Tag: Green New Deal

Just a Rant for Today

photog 0 Comment Current Events , , ,

Today was an insane day.  I was enmeshed in a bureaucratic maelstrom of political deadlines and ideological absurdity.  People were running around in circles getting signatures on petitions and trying to dot the i’s and cross the t’s needed to beat the clock.  And I got gypped out of my day off.  But as Camera Girl would say I was the “better person” (I think).

So, I didn’t have much time to look at the news.  What I saw was more of the same.  Scott Pelley was crying (literally) about Bari Weiss trying to make 60 Minutes slightly less leftist.  Graham Platner was winning the Democratic Maine Senatorial primary while reports of his sub-human antics continue to pour in from all directions.  Donald Trump was booed at an NBA playoff game at Madison Square Garden.  And apparently the California absentee ballot scam is still working effectively six years into the new era so that as long as unlimited time is allowed for fake ballots to be printed up no Republican will ever be elected (or even get past the jungle primary) ever again.  Check, check, check, check.  Yep, full speed forward and steady as she goes.

And based on my personal experience today and what passes for the news of the day, we have entered the after-time where we no longer worry about getting things back to normal.  There is no normal anymore.  We just roll with the punches and when we can’t keep our heads above water, we take a deep breath and hope to fight our way back to the surface before our lungs explode.  All in all, it’s pretty great.

Okay, end of acerbic rant.

Actually, the day ended pretty well.  I had a very nice dinner, watched a fun old movie (American Graffiti) and even sold a few books on Amazon (two paperbacks and a Kindle Unlimited).  But it is undeniable that we have passed into a new era where normalcy is no longer a universal concept in our society.  Strangeness is the new normal.  And we must accept that, to those around us, we are the abnormal ones.

And that’s okay.  In fact, I now embrace my status as an outsider with a definite stigma attached.  It’s a badge of honor and a qualification for a secret society that lurks in the dark corners of the daylight world made up of vapid adherents of the “normal” world of the stupid and the weak.  We can embrace and support the sensible and logical pursuits and actions that have always been there.  There is so much reality that can’t be avoided by the stupid that just using common sense will guide us to how we should navigate around the catastrophic errors of our age.  A good example has been the green energy revolution.  Those who have gone along with the band wagon are now saddled with electric cars they can’t afford to charge and heat pumps that cost too much to heat their homes.  By just doing the math you could have seen that coming.  And that is the template.  Look carefully at the propaganda and avoid the worst of the pitfalls.  And most importantly stay away from the cities where we’re told that crime is at an all time low (despite the daily body count in the news).

Okay, have a good day.

The Left Coast is Finding Out What Zero Carbon Means, the Hard Way.

photog Current Events , , ,

California, Oregon and Washington (also known as the Left Coast) are some of the most progressive parts of the United States.  And one particularly rabid part of their agenda is green energy.  They have been punishing the oil companies for anything and everything they could think of for more than the last twenty-five years.

And now they’ve succeeded in convincing the oil companies to get outta Dodge.  That right.  California used to be a large-scale extractor and refiner of petroleum.  But those days are over and now the state no longer produces enough oil to cover the gasoline and other petroleum energy products it needs.  And this is even worse for Oregon which has a very tenuous lifeline of gasoline that travels through a single pipeline.  Oregon has literally zero oil refining capacity.  Oregon’s woman governor sent a letter to Shell Oil begging them to return to the state.  She promised tax subsidies and protection from environmental harassment.  They said no thanks.  After losing money on all their ventures on the Left Coast they’ve permanently moved on to working with the more lucrative LNG projects elsewhere on the planet.

Now Washington state has a less dire situation but only by comparison.  These states convinced themselves that electric cars and solar panels were the imminent future of transportation and energy production.  But none of that turned out to be true.  Now they’ve realized late in the game that they’ve chased away they petroleum industry and left themselves without the fuel stocks they need just to keep their economies running.  Now isn’t that special!

So, what’s my point?  Well, basically I’m just gloating.  Schadenfreude is a large part of the pleasure for us on the Right, here in the era of Trump.  I extract enormous satisfaction from watching morons like Newsom and Oregon’s Governor Tina Kotek panic when they discover that fossil fuels still provide the power that keeps their fantasylands from collapsing back into the stone age.  And that they’ve effectively driven away the people who provide these extremely valuable resources.  Listening to them beg grown-ups to give them another chance just does my heart good.

