tanks, focus groups and polling. The end result of this massive lobbying effort is that we are all poorer.
I take no delight in seeing a break down in the rule of law. Equally, I think it shows how dangerous the anti-democratic green agenda is and the challenges proponents for Net Zero are going to face as they progress further along. To date, the plan has been to pick the low hanging fruit (i.e. stuff that ordinary consumers are not supposed to notice). When you speak to any British politician or policymaker, they will tell you that the decarbonisation of our energy system is a success story. But in my opninion, the energy crisis has actually exposed how there are big costs associated with the transition, including a greater exposure to volatile imports of natural gas. ULEZ is another example of the naive thinking amongst our elites. They think the public is overwhelmingly in favour of Net Zero. Except polling results show that voters want our Government to deliver on climate policies, they do not want to pay for it (quelle surprise). So imagine what will happen when they come for people's gas-fired boiler systems and when holidays abroad start to become prohibitively expensive. Or when meat and dairy becomes a luxury that most people will no longer be able to afford. In short, what happens when consumer capitalism - the economic system we have taken for granted over the last 40 years - comes crashing down because of the consensus on climate policymaking?
Your last statement + make the ruling class even more wealthy (without doing any work to earn that wealth) is the REAL reason they are promoting this Climate Change Fear Porn Agenda. And more power and control for the ruling class over us lowly serfs.
This campaign needs to be defeated at local level. Every utility needs to ask its consumers if the will accept a 330% increase in their monthly bills (on top of inflation). And consumer groups need to mount legal challenges to utilities that favour ideology over affordability.
Great analysis of this insane global warming cult, which is causing a real energy crisis almsot all over the formerly knonn as Free West. We all know that it isnt about the climate, but about the destruction of our western way of life and freedom and about big money for some. Sadly the totalitarians own most branches of society and the media and are silencing all critics. But we have to fight for the truth.
It's all about cost-benefit analysis and the Free Market, not snot-swallowing, corrupt, nitwit bureaucrats telling us what we must do. Having energy choice in commercial, industrial & residential sectors is important. A little competition goes a long way. If electric heat with a heat pump/air conditioning unit, is cheaper than a gas boiler, fine use that, if you wish. We don't want the equivalent of the Arab Oil Embargo or Russia gas blockade or pipeline sabotage to cause an energy crisis for homeowners, who have only one source of energy.
And, a big one, if the corrupt government keeps pushing electricity prices sky high with their nutty wind & solar, H2, CCS, biomass burning scams, then the electricity consumer can opt out with a CHP gas boiler or Bloom Box. Grid Defection should be a right.
As for low carbon, these morons don't seem to know that you can make Methane carbon neutral through nuclear synthesis. So you can still supply NG with negligible carbon emissions. Better yet, switch to Methanol which is the easiest liquid fuel to make and easy to make carbon neutral, a dozen different ways. Methanol will go through existing gas pipelines at a much higher energy density than CNG. And can be used directly as fuel for gas automobiles. Or converted to DME as the best fuel for Diesel transport. I should say 2nd best, the best thing for diesel transport, rail, short distance shipping & diesel heavy equipment is to switch to battery electric. Far more economical, and by far the wisest use for very limited battery supplies. Makes utility or wind/solar battery storage or BEV light vehicles look stupid. Diesel is precious, we need a non-petroleum substitute for it, badly.
But when it comes to low carbon energy sources, the proper thing to do, the effective and efficient thing to do, is replace the myriad of preferential subsidies, mandates & exemptions given to Wind & Solar exclusively with a Revenue Neutral Carbon Fee & Dividend, and bring fair competition to low carbon energy sources like CCGT, ultra-supercritical Coal, nuclear, hydro & geothermal, not just wind & solar. And get rid of the nuttiest scams ever: Carbon Trading, Cap n' Trade, Carbon Credits or Net Zero. Just a big Wealth Transfer scam for the ultra-rich. Crooks.
In general, the way to upgrade to heat pumps (heating, cooling, water heating, clothes drying, etc) is when your old gas units (or old inefficient AC) need replacing anyway, and you have to spend the money anyway. After the current government incentive, it is often cheaper (sometime significantly) to convert to electric than it is to install another gas appliance. We live in a 100 year old 1150sqft house along the line between heating zones 5 and 6, a climate like lower New Hampshire, southern South Dakota or very northern Illinois. We have a high efficiency, cold temperature mini-split heat pump. Our electricity rates are about US average. We live 100% electrically, and it costs us about $100/month for all our energy usage, including all the driving of our electric car, our electric lawn equipment, etc. It cost us more when back we had to pay the gas company over $250/yr just to be connected, and WAY MORE when we also had to buy gasoline.
Nobody makes fuel form fuel, when you can just use the fuel as is. That's just common sense, no need to invoke thermodynamics.
I never said hydrogen should be directly used as a transportation fuel. I said hydrogen could be used for things like a blast furnace or used as a starting material for transportation fuel and chemical synthesis. SO hydrogen would be used *indirectly* to power planes for example, by using it to make conventional aviation fuel that does not add new carbon to the atmosphere.
You suggest making hydrocarbons out in the desert using cheap solar will be cheaper than fossil fuels. To make hydrocarbons you need air, water, and 8.8 kwh of electrons to make 1 kg of hydrocarbon. A gallon of fuel is about 3.2 kg so this works out to 28.2 kwh per gallon. This is assuming perfect efficiency. Lets assume 50% overall efficiency, which is pretty good, that is 70% efficient CO2 removal from the atmosphere and 70% efficient conversion of CO2 into fuel using some yet-to-be-discovered super-process.
