Look Up - WSJ

 Nice summary article from the WSJ:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/look-up-11661351343?mod=opinion_minor_pos1

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Life is hard down on the wind farm.

By James Freeman

Aug. 24, 2022 10:29 am ET

446

PHOTO: JOSE SARMENTO MATOS/BLOOMBERG NEWS

Hollywood suffers from no lack of creativity when it comes to conjuring an imagined world devastated by fossil fuels. Perhaps some enterprising filmmaker will consider building a story around a recent event in rural Oregon that involved another form of energy. Ted Sickinger of The Oregonian reports:

In the early hours of Feb. 1, one of the spinning blades on a turbine at Portland General Electric’s Biglow Canyon wind farm in Sherman County launched into the night.

The 135-foot piece of fiberglass, wood and metal weighs more than seven tons.

It flew the full length of a football field.

Sounds like a compelling opening scene for a Netflix original. After the great flight of the blade on that cold Oregon night, Mr. Sickinger reports on the reaction of its operator:

After the winter incident, PGE shut down all 217 turbines at the wind farm while it launched a review... Oregon’s largest electricity provider has since resumed operations for most turbines at Biglow Canyon, saying they are safe.

“PGE is taking this matter very seriously as a safety incident, which is why we took swift action to shut down the turbines and are conducting a thorough and deliberate investigation, so that we can fully understand the cause of the blade failure and rectify it,” the company said in a statement. “The results of the investigation will help us determine if there are any adjustments needed to improve our operations.”

According to the Oregonian report, there are problems beyond last winter’s hurtling blade. Mr. Sickinger writes:

As recently as this spring and summer, dozens of the once pristine white turbines at the site were caked in oil and lubricants leaking from gearboxes and other controls housed in a box behind the rotor, suspended 265 feet in the air. That oil not only coats the machines, it is spitting into surrounding fields. Transformers have ruptured with drumbeat regularity, dumping thousands of gallons of mineral oil into the soil and causing two fires in the last 15 years.

Pieces of the turbines – hatch doors, metal disks and blade bolts – have routinely fallen off turbines and into the fields below.

Despite the large environmental footprint of wind power projects, the utility PGE appears committed to such low-intensity, intermittent energy sources. Its website proclaims:

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Together with you, we’ve been leading the way to a clean energy future — starting with cutting greenhouse gas emissions 80% by 2030. The passage of the Inflation Reduction Act will supercharge these efforts by making it easier and more affordable than ever. It’s going to take all of us. We’ll continue to do our part and help you do yours...

There is no greater imperative than to rapidly reduce greenhouse gas emissions to fight climate change.

You’d probably say the same thing if you had to answer to Oregon regulators. But in the not-too-distant future Oregon consumers may be looking at the great flight of the blade as a 7-ton metaphor for the Biden climate plan.

As for the emissions forecast, it might be helpful to consider recent trends—and why they’ve occurred. Bjorn Lomborg writes in the Journal:

Unlike most other nations on the planet, the U.S. has substantially reduced its carbon emissions over the past 15 years. This is largely owing to the fracking revolution that replaced a lot of America’s coal with natural gas, which is cheaper and cleaner. Even without the new law, the U.S. was on track to cut emissions substantially by 2030, according to research by the Rhodium Group. Averaging their high and low emission predictions, the U.S. would drop emissions by almost 30% absent the new law. With the new law, emissions will decline instead by a little over 37%. The “most significant legislation in history” will actually cut emissions by less than eight percentage points.

While the administration talks up its emission reductions, it never seems to tout the law’s impact on temperature and sea level—for good reason. If you plug the predicted emissions decline into the climate model used for all major United Nations climate reports, it turns out the global temperature will be cut by only 0.0009 degree Fahrenheit by the end of the century...

The law will similarly have little effect on the sea level. A model that calculates changes in ocean levels predicts waters will be somewhere between 0.006 and 0.08 inch lower in 2100 than they would have been without the Inflation Reduction Act.