If you watch that first video, you’ll hear that Oregon predicts that if there is a pipeline problem anytime soon $9-$12 a gallon gasoline will be very likely.  Now think about what that will do to the cost of living.  All I can say is it couldn’t happen a nicer bunch.

Alright, I guess that’s enough gloating for now.

It’s All Gotten Very Sad

photog Current Events, Fake Science , ,

Three weeks ago, at the beginning of May I turned off the heating system in the house.  And that was an historically reasonable action.  At that point the days were averaging in the high sixties and sometimes breaking into the low eighties.  So, hurrah for the end of winter and come on summer!

Well, today after the fourth really cold day in a row I looked at the thermostat and noticed the temperature in the late afternoon was sixty-three degrees.  I saw that Camera Girl was wearing an arctic survival suit and the dogs were burrowing into the permafrost layer that had infiltrated the living room.

Being the benign dictator that I am I overrode Camera Girl’s frugal instinct to “just add more layers of clothing until you’re warm” and turned on the heating system and set the thermostat to seventy-two.  Global warming; don’t make me laugh.

Now, of course, I’m well aware that in the southwest it’s already in triple digits here and there.  But up here where the geniuses of Harvard and Yale hold sway we’re freezing to death but we spend all our time worrying about ice caps melting.  But finally, finally, finally all of the nuttiness they enacted to make fossil fuels too expensive to use has come back to bite them on the butt.  The governor of Massachusetts has discovered that natural gas prices have skyrocketed!  She can’t account for it!  And she is demanding that the agencies responsible for regulation of energy companies and those companies themselves immediately lower the consumer cost for natural gas!

Of course, what it means is she will have to reverse the executive orders she put in place to make the prices higher a few years ago.  Essentially, she is “shocked, shocked to find out gambling is going on at Rick’s Café Américain.  Oh, by the way here are your winnings Madame Governor.”

But I think the biggest shocker will be to those who own and invest in the green new energy companies that Biden rewarded with billions in subsidies and grants.  With all that payola shut down there is going to be a lot of unemployed “consultants and lobbyists who will have to figure out a new racket.  The real question I have is what happens to all those rooftop solar panels when they stop working in a few years.  Do the homeowners have to replace them out of their own pockets?  And if they won’t, what exactly happens to them?  Will they eventually be covered over with tar paper and shingles?  They don’t look like they’ll keep the snow and ice out indefinitely.  Will people have to yank them off their roofs and have their roofs patched?  And how much will it cost to “recycle” the panels?  Who’s going to pay for that, the homeowner?

These are troubling times for the followers of Gaia.  The Earth goddess’s disciples are out of power in Washington and even in her most loyal bastions in Germany and Belgium things are not going well.  Greta Thunberg has been reduced to chasing after and hectoring her neighbors in Stockholm if they drive automobiles instead of ride bicycles.  But the new African immigrants don’t know who she is and they’ve roughing her up a bit.  It’s all gotten very sad.

The Green Energy “Transition”

photog Current Events, Fake Science, Science , ,

Here’s an excellent article that takes an objective approach to energy policy.  It looks at energy sources as an historical phenomenon.  One of my favorite quotes is, “We find a useful referee in this war of words with the recently released Eye on the Market 15th Annual Energy Paper by Michael Cembalest, J. P. Morgan’s chairman of market and investment strategy. As this 70-slide, deep-dive report pointedly notes, “after $9 trillion globally over the last decade spent on wind, solar, electric vehicles, energy storage, electrified heat and power grids, the renewable transition is still a linear one; the renewable share of final energy consumption is slowly advancing at 0.3%–0.6% per year [emphasis added].” One does not need a mathematics degree to understand that such anemic growth rates are not the hallmarks of an “unstoppable” juggernaut. Hence, Cembalest’s bottom line: “Growth in fossil fuel consumption is slowing but no clear sign of a peak on a global basis.” That is to say, no “energy transition” is in sight.”

I like a business analyst that has a rye sense of humor; “an unstoppable juggernaut.”  The Germans being the hyper-obedient victims of their past behavior have gone down the green road with both feet.  They shut down their nuclear power plants and without Russian gas their economy has been crushed.  They don’t have enough heating energy for their homes and they can’t run their heavy industries like auto manufacturing and chemical synthesis without fossil fuels.  I wonder if they were smart enough to leave the nuke plants intact just in case they came to their senses.  Nah, they’re too smart to have left themselves a emergency exit.  I’ll bet they knocked them down.