So, to make the gallon of gas we need to input 56 kwh of raw materials. At 4 cents per kwh (this is the lowest price I have seen for any form of electrical power) this works out to $2.2 per gallon (compare to 0 input cost for fossil fuels). And this is just the process inputs. So no, manufactured fuel is never going to be cheaper than fuel that nature has already made from you can you just extract out of the ground.
If we live in a world where most people believe as I do that using fossil fuels has some nasty future climatic side effects* and we properly price in those side effects, we might find that the actual cost of using fossil fuels is not just the $3-4 we pay at the pump but more like $5-6 when we consider the cost of dealing with the climatic side effects in the future. The fuel in the desert people will never be able to compete with $3 gas, but $5 gas, that's a different story.
*People don't really talk about this, but looking at historical sea level and temperatures over the past 400 millennia, one can obtain a relation between sea level and temperature. It suggests 15 feet of future sea level rise is already baked in the cake from the first 1 C rise we have seen. Add another one before were get this under control and we have 30 ft. Florida is going to be underwater in the future. I then look at the forcing associated with this temperature rise and calculate how long it would take for it to melt enough ice to raise sea level by that amount. It's on the order of 1200 years. So that's 2.5 ft per century and if you look it up you see forecasts for sea level rise for the rest of this century are around 2 feet.
What they want is a single wire monopoly to your home and business. They want everything from your car to your dryer to be at the mercy of their hourly pricing. They do not care that much of our gas is a by-product and will simply be flared off - they do not care about the environment. They want a MONOPOLY to your home, ( And they want to stop maintaining the last mile to your home too, a bonus savings of billions ) - They will burn every molecule of gas in centralized turbines, at 3 times the rate of burning it at point of use, the loss in generation, transmission, and conversion back to heat, requires 3X the gas - another win. Electrification is about MONOPOLY. Bryce continues to do a great job
Propane may cost more per btu than gas. But my gas had a $40 per month connection fee on $10 worth of gas. Never again. And I have 250 gallons in my yard they cannot turn off. :)
It's disappointing to see that the author of this article missed the big picture by getting too caught up in the details. The fact is that heat pumps are 300% efficient up to 0 degrees Fahrenheit, not including wind chill, which covers 95%+ of Americans for 355+ days per year. This puts most Americans at current cost parity, and in many areas, heat pumps are actually cheaper to run than natural gas. Acquisition costs can be an issue, but the government can provide assistance to address that. It's incredibly disingenuous that the article failed to mention heat pumps, especially considering that many Americans can heat their homes more affordably with an electric heat pump than with a natural gas furnace. For the sake of fairness, heat pumps should have been addressed.
"Acquisition costs can be an issue" translates to "heat pumps are not affordable for a lot of people" and "government can provide assistance" means taxpayers are on the hook. And not sure how it's cheaper to run a heat pump but my electric bill tops $400-$500 per month in the winter running my heat pump furnace, which I have only because my neighborhood doesn't have a gas utility. Heat pumps might be 300% efficient in a properly insulated newly built home which isn't exactly in the budget of most Americans.
One more thought: How old and what make is your heat pump? It's worth noting that older heat pumps can lose efficiency as high as 50 degrees Fahrenheit. On the other hand, today's newer models are more than 250% efficient to below 0. Surprisingly, wind chill does not matter and can even improve efficiency. It might be worth considering whether upgrading to a newer model heat pump would help lower your heat bills enough to make it worth the investment.
Not knowing your region that does not seem like that high a bill. I live in a very northern climate and for 3 months a year most of the people in my area would see Natural gas and hydro bills over that amount if they are in homes that are not super well insulated. Not all heat pumps are 300% efficient but the insulation rate of the home does not change the efficiency of the heat pump. insulation is a great investment for the most part but heating source does not change that.
Another great expose from Robert - thank you sir!
Just more proof, as if any were needed, that Progressives hate the poor and working classes.
I am also a Ph.D engineer, but chemical rather than nuclear. So when in look at replacing a fuel with electricity for heating, this initially makes no engineering sense. Electricity is produced (at high efficiency) from *work*. So using "free" work to produce electricity makes intuitive sense. Hydropower uses water flowing downhill to do work for free (a 900-year-old tech) to generate electricity at high efficiency. So much so that hydro plants were among the earliest power plants used. Wind power uses flowing air to do work for free (another 900-year-old tech) to do the same thing. Solar cells passively generate electricity from sunlight. If the cells are cheap enough this makes intuitive sense.
Work can also be produced from heat using a heat engine, which ideally operates at the Carnot efficiency. In the real world the efficiency is less than ideal and it well under 1. It makes little sense to convert heat into work at a loss, then convert the work into electricity (small loss but big capital) only to convert the electricity back into heat, when you could just create the heat at the point of use (i.e the home furnace).
But here's the kicker. If using fossil fuels to power the furnace is going to cause big externalities, then those externalities need to be captured in the cost of the fossil fuels. It could well be that the *cost* of using the fossil fuel (when externalities are taken into account) to heat the house will be greater than using a home heating system that does not employ fossil fuels.
But of course, nobody is proposing electrical heating. They are proposing heat pumps (e.g. AC) where heat is pumped into and out of the home during the winter and summer. This is more efficient than direct resistive heating, but as I learned in school 40 years ago, most suitable for mid-latitude US states.
Too many of these analyses tacitly assume that rising temperatures are a nothing burger and do not have to be taken into account through the cost of fossil fuel use. Which sort of makes such analyzes useless, except as a polemic.