Speaking of forecasts related to natural gas, Michael Shellenberger is offering an especially bleak one on Substack:

Over the next several years, millions of people will die from hunger-related diseases, cold temperatures, and air pollution as a direct result of natural gas shortages. All of those deaths have been going down over the last several decades. But shortages of natural gas, gas-derived fertilizers, and electricity will result in a reversal of those trends. And the higher-than-normal death toll will continue so long as the world fails to produce sufficient natural gas to meet global demand.

President Joe Biden could prevent a significant number of those deaths but his policies restricting natural gas production and exports will increase them.

Let’s pray that Mr. Shellenberger’s forecast turns out to be wrong and that we never have to watch that movie.

What is a battery?

A friend emailed me this analysis. It's not completely accurate, but conceptually it points out the problem with the "green" revolution.

What is a battery?

 

This is from a friend's High Tech family member, I have heard similar info but this goes into great detail, quite interesting, it sure makes one wonder why so much of our tax revenue is being spent on this???

  

What is a battery?' I think Tesla said it best when they called it an Energy Storage System. That's important.   They do not make electricity – they store electricity produced elsewhere, primarily by coal, uranium, natural gas-powered plants, diesel-fueled generators or minerals.  

So, to say an Electric Vehicle (EV) is a zero-emission vehicle is not at all valid.   Also, since forty percent of the electricity generated in the U.S. is from coal-fired plants, it follows that forty percent of the EVs on the road are coal-powered, do you see? If not, read on.   

Einstein's formula, E=MC2, tells us it takes the same amount of energy to move a five-thousand-pound gasoline-driven automobile a mile as it does an electric one. The only question again is what produces the power? To reiterate, it does not come from the battery; the battery is only the storage device, like a gas tank in a car.   

There are two orders of batteries, rechargeable, and single-use. The most common single-use batteries are A, AA, AAA, C, D. 9V, and lantern types. Those dry-cell species use zinc, manganese, lithium, silver oxide, or zinc and carbon to store electricity chemically. Please note they all contain toxic, heavy metals.   Rechargeable batteries only differ in their internal materials, usually lithium-ion, nickel-metal oxide, and nickel-cadmium. The United States uses three billion of these two battery types a year, and most are not recycled; they end up in landfills. California is the only state which requires all batteries be recycled. If you throw your small, used batteries in the trash, here is what happens to them.   

All batteries are self-discharging.  That means even when not in use, they leak tiny amounts of energy. You have likely ruined a flashlight or two from an old, ruptured battery. When a battery runs down and can no longer power a toy or light, you think of it as dead; well, it is not. It continues to leak small amounts of electricity. As the chemicals inside it run out, pressure builds inside the battery's metal casing, and eventually, it cracks. The metals left inside then ooze out. The ooze in your ruined flashlight is toxic, and so is the ooze that will inevitably leak from every battery in a landfill. All batteries eventually rupture; it just takes rechargeable batteries longer to end up in the landfill.   

In addition to dry cell batteries, there are also wet cell ones used in automobiles, boats, and motorcycles. The good thing about those is, ninety percent of them are recycled. Unfortunately, we do not yet know how to recycle single-use ones properly.   But that is not half of it.  For those of you excited about electric cars and a green revolution, I want you to take a closer look at batteries and also windmills and solar panels. These three technologies share what we call environmentally destructive embedded costs.   

Everything manufactured has two costs associated with it, embedded costs and operating costs. I will explain embedded costs using a can of baked beans as my subject.   In this scenario, baked beans are on sale, so you jump in your car and head for the grocery store. Sure enough, there they are on the shelf for $1.75 a can. As you head to the checkout, you begin to think about the embedded costs in the can of beans.   The first cost is the diesel fuel the farmer used to plow the field, till the ground, harvest the beans, and transport them to the food processor. Not only is his diesel fuel an embedded cost, so are the costs to build the tractors, combines, and trucks. In addition, the farmer might use a nitrogen fertilizer made from natural gas.   Next is the energy costs of cooking the beans, heating the building, transporting the workers, and paying for the vast amounts of electricity used to run the plant. The steel can holding the beans is also an embedded cost. Making the steel can requires mining taconite, shipping it by boat, extracting the iron, placing it in a coal-fired blast furnace, and adding carbon. Then it's back on another truck to take the beans to the grocery store. Finally, add in the cost of the gasoline for your car.   