The gist of the essay is that there’s never a transition from one energy source to the next.  The old one keeps on at the same lever or even increases.  Eventually an even more productive successor just step changes itself into prominence.  Human muscle didn’t disappear when animals were domesticated.  Wind power didn’t eliminate oxen.  Neither did steam.  And steam still powers many applications even though fossil fuels became predominant.  And one day oil and gas will be overshadowed by nuclear or geothermal or whatever larger source is engineered.  We want more power not less.  That’s the lesson.

Hello, Hello.  Is There Anybody Out There?

photog Current Events, OCF ,

We got five or six inches of really wet heavy snow last night so of course the power goes out and also the cable, internet and phone lines.  The generator faithfully kicked in so Camera Girl and the dogs were warm and cozy while the male contingent was tasked with clearing the snow.  Of course, the snow blower is suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome so the snow had to be cleared the old-fashioned way.

To add insult to injury the electrical failure is less than five hundred feet from my driveway and so there are the trucks and electrical crew and even some fire fighters standing around looking puzzled.  I thought about going and talking to them but reconsidered.  I’m guessing some of my neighbors already have and I figure the more times you bother those guys the slower they’ll fix it.

It’s about eighteen hours in and I’m sort of resigned to a world without connectivity.  The only phone is an old flip phone that we keep around for emergencies.  I charged it up and Camera Girl called the kids to let them know we’re alive.  I called work and said I was declaring a snow day.  When the driveway was clear I went to a wi-fi location and checked to make sure OCF was up today and that has been the extent of our electronic communications for the day.

No news sites, no X, no nothing.  All things considered, it’s not so bad.  I guess if the utility reliability continues to decay out here in the hinterlands of Dunwich, I’ll have to ask Elon Musk to provide us with our own dedicated Starlink satellite, a small nuclear power plant and maybe a spaceport.  Dunwich is located at the nexus of the Terran/Great Old Ones dimensional rift so a small dedicated interdimensional port makes a lot of sense.  If he’s not too busy with his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) role-playing game maybe he could get working on that.

Well, whatever the New England states have done to the power grid it doesn’t bode well for the future.  I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that a generator with a cut-in switch that can handle the full electrical load of a home is now standard equipment around here.  You can be without power for a week in the winter at any time.  So natural gas or a large propane tank is what you need.  Getting enough gasoline might not be a safe bet if everyone is without power and out searching for fuel.

Well, anyway, while I sit here isolated from Al Gore’s world wide web and information superhighway, I think about how the Democrats want to cut away the last links of reliable energy we still have.  The blue states are going full speed ahead to criminalize the internal combustion engine and anything else that uses fossil fuels.  I guess that Trump’s term will be a decision point for some parts of the country.  Without his support, all of the promised charging stations and other green energy rigamarole won’t be there to allow for the fossil-fuel-free-wonderland they envisioned.  It may turn out that their deadlines are not be feasible.  And if they insist on them, there may be some serious blowback from the voters.  It might become quite interesting for Gavin Newsom.  Instead of the bullet-train future he promised he might be leaving on a different rail, one that includes tar and feathers.

Who Will Own the Future?

photog Current Events, Fake Science, Science ,

The earliest civilization that archeologists have identified is Sumer.  Located in the southern portion of the Tigris-Euphrates basin the Sumerians invented irrigation agriculture, domesticated several of the familiar farm animals and formed the first empire.  Their technological advances allowed them to grow their population until it probably included a million people.  Pretty good for six or seven thousand years ago.

So why aren’t we all speaking Sumerian and praying to Enki and Enkidu (Enki see, Enki do)?

Well as it turns out, using the Tigris and Euphrates as an irrigation source for hundreds of years eventually raises the salinity of the soil to the point where agricultural yield falls way off.  That’s right.  The technology that made their civilization possible was eventually unsustainable.

Sustainability is a buzzword that Gaia worshippers love to bandy about.  And typically, they’re talking about fossil fuels as being “unsustainable.”  But more and more the sustainability of things like wind and solar energy systems have begun to be questioned.