"They are proposing heat pumps (e.g. AC) where heat is pumped into and out of the home during the winter and summer. This is more efficient than direct resistive heating, but as I learned in school 40 years ago, most suitable for mid-latitude US states."
You are certainly correct about "40 years ago". Heat pump cold weather efficiencies were pathetic back then, and most could hardly, if at all, function below freezing. But cold temperature heat pump performance has made huge and amazing strides in recent years. They are now popular and working well in cold places like Scandinavia and Canada. This is no longer "40 years ago".
"If using fossil fuels to power the furnace is going to cause big externalities, then those externalities need to be captured in the cost of the fossil fuels. It could well be that the *cost* of using the fossil fuel (when externalities are taken into account) to heat the house will be greater than using a home heating system that does not employ fossil fuels."
This false premise / socialist propaganda line of "externalities" is quite popular with the climate cult. Like just about everything else they either say directly or imply, it is a lie. Why? Because if this is true, then it is ALSO true that any externalities resulting in VALUE which the fossil fuel industries provided to humanity but did NOT receive fair compensation for in the prices they charged exist, then "society" then owes the fossil fuel industry because they were "cheated."
Those externalities do indeed exist, and are easy to quantify. WITHOUT fossil fuels, 80-90% of humans alive today simply would not exist - period. The quality of life of that 10-20%, were they forced to live without fossil fuels, would be horrible by comparison. Therefore, the value you and society owe to fossil fuels is too great to possibly be repaid in a thousand years.
So, please push this line of thinking! I want to see the look on you people's faces when you get the bill!
As for temperatures...
I completely agree with your statement about the importance of fossil fuels TODAY. I further agree that the world would not look like it does now without fossil fuels. They have been a game changer. While fossil fuels have played a significant role in powering our world up until now, it's important to recognize their negative impact on our environment. Even if one does not believe in climate change, it's clear that fossil fuels contribute to air pollution, which can have serious health consequences, especially in densely populated urban areas.
Furthermore, it's worth noting that not all fossil fuels are created equal. Electricity produced from fossil fuels burned far from cities can be less damaging than those burned in densely populated urban areas. This highlights the importance of considering where and how we produce and consume energy.
I agree with you on the past value of fossil fuels, and that should not be overlooked, but it also should not be the sole factor in our current cost-benefit analysis. By your logic of looking at the past value, no newspaper should go out of business. We should all still have landline phones, radios and be reading paper books. There are many technologies that have played an essential role in shaping our world, but they are now being replaced by new systems. Fossil fuels are simply one great technology of the past that needs to be replaced. While we owe an incalculable debt to these technologies, it's important to recognize that society evolves, and new systems are constantly emerging to take their place. Similarly, while fossil fuels have been a game changer in the past, it's important to consider the current and future impact of our energy choices and work towards a cleaner and healthier future.
While fossil fuels may still be necessary in the short term, we must start taking steps towards a fossil fuel-free future. By doing so, we can work towards a cleaner, healthier, and eventually, we will run out of fossil fuels, so let's start the transition NOW.
"While fossil fuels have played a significant role in powering our world up until now, it's important to recognize their negative impact on our environment."
Except they haven't. The air and water today across America is far cleaner than when I was a child. China is another story - but the argument you are making never gets applied to them. CO2 and the warmer temperatures have been beneficial both to mankind and plants. The temperatures in 1850 were an arbitrary starting point - a momentary DIP in temperatures across the steadily rising temps over the past 40,000 years - so any assumptions about overall impact are nonsense.
I've carefully read the IPCC Report on Climate Change for Policy Makers (various versions across the past decade. If that report is 100% true, then we are in absolutely no "danger" whatsoever. Only the Irwin Allen disaster scenarios presented as fantastical "what if?"s look scary, but the assumptions to make them come true are absolutely ridiculous at face value.
Then there's the other matter. We don't any have real replacements which are cost competitive. None. The currently promoted and heavily subsidized dead-ends cannot possibly get us there. Leaving alone the terratons of materials to be mined and the billions of acres of land they would consume - they are to the energy transition as VHS and Beta were to the future of the video industry: dinosaurs too slow to understand they are already on their way to extinction.
There is nothing to "start." The hubris wrapped into that statement is so staggering as to defy description - the very notion that some magical central planners can and must predict what the innovations will be which will tip the scales is laughable and offensive at the same time. It's right up there with "for the greater good!" as a totalitarian rallying cry. On the stupid scale, it's right up there with the old Dilbert cartoon where the boss demanded his engineers provide him a schedule of the upcoming year's unplanned outages. As a personal opinion, if every person alive who made such assertions were to spontaneously burst into flames as a consequence of their fanatical arrogance, the world would quickly become a better place.
We are already taking the necessary steps through funding research. Progress has been steady - exponential improvement decade over decade, with no indication it will stop any time soon. By 2030, 2040 at the very outside we will actually have clean and reliable solutions which are cheaper, too - and governments will simply get in the way of the natural progression. It is inevitable, and feeble governments are powerless either to "bring it into being" (as if 9 women could have a baby in 1 month) or to stop it from happening. Greed is what will save us - greed to grab a piece of the multi-trillion dollar energy industry while doing so at prices which bring prosperity, not poverty.