A typical EV battery weighs one thousand pounds, about the size of a travel trunk.  It contains twenty-five pounds of lithium, sixty pounds of nickel, 44 pounds of manganese, 30 pounds cobalt, 200 pounds of copper, and 400 pounds of aluminum, steel, and plastic. Inside are over 6,000 individual lithium-ion cells.   It should concern you that all those toxic components come from mining. For instance, to manufacture each EV auto battery, you must process 25,000 pounds of brine for the lithium, 30,000 pounds of ore for the cobalt, 5,000 pounds of ore for the nickel, and 25,000 pounds of ore for copper. All told, you dig up 500,000 pounds of the earth's crust for just one battery."   

Sixty-eight percent of the world's cobalt, a significant part of a battery, comes from the Congo. Their mines have no pollution controls, and they employ children who die from handling this toxic material. Should we factor in these diseased kids as part of the cost of driving an electric car?" And the Chinese just bought most of these mines!   

I'd like to leave you with these thoughts. California is building the largest battery in the world near San Francisco, and they intend to power it from solar panels and windmills. They claim this is the ultimate in being 'green,' but it is not! This construction project is creating an environmental disaster. Let me tell you why.   The main problem with solar arrays is the chemicals needed to process silicate into the silicon used in the panels. To make pure enough silicon requires processing it with hydrochloric acid, sulfuric acid, nitric acid, hydrogen fluoride, trichloroethane, and acetone. In addition, they also need gallium, arsenide, copper-indium-gallium- diselenide, and cadmium-telluride, which also are highly toxic. Silicone dust is a hazard to the workers, and the panels cannot be recycled.   Windmills are the ultimate in embedded costs and environmental destruction. Each weighs 1688 tons (the equivalent of 23 houses) and contains 1300 tons of concrete, 295 tons of steel, 48 tons of iron, 24 tons of fiberglass, and the hard to extract rare earths neodymium, praseodymium, and dysprosium. Each blade weighs 81,000 pounds and will last 15 to 20 years, at which time it must be replaced. We cannot recycle used blades. 

Sadly, both solar arrays and windmills kill birds, bats, sea life, and migratory insects.   There may be a place for these technologies, but you must look beyond the myth of zero emissions. I predict EVs and windmills will be abandoned once the embedded environmental costs of making and replacing them become apparent.  "Going Green" may sound like the Utopian ideal and are easily espoused, catchy buzzwords, but when you look at the hidden and embedded costs realistically with an open mind, you can see that Going Green is more destructive to the Earth's environment than meets the eye, for sure.

UN Environment Programme's war on fertilizer

As an agricultural economist, I've been impressed with the way Michael Shellenberger focuses on the most important issues at the foundation of society. Here, he discusses the inevitable and impending disasters caused by political ideology that affects agriculture.

https://michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/un-war-on-fertilizer-began-in-sri

Michael Shellenberger

@ShellenbergerMD

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17h

Without synthetic fertilizers, farming could only support 3 billion people — not the 8B people it supports today Why, then, are the U.N. Environment Programme & the Food & Agriculture Organization trying to "steer" nations away from synthetic fertilizers?

Excerpt:

UN Environment Programme launched its anti-fertilizer efforts from Sri Lanka in 2019

Michael Shellenberger

Aug 13

96

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COLOMBO, SRI LANKA - JULY 13: A protestor wearing a gas mask runs to throw a tear gas canister fired by army personnel during a protest seeking the ouster of Sri Lanka's Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe amidst the ongoing economic crisis on July 13, 2022 in Colombo. (Photo by Abhishek Chinnappa/Getty Images)

The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) describes itself as “the global authority that sets the environmental agenda… and serves as an authoritative advocate for the global environment.” Through its “Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity for Agriculture and Food” program launched in 2014, the UNEP advocates that nations “steer away from the prevailing focus on per hectare productivity.”