As an example, down in Texas a hail storm destroyed a significant part of a 4,000 acre solar panel array.  And local people are worried about the damaged equipment leaking harmful chemicals into the groundwater.  And this is far from the first occasion when hail has destroyed these arrays.  And wind turbines have been having their own problems.  Maintenance has been found to be more expensive and frequent than estimated.  And the impact on bird life has been shocking for the wildlife lovers among the green energy crowd.  Dead eagles and other raptors are a common sight around these installations.

But the main complaint about these supposedly sustainable technologies is that they have significant environmental costs compared to the limited power production they represent.  In other words, replacing the current power generation capacity with these sustainable technologies would create enormous ecological impact from the production of the equipment and from the sheer size of the area needed to contain this capacity.  Imagine a landscape covered for miles and miles with wind turbines.  And the whole area littered with bird carcasses.

The current green energy technologies remind me of the compact florescent bulbs that the Obama administration tried to push on us.  It was a technology that had more problems than the technology it was supposed to replace.  Basically, it was a pretend solution to a situation that was being presented as a critical problem but was actually a manufactured crisis.

Now here’s the thing.  Problems with technology occur.  One problem that we have anticipated for a long time is what to do when fossil fuels run out.  Now whether that’s a hundred years in the future or a thousand years there will most probably will be a point where we’ll run out of recoverable coal, oil and gas.  And long before that time comes mankind should have a plan to replace this energy source with something else.

But the answer can’t be going back to living in caves as the green energy people want you to believe.  And if this country and the rest of Western Civilization decide that following the lead of the Greens is the answer then someone else will find the better way and move forward without us.

Will it be the Chinese, the Russians, the Indians?  It’s very hard to know who.  But it will happen.  And if we allow ourselves to be bullied by the likes of Greta Thunberg and John Kerry then we’re going to doom our children to living like stone age people and eventually be displaced by more rational societies.

I’m hopeful that the great experiment with green energy that California has pioneered will soon bear fruit and cause some horrific catastrophe.  Maybe a huge number of electric cars will get stuck in a traffic jam out in the desert and thousands of stranded motorists will die of heat stroke.  Something like that could allow rational people to realize how stupid the Greens truly are and return people to a sane way of thinking about energy and its place in our lives.

Well, Enki see Enkidu.

Guest Contributor – ArthurinCali – 15JUN2023 – Energy Haves and Have-NotsXYZ

photog ArthurinCali, Fake Science, Guest Contributors, Science , , ,

A side story on California’s stupidity on renewable energy:

Last fall the state energy commissioner, or whatever the “very important state official” who is in position to announce proclamations from on high to us peasants had dire news. The problem? Energy consumption between the hours of 4pm-10pm needed to be drastically reduced due to the whole sun going down effect. No sunlight, no solar charging-easy concept. The call was put out with advice on appropriate temperature settings for A/C, and the avoidance of activities that might strain the electric grid across the state.

Imagine the surprise that night to see So-Fi Stadium in Los Angeles fully lit up in anticipation for the NFL game being played. The irony was not missed on what the state considered their priorities to be during this alleged crisis. And yes, it was put out with an attitude that this could result in blackouts (brownouts?) across the state.

Those unfamiliar with Los Angeles weather should know that it is quite mild for most of the year. If this was such a desperate situation surely a football game should not have been that important to warrant the amount of wasted energy to light up a small village. The game could have been rescheduled to be during the daylight hours. But no. Priorities you see.

If This Goes On … Then What? – Part 3

photog Current Events, Fake Science, Science , ,

So, after the rainbow crusade the next most important article of the woke faith is the climate change crusade.  And the real-world consequence that this delusion engenders is the energy crisis that we are currently suffering under.

Starting in Europe but now picking up steam here in America, the Left is attempting to criminalize the use of hydrocarbon fuels.  And especially they’re trying to take them away from private citizens.  So even though the bulk of electrical generation is powered by natural gas in this country, the federal government and states like California are legislating against the use of gasoline powered cars and other equipment like lawn mowers and at the same time, against the use of natural gas for cooking and eventually home heating.

And indicating to the oil companies that they are going to be phased out has had the predictable effect of curtailing their efforts to keep the price of gas and oil stable.  Instead, this plan has unleashed the OPEC cartel’s efforts to maximize their profits in the short term and ignore Washington’s pleas to help it along with making the transition quiet so that it becomes a fait accompli.  And even though the adoption of electric vehicles is already becoming a nightmare for the power grid in California, the feds have doubled down on making this all happen by 2030.