(continued)
We are 3+ million years into the Earth's fifth Ice Age. Ice Ages comprise about 10% of the Earth's history. Within this Ice Age, the Earth has been steadily warming for the past 40,000 years. About 11,500 years ago it finally became warm enough to qualify as an inter glacial period. This is just one of many such periods within the current Ice Age, and is quite unremarkable. In fact, temperatures today are about 8F cooler than during the last inter glacial period about 130,000 years ago. Inter glacial periods make up about 10% of all Ice Ages, or about 1% of the Earth's entire history. Temperatures in these periods are thus the LEAST likely to be called "normal" for the Earth.
There is no "climate crisis." None. Nor will there be. Climate changes at a (pun intended) glacial pace. Innovation is exponential. We probably already have the solution for every form of alternative energy we need. No, it's not the current technologies for wind, solar, and LiIon batteries - arguing about which of these will "win" is like arguing about whether VHS or Beta will rule the video market. We can get unlimited power and winter heat from the earth's heat (Eavor dotcom) and, with a bit of experience in doing it, it will likely become cheaper than natural gas (per the IEAA). Batteries can be made from materials which are nontoxic, non-flammable, plentiful, and available anywhere on the earth - and with a bit more work can move our vehicles 5x further than a Tesla for about the same amount of weight (Influit Energy). For niches in which hydrocarbon fuels still make the most sense, we can make all the clean burning carbon-neutral synthetic substitutes for gasoline and diesel/jet fuel we want from seawater (Low-cost catalyst helps turn seawater into fuel at scale).
These are not cheaper - yet. But they, or something very much like them, will be.
You are making my point. I agree that we will engineer our way out of this. But as an industrial engineer, I know that nothing happens without the suits in headquarters deciding to do it. Are the oil companies the bad guys. NO! They are going to be part of the solution. But they are a business, and they have to respond to the environment in which they operate. And that environment is set by the political environment over which we are arguing. As I have argued previously, I believe this will change fairly dramatically in the 2030's. For the sake of our posterity, I hope it does, but I will be long dead before its fruits ripen.
About 15 years ago, I spent about six months learning enough climate science to construct a toy model on a spreadsheet to aid my understanding of this thing since so many people were objecting to it like you are. As a result, I have sufficient understanding to know when a claim is BS, and am able to come to my own conclusions *without* having to reference someone else's work.
"...I know that nothing happens without the suits in headquarters deciding to do it."
Fortunately, not all the suits are in a single room. There are tens of thousands of suits doing nothing all day long but dreaming of a way to grab a piece of the trillion dollar energy pie. Leaders like Eavor dotcom and Influit Energy are showing that we can have all the clean, reliable, CHEAP energy we want without compromise. Everything takes a bit of time - someone has to go first to make the other investors comfortable a product isn't a scam. Eavor's first plant comes online next July; Influit is (or shortly will be) delivering product to their first customers (the US military). So long as they don't fail, they will scale.
Geothermal (what Eavor does) was one of the hot techs that was touted back in the 1970's. It along with oil sands (fracking), wind, concentrated solar, and biofuels made far more sense to my mind back then than did solar cells and batteries. And yet here we are. Fracking and wind panned out, but the other "likley candidates" did not. Eavor is trying their hand at geothermal, making use of advances in directional drilling that did not exist in the 1970's. Maybe they will be successful. We'll see what happens. I hope they are successful, it would be good to have more baskets into which to put our energy generation eggs. The other company is a battery company looking to replace lead-acid batteries in things like forklifts and other heavy industrial equipment. I hope they are successful too (and the guys with the iron batteries). One of my concerns is the fixation on solar-battery as THE solution for green energy. It is certainly A solution, as is wind and nuclear, and perhaps other things like geothemal. But it has a LOT of batteries: in a solar world, the electricity with which you charge your electric car battery overnight will come from another battery.
Personally, I favor solar-generated hydrogen for use in high temperature industrial processes (where it can serve as a drop-in replacement for natural gas) and for use as a reducing agent for chemical and aviation-fuel synthesis. (I find the idea of battery-powered aircraft as nutty). But I'll probably be wrong on that too.
I remember clearly. People SPOKE of closed loop geothermal in the 1970s, just as they SPOKE of cold fusion. There was no technology available at that time to make such a dream even remotely plausible, let alone financially competitive. Only in the past decade have such technologies become available (directional drilling; microwave drills; pipe-less rock bores), and Eavor has only been pursuing them for 7 years. Whether they do or not, at this point it's either that or nuclear - and of the 2, only geothermal shows the promise of becoming economically competitive.
Influit is not a replacement for lead acid. It is a replacement for LiIon. It already possesses superior energy density, and is expected to achieve 4-5x the energy density of LiIon in their gen2 product. That would be a 1,500 mile Tesla.
I agree with you that neither solar/battery nor wind/battery are even remotely candidates to replace fossil fuels. The terratons of materials which must be mined to allow for a week's worth of "unreliable outages" places it squarely into the realm of science fiction.
If you're going to use energy to make stored energy such as hydrogen, why not use fuels which are vastly more practical and require no changes to our infrastructure instead? Google "Low-cost catalyst helps turn seawater into fuel at scale" Hydrogen was the "fuel of the future" when I was a kid in the 60s, it's still the "fuel of the future," and it probably will be in another 30 years... :)
I'm an economist, and so am an expert in the analysis of externalities. The problem with your comment is that it only contemplates negative externalities for hydrocarbon usage. Hysterical political "analysis" is nothing close to the sober analysis of externalities. The so-called social cost of carbon is an attempt to net the positive and negative externalities of the use of hydrocarbons. A glance at the literature shows that the estimates vary wildly based on discount rates and other parameters of choice. Of course, those who select the values for these important parameters are themselves politically motivated. Such is the nature of academic grant funding. A recent study by CERES notes that, contrary to the alarmist IPCC "analysis" increasing temperatures are mostly due to measurement problems and cycles in solar radiation. https://www.ceres-science.com/post/new-study-suggests-global-warming-could-be-mostly-an-urban-problem
The use of externalities to defend draconian, regressive taxes and more extreme measures such as outright bans will always be a political issue. The analysis of externalities includes some notion of utility maximization, which, again, is subjective and thus open to the whims of political actors.
