Perpetual Innovation

Category: climate change

  • Earth Day 