But today the world is in its worst food crisis since 2008. The number of people suffering acute food insecurity increased by 25% since January 2022 to 345 million, according to the United Nations World Food Programme. Why, then, is the UNEP trying to steer nations away from fertilizers that increase food production?

The UNEP’s Acting Director in 2019 said the reason was humankind’s “long-term interference with the Earth’s nitrogen balance.” In October of that year, the UNEP hosted a meeting in the capital of Sri Lanka, Colombo and issued a “road map” to push nations to cut nitrogen pollution in half.

But the Netherlands proves that nations can slash nitrogen pollution from livestock by 70% while also increasing meat production. Same for crops. Since the early 1960s, the Netherlands has doubled its yields while using the same amount of fertilizer. While rich nations produce 70 percent higher yields than poor nations, they use just 54 percent more nitrogen.

One month after the Colombo meeting in 2019, which generated significant media attention in Sri Lanka, voters in that nation elected an anti-fertilizer president, H.E. Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who claimed, without scientific evidence, that synthetic fertilizers were causing kidney diseases. In April 2021, he banned fertilizer imports.

In June, 2021, two months after the fertilizer ban, Sri Lanka hosted a UN-sponsored “Food System Dialogue” aimed at influencing the UN’s broader anti-fertilizer agenda for the world. “Sri Lanka’s inaugural Food System Dialogue is part of a series of national and provincial dialogues conducted by the Ministry of Agriculture ahead of the 2021 UN Food System Summit set to take place in New York later this year.”

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In his statement to the UN Food System Summit in New York in September, Sri Lankan President Rajapaksa repeated his claim that “chemical fertilizers… led to adverse health and environmental impacts.” He said, “My Government took the bold step to restrict imports of these harmful substances earlier this year,” and blamed farmers for resisting his fertilizer ban, saying that “changing the mindset of farmers long accustomed to using chemical fertiliser has proven challenging.”

In fact, the fertilizer ban was causing a crash in agricultural production. After the fertilizer ban, 85% of Sri Lankan farmers experienced crop losses. Rice production fell 20%, prices rose 50 percent, and the nation had to import $450 million worth of the grain. In Rajanganaya, where farmers operate on just a hectare (2.5 acres), of land on average, families reported producing half their normal crop harvest.

There were other factors behind the government’s fall, but those factors affected many other nations and none fell. Covid lockdowns hurt tourism. The government borrowed too much. Oil prices rose. All were factors and none were decisive. What made the difference was Sri Lanka’s ban on fertilizers.

Hardest hit was tea. It had generated $1.3 billion in exports annually and provided 71% of the nation’s food imports before 2021. After the fertilizer ban, tea production crashed 18%, reaching its lowest level in 23 years. The government’s devastating ban on fertilizer thus destroyed the ability of Sri Lanka to pay for food, fuel, and service its debt.

The UN justifies its anti-fertilizer agenda on the same basis as the Sri Lankan government: cost savings. UN documents claim that its goal for nations to “Halve Nitrogen Waste” would save nations “$100 billion annually.” But the same document promotes a “circular economy,” which is a euphemism used by Green parties in Europe to refer to economic “de-growth” based on making food and energy production less productive.

UNEP isn’t the only UN agency promoting an anti-fertilizer agenda. The U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in 2018 launched the “Scaling Up Agroecology” Initiative. It is not a research initiative, it is an advocacy initiative. It claims “agroecological systems are vital… for addressing poverty, hunger, and climate change.” In fact, agroecology, which doesn’t use synthetic fertilizer, reduces food production, and thus increases poverty and hunger.

Now, the UNEP is seeking to move nations away from modern fertilizers through “the International Nitrogen Management System (INMS)” under the guise of science. It calls INMS a “science support process” as part of an “Inter-Convention Nitrogen Coordination Mechanism (INCOM).”

What’s going on? Why is the United Nations promoting a kind of food production proven to reduce yields, raise prices, and topple governments? And what can be done to stop it?