Economics isn't engineering and pretending it is will lead you to very very harmful conclusions. Best to leave the analysis of externalities to those of us equipped to do so with a full view of the issues at hand and stick to your energy equations.
Yep - see my response adjacent. 80-90% of humanity simply would not exist. Most of those remaining would live a drastically lower standard of living, if not abject poverty. I'd love to see the faces of climate cult members when they get the bill for externalities, lol!
Greenhouse gases fall into the same category of externalities as pollution. Look at groundwater contamination. Industial firms allowed all sorts of organic compounds to flow into the environment just as we continue to add greenhouse gases to the environment today. Much later we find the contamination of the soil and groundwater had negative externalities that were later realized so now we have the former sites of these enterprises unusable without expensive cleanup which has to be paid for by the government as the original polluter is long out of the business in many cases. Similarly, when the externalities from global warming come home to roost, it will be government who is stuck with the tab. So, OF COURSE, determining externalities is a political matter, since dealing with the mess it creates will fall to the government.
As for positive externalities coming from using hydrocarbon fuels, these come from the properties of the hydrocarbon, not its point of origin. The plane will fly just as well if the carbon atoms in its aviation fuel came from the atmosphere instead of out of the ground. Hydrocarbon fuels can be manufactured. Right now, my understanding is oil companies are working on carbon capture. I am sure this is just PR because capturing CO2 so you can burn more fossil fuel can never work thermodynamically, which they sure know. But assuming they build some pilot facilities they will have CO2 on tap onsite. And solar units are going up all over. They aren't going to be able to build enough batteries for all of this so sooner or later they will convert some of the excess power during the daytime into hydrogen to earn a process credit. And so in the future there will be hydrogen available. With CO2 and hydrogen you can make hydrocarbon fuels. The tech is very old, we did a class project in engineering design class forty years ago to do that very thing and the tech was old then. The fuel is going to be more expensive that the fuel you make from crude oil, but if the political worm has turned and fossil fuels carry some politically implemented cost, then this will make sense, and the oil companies will make their product instead of mine it.
As for the politics, in ten years a majority of the Legislature will be consist of people for whom global warming has been a thing all their adult lives. And ten years and a majority of the electorate will consist of folks for which global warming has been a thing for their entire lives.
Scientists discovered smoking caused cancer back in the 1930's. Major restrictions on where you can smoke did not come about until the first decade of this century. It took 70 years for the worm to turn on tobacco. Global warming was established as a correct theory in 1967. I except the worm to turn sometime during the next decade. I suspect the oil companies exploring carbon capture is a way to hedge their bets.
We already have all the carbon sequestration we need, and it's free. Thanks to Global Greening - the ONLY model to come from AGW theory for which real world observations exactly match predictions - plants today take up 20% more CO2 each year now than they did in 1850.
"Global warming was established as a correct theory in 1967."
No, it wasn't. They were still predicting the inter glacial period would end in the 1970s. Nor has global warming been fully validated today. Is there SOME effect? Yes. Are they certain the degree and whether it is linear, exponential, self-stabilizing or inherently unstable (the "tipping point" theory)? Absolutely not. However, 4.5 billion years of the Earth's geological / climate history strongly suggest that the predictions of doom are directly proportional to the size of the grants.
Who is the *they* who were predicting the ice age in the 1970's? A handful of scientists, just like a handful of scientists were proclaiming nuclear fusion at room temperature a decade or so later, and some were proclaiming superconductivity at ambient temperatures and pressures.
When I say global warming was established in 1967 I am referring to the first formal theory making testable predictions. That model predicted an average temperature rise of 0.16 degrees per decade. In the 53 yrs from1967 to 2020 that works out to around 0.8-0.9 degrees warmer. The actual increase is the same.
https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/
No skeptic has come up with an alternate explanation for the observed temperature increase that has obviously happened (half of the summer ice cap at the North Pole has disappeared), sea level has risen in accordance with measured temperature increases and we have observed stratospheric cooling as expected for a greenhouse warming mechanism (as predicted in 1967 paper) that would NOT happen if the mechanism was solar in nature. And there is the fact that the sun's intensity has been *measured* via satellite since 1979 and it has not increased.
Every skeptic I have seen uses nothing by hand waving arguments. That may work for politics, but not for natural science.
"Who is the *they* who were predicting the ice age in the 1970's?"
Try Google.
AGW was and still is a framework. I have not and never will dispute that there is some truth to it. I will however categorically state that if the IPCC Report on Climate Change (for "decision makers" version - I have no interest in becoming a climatologist) is 100% correct, then claims of a crisis are bald faced lies.
Why?
Climate is changing (pun intended) glacially. Innovation is exponential. For example, the cost of solar panels (price divided by the lifetime expected kwh delivered) have dropped by half about ever 3.5 years since 1960. That's exponential. Batteries have done the same, with a periodicity of about 6.5 years (the chemistry and manufacturing have changed, but they are still "batteries").
The world will begin in earnest to switch to alternative energy sources when they are clean, reliable, and cheaper than fossil fuels. That day is not today, but the arrival of that day can easily be calculated to within a decade. The day when no new fossil fuel plants will get built is probably within 15-20 years (quite likely Eavor dotcom). The earth won't warm enough more for anyone to care in the time it will take to transition.
AGW may be science, but "climate crisis" is a hoax.
Innovation isn't always exponential. The ancient Greeks and Romans were aware of steam power, but did nothing with it--no innovation. A thousand years ago there were many advanced civilizations with the necessary scientific knowledge to launch exponential innovation. All but one of them did not.
I remember the 1970's oil crisis and did my thesis on alcohol fuel in the 1980's. The original Alcohol Fuels program was launched in the height of the oil crisis to look into restarting the WW II alcohol from wood project to see if technologically advancements since then would enable development of alcohol as a supplement to gasoline to make the US less dependent on Mideast oil. The program was discontinued in the 1980's, but not before it had spawned an alcohol from corn program that serves to this day as an agricultural subsidy.
Another old tech being re-assessed to address the oil crisis was fracking, with shale oil as the source. That delivered. You know what was *not* considered? Solar-power battery cars. That was too-pie in the sky in the 1970's. That assessment was correct, fracking was the way to go, there was no need for solar cell and battery innovation to deal with the problem of oil dependence. No solar/battery innovation would have happened had the driver been energy shortage.
The reason *why* there has been exponential innovation on solar cells and batteries is *because* greenhouse warming became a thing. The idea of the greenhouse effect was advanced in 1896 and disproven shortly after. As late as 1950, meteorological textbooks were still saying the greenhouse effect had been proven false. Had the skeptical viewpoint remained mainstream, greenhouse warming would have stayed fringe.
Solar cells in the 1970's already had a niche utility: Space. As space fizzled out, further work on solar cells wouldn't make sense until SpaceX restarted interest in space. Working would be going on now, but they would be 30 years behind where we are now.
But greenhouse warming did NOT stay fringe. Your side did not win the debate. And so we have had this innovation now.
The rich world has been able to pay for addressing externalities because it is rich. Poor countries have no such options. For them to adopt "free" energy (I assume you mean chaotic weather-dependent energy sources) they will sacrifice future economic growth. The consequences of that will inevitably mean more fossil fuel burning , not less, and, due to lack of progress on poverty, higher birth rates than would be the case if they were rich. What about the population externality?
I assumed that a carbon tax would be a domestic affair, US law does not apply outside of the US. So why do you assume poor countries would do this? That is silly.
If the tech is so old, why is it not implemented? Ah yes, cost. Cost that cannot be ignored. Cost that, if the cheaper alternative is banned by psychotic, anti-human engineers such as yourself, will have the effect stated in the article. Climate hysteria is a regressive tax. There are 7 billion people on the planet who are nowhere near our standard of living. If they are to ever get there, adaptation to the (poorly) forecasted warming is the only way.
The magical thinking that inherently weather-dependent, non-dispatchable, intermittent energy generation will ever create a higher standard of living for the 7 billion people who live outside the West and the Far East is quite dangerous. Far more dangerous than a 2 degree celsius increase in the "average temperature" (whatever that means) of the planet. Note well that I'm the only one who has cited published empirical work on the subject. You've leaned on nothing but hysteria.
Thankfully, the reality of "green" energy is being felt and your idiotic prediction of the political future will not come true. Your attempt to indoctrinate the youth with climate hysteria is no longer working.
Of course it is cost. Both water and wind power have been around for 900 years, old tech. Yet water power was harnessed immediately for power generation while it is only recently that wind has. Why? Water is much denser and so easier (cheaper) to figure out how to harness. Wind was a lot harder until we got the computer power to do computational fluid dynamics. And voila we have wind turbines that look remarkably similar to the hydrofoil impellers developed 35 years ago. These were designed to produce maximum fluid motion (mixing) for minimum power input. In the wind case it is the reverse, how to recover maximum power from fluid motion. So, while hydropower always was economic, wind power is harder, but one you solve the problems, it is economic too. The same thing is true of solar power. Look, there are *no moving parts* nothing to wear out. It's like software, once it's in place it generates power (revenue) for almost nothing. The issue was the cost of the solar panel. This is not complicated. Average solar insolation is 240 watts per sq meter (this is an average and included nights). Assume 10% efficiency and you get 24 watts average output. Multiply by 8766 hours per year and divide by 1000 and you get 210 kwh per year/per sq meter. Calculate the present value of this stream of kwh over a 20 year lifetime and you get the value of a solar panel in kwh. Multiply by price of that kwh and you get maximum dollar value for the panel. If the cost of the panel if more than this, it is too expensive, like wind (but not water) was 130 years ago. But since they are building these things all over the place, this is obviously not the case anymore. You can read that the rapid fall in the price of solar panels is what started the boom. Duh, of course it did. This is capitalism 101.
Great piece as always. Looking at the affordability of electricity vs gas, would the efficiency of the appliance not make an impact too? i.e. yes electricity may be more expensive than gas per btu, but if the electric heat pump needs less btu to produce the same heat output, should that not be considered too?
Extract from EDF Energy:
"A well-designed heat pump installation may have a coefficient of performance (CoP) of 3.5 or better. This sounds complicated, but what it simply means, is that for every unit of energy it uses, it produces 3.5 units of heat."
"This makes it about four times more efficient than gas central heating! And, based on standard tariffs, on a par with running costs."
Good point, but you also need to factor in the inefficiency of electricity generation, as pointed out by Ducat. The CoP for an electric heat pump varies from 1 to 4, but the energy efficiency is only half that due to generator loss. So the heat pump with a CoP of 3.75 has an energy conversion efficiency of 1.875, still greater than simply burning gas, which cannot be greater than 1, but not as dramatically greater.
My friends have had a positive experience with heat pumps and the cost of heating their homes because we/they don't pay for the generator losses. The homeowner only pays for how many watts of electricity I use. In talking with my friends who have switched from gas furnaces to heat pumps, they tell me that for the six months of the heating season, when they add their hydro and gas bills together, the total they got has gone down after installing a heat pump. I admit acquisition costs are more for the heat pump than a gas furnace. The government rebate almost covered the difference. Heating with a heat pump, means that they can now add solar to their roofs and further reduce their monthly bills, and in a couple of years when batteries are more affordable, they can add batteries and weather a power failure easily. Given that solar is so cheap to deploy these days, the question is over the next ten years, forgetting about climate change and air quality, and all the other reasons to switch off of gas heat from a purely economic point of view, do we expect that gas or electricity rates will rise more.
Given that we are seeing massive technological advancements that will allow us to generate electricity at cheaper and cheaper rates, I am fairly certain the free market would see fossil fuel rates go up more than electricity.
Efficiency is diminishing returns against exponential investment. I looked at installing a geothermal heat pump (500' vertical well used as a "heat sink" to expel heat into in the summer and draw heat from in the winter). Government offered about a 33% "subsidy" to install it - which would have brought the $36,000 price tag down to "only" $24,000. For reference, it would have save about half the energy vs an efficient gas furnace and AC. Instead, for $4,000 I replaced the furnace and AC with higher efficiency versions. To repay the difference in price would "only" have taken about 27 years.
Your best investment today? Superior insulation for your home. Lasts forever, requires no maintenance. Spray-foam sealed homes use so little energy that even a 10 SEER AC would not result in an uncomfortably high electric bill in August.
Best investment for the nation? Keep innovating, come up with something that is clean, reliable, endlessly renewable, and CHEAP. Then we won't care how much we use.
I am refering to air heat pumps. ground source heat pumps are 20 year plus BUT after 20 years they are super cheap. beacause 20K of the 36 k was drilling the holes and that has a 100 year life expectancy. If your in a forever home for wich a 20 year pay back can be justified and you can phisically instlall ground source its LONG LONG term the best. My friends I was talking about was baced on air source heat pumps.
Had that kind of heat pump in my last home. GA has short spring / fall. Summer is a push with an equivalent seer AC. Winter it won't work below a threshold temp. Then they changed the laws on the coolant, rendering it useless. Over 5 years, we didn't save any money. It's much noisier than a furnace.
We moved in 2011 from a 2,700 sq ft home to a 6,800 sq ft home (sweet deal - a foreclosure). It was upscale build, 16" of attic insulation, superior windows and doors, fully sealed, etc. Got a 16 seer AC and 97% efficient furnace. Gas has been cheap for heating, and our heating / cooling bills in this home have been lower than in the old home - primarily because of the superior insulation. The newest homes with the spray foam and enclosed attic space are even better. Exponentially increasing cost for exponentially diminishing returns from that point on, i.e. spend twice as much to save half as much.
The best answer? Clean cheap reliable energy. Then nobody will care how efficient your system is. It will probably be closed loop geothermal. How to get it? Stop obsessing over it and trying to "regulate it" - you cannot legislate innovation. Just wait a few more years. It's coming.
So, I'm not against them but they really only provide super value in the right climate.
Our Beeg Guy, a Rich Man North of Richmond if ever there was one, could take a few lessons from King Canute who realized that commanding tides and a few other things on a human time-scale were above his pay grade.
Mr Bryce, please chime in about the relationship between increase greenhouse gas concentration and global temperature rise. It seems your readers don’t understand the basic physical science. It would make a great new column.
Utterly irrelevant. Innovation is exponential; climate change proceeds at a (pun intended) glacial pace. 3+ million years our Ice Age has been ongoing; warming for 40,000 years; 12,500 years ago we got warm enough to call an inter glacial period (about 1% of the Earth's history). This inter glacial is totally unremarkable, about 8F cooler than the last one 130,000 years ago, while innovation is exponential in terms of decades, not millennia. We will switch to better solutions because they are cheaper, not mandated, and everyone will be just fine.
The climate cult can only make things appear "alarming" by presenting data viewed through a soda straw. Put into context, our weather is just fine and will be for the next millennia.
Professor Kelder, as you know, the risks of climate change have three components: the direct Hazard risk of climate events caused by rising CO2, Exposure to those climate events, and Resilience to that exposure to climate events.
Historically, the huge decrease in global climate-related mortality is because of increased Resilience. Robert Bryce’s work focuses on the impediments to Resilience caused by restricting fossil fuel use by prioritizing CO2 Hazard mitigation.
So, you come on this message board faux-humbly stating that denialists simply don’t grasp the magnitude of the Hazard risk, and then you’re perplexed that you are met with the usual menagerie of denialist talking points presented in a rude and condescending manner.
Here’s what the academic climate science community seems to ignore: It’s true that humans do not instinctually understand principles of scientific inference. Rather, human social awareness is designed to have intuitions about what other people think about abstract ideas; they skip to the probabilistic inferences of arguments. So, when you present visions of apocalyptic fires and floods, people intuit a value proposition imbedded there. They see a stratum of energy secure elites, which includes global academia, who are willing to prescribe energy poverty for the 3 billion people without access to reliable electricity and increasing energy poverty in developed nations, out of their own anxiety about future worst case scenarios. This feels immoral to many people, regardless of how this climate change predicament plays out.
Why don’t you explain it. Compare the monotonous 2ppm rise of co2 per year every year with the up downsideways graph of temperature over the last 50 years.
No homogenized adjusted temps please
It's not that simple as many Climate Scientists have pointed out. Global temperatures rise & fall moreseo than they are at present without a rise, or even with a fall in CO2 concentration. Human CO2 forcing does occur, but it may be swamped out by other factors, such as volcanic eruptions, water vapor, solar cycles, cloud levels and more. So without a thorough understanding of what is going on, and with many scientists of contrary opinion, you don't go balls-to-the-walls on destroying our civilization based on little better than speculation.
I wish energy realists from across the Western world would wake up and start pushing back on this nonesense. Want to know what the future looks like? Come to the UK.
Over the last 10 years, we have seen this agenda take a hold of our energy policymaking establishment. Energy costs have increased and we've become more exposed to Putin's energy weapon. People are so ignorant and we are yet to see a backlash. This is because the media and politicians refuse to talk about what is actually happening. And the funders you mention in this article are the very same ones pushing the same barmy policies here in the UK. They do this through a network of third-party campaigns who are in turn amplified by agenda-setting Big Media. They fund think tanks, focus groups and polling. The end result of this massive lobbying effort is that we are all poorer.
All the smashed cameras in London give you any hope?
I take no delight in seeing a break down in the rule of law. Equally, I think it shows how dangerous the anti-democratic green agenda is and the challenges proponents for Net Zero are going to face as they progress further along. To date, the plan has been to pick the low hanging fruit (i.e. stuff that ordinary consumers are not supposed to notice). When you speak to any British politician or policymaker, they will tell you that the decarbonisation of our energy system is a success story. But in my opninion, the energy crisis has actually exposed how there are big costs associated with the transition, including a greater exposure to volatile imports of natural gas. ULEZ is another example of the naive thinking amongst our elites. They think the public is overwhelmingly in favour of Net Zero. Except polling results show that voters want our Government to deliver on climate policies, they do not want to pay for it (quelle surprise). So imagine what will happen when they come for people's gas-fired boiler systems and when holidays abroad start to become prohibitively expensive. Or when meat and dairy becomes a luxury that most people will no longer be able to afford. In short, what happens when consumer capitalism - the economic system we have taken for granted over the last 40 years - comes crashing down because of the consensus on climate policymaking?
Well said. At some point the bubble bursts
Probably a typical American point of view…. Breakdown of the rule of law isn’t always a bad thing
Your last statement + make the ruling class even more wealthy (without doing any work to earn that wealth) is the REAL reason they are promoting this Climate Change Fear Porn Agenda. And more power and control for the ruling class over us lowly serfs.
This campaign needs to be defeated at local level. Every utility needs to ask its consumers if the will accept a 330% increase in their monthly bills (on top of inflation). And consumer groups need to mount legal challenges to utilities that favour ideology over affordability.
Great analysis of this insane global warming cult, which is causing a real energy crisis almsot all over the formerly knonn as Free West. We all know that it isnt about the climate, but about the destruction of our western way of life and freedom and about big money for some. Sadly the totalitarians own most branches of society and the media and are silencing all critics. But we have to fight for the truth.
It's all about cost-benefit analysis and the Free Market, not snot-swallowing, corrupt, nitwit bureaucrats telling us what we must do. Having energy choice in commercial, industrial & residential sectors is important. A little competition goes a long way. If electric heat with a heat pump/air conditioning unit, is cheaper than a gas boiler, fine use that, if you wish. We don't want the equivalent of the Arab Oil Embargo or Russia gas blockade or pipeline sabotage to cause an energy crisis for homeowners, who have only one source of energy.
And, a big one, if the corrupt government keeps pushing electricity prices sky high with their nutty wind & solar, H2, CCS, biomass burning scams, then the electricity consumer can opt out with a CHP gas boiler or Bloom Box. Grid Defection should be a right.
As for low carbon, these morons don't seem to know that you can make Methane carbon neutral through nuclear synthesis. So you can still supply NG with negligible carbon emissions. Better yet, switch to Methanol which is the easiest liquid fuel to make and easy to make carbon neutral, a dozen different ways. Methanol will go through existing gas pipelines at a much higher energy density than CNG. And can be used directly as fuel for gas automobiles. Or converted to DME as the best fuel for Diesel transport. I should say 2nd best, the best thing for diesel transport, rail, short distance shipping & diesel heavy equipment is to switch to battery electric. Far more economical, and by far the wisest use for very limited battery supplies. Makes utility or wind/solar battery storage or BEV light vehicles look stupid. Diesel is precious, we need a non-petroleum substitute for it, badly.
But when it comes to low carbon energy sources, the proper thing to do, the effective and efficient thing to do, is replace the myriad of preferential subsidies, mandates & exemptions given to Wind & Solar exclusively with a Revenue Neutral Carbon Fee & Dividend, and bring fair competition to low carbon energy sources like CCGT, ultra-supercritical Coal, nuclear, hydro & geothermal, not just wind & solar. And get rid of the nuttiest scams ever: Carbon Trading, Cap n' Trade, Carbon Credits or Net Zero. Just a big Wealth Transfer scam for the ultra-rich. Crooks.
Snot swallowing. 😁
The Hot Earth Society is dragging us in the wrong direction.
https://rumble.com/v2aysj4-climate-forum-presentation-jeff-grimshaw.html
You are right, but it is largely a regulatory problem and not a really a technical one as I understand it.