First a word on the technical aspects of this plan.  As a chemical engineer I can say categorically this is a stupid and wrong-headed plan.  Charging electric cars from a grid that is basically powered using fossil fuels is incredibly wasteful.  Over a third of the energy that even reaches the grid is wasted as heat during transmission.  That’s not even taking into consideration the difference in efficiency between the internal combustion engine versus the combination of the turbine electric generators and the battery charging and discharging efficiency.  It’s absurd.  And they call it “green.”

So how does this end up?  Well, you know the drill.  Let me throw out some scenarios and I’ll make my guess and then you follow up on the poll.  Here goes.

The worst-case scenario is that this whole thing is accomplished.  The people of the United States act like good little sheep and just acquiesce in this whole stupid plan.  And in order to compensate for all the inefficiencies and fallacies in the plan we all end up losing a whole lot of freedom and affluence.  With much more expensive electricity and with the supply insufficient to allow everyone to recharge their cars every day, trains and busses will become the mandated form of transportation for ordinary people.  So, forget about auto trips and vacations.  Probably car ownership will become too expensive for anybody not in the upper middle class.  Even home heating will become a real problem.  Expect that people will walk around their homes in coats and hats in the winter and insulation will become a matter of life and death.  And enjoy living in the desert southwest without air-conditioning.  And the cost of food will also increase drastically and the variety of foods will go away.  No more fresh fruits in the winter except for the very well off.  The peasants will make do with whatever can last from the fall.  No more meat.  Unless you consider crickets meat.

The middle scenario is a much slower rollout and the realization that nuclear power plants can be sold to the climate zealots as “green energy.”  Having a reliable and economical high density power source could ameliorate some of the sins that battery cars create and leaves open the scenario where hydrogen fuel for cars is affordable.  And likewise, affordable energy could prevent the other problems like expensive food and home heating

The best-case scenario would be the American people revolting against the stupidity of the green agenda and voting for a combination of fossil fuels in the here and now and research into long term energy solutions like nuclear and other more exotic sources like geothermal.

For once I’m not guessing that the middle scenario will occur.  I think the American people are sheep that will be led to the slaughter.  I’m guessing we’ll get the whole green agenda and we’ll be eating bugs and taking the train in the future.  The ultimate humiliation for a once free people.

Leave your guess below.

Guest Contributor – TomD – 27APR2023 – Comments on Feasibility of an “Electric” Navy

photog Guest Contributors , , ,

“This essay is in response to this post” Want to Know How Out of Touch With Reality the Greens Are?”  where there was a congressional review of the idea of all military vehicles being electric.

photog” 

 

It’s worse. Just heard some of the testimony and the idiot is talking about an all electric Navy by 2030.

Thar is so far beyond current technology as to be beyond fantasy. The current peak of battery tech resides in a Ford pickup and contains around 110 kW hours. This is approximately the equivalent of 140 HP hours or 14 HP x 10 hours or some equivalent multiple. The Ford pickups have proven worthless for towing any load more than a few miles.

The current US Destroyer, the Arliegh Burke class, is powered by 4 gas turbines with a combined out put of 78,000 kW, or about 105,000 HP. That’s just propulsion, in addition there are generators on board totaling 21,000kW for misc electric power. So we’re talking about right at 100,000 kW of power generation onboard.

If they get into wartime mode, I’d expect they would need the great bulk of that. A Ford PU battery would power that for around 3 seconds, 1000 Ford PU batteries would push it for an hour.

But a deep water war vessel has to be self reliant for weeks. Even just patrolling at cruise speed, the power requirements must be in the 20,000 kW range. Your hypothetical 1000 Ford batteries would power it for 5 hours then.

And you may think you’ve heard of what happens in a battery fire.

Lets say that battery tech has increased 50X, allowing an Arleigh Burke to do it’s normal 5100 mile cruise at 20 knots and you pull into some South American port on your last couple of kW and looking to recharge 4,400 megawatts hours. And that powered by windmills that aren’t working right now. Yeah, right.

Charging at sea? How’s that going to work? The replenishment boat is running on batteries too.

We are no longer a serious nation. We’ve collapsed into a silliness and stupidity forced on us by, what?

 

 

Want to Know How Out of Touch With Reality the Greens Are?

photog Current Events, Fake Science

This is hilarious.  They want the armed forces to switch 100% electric vehicles.  I can just see an M1 tank with a 100 mile electric charging cable running behind it.  It’s like a Babylon Bee satire come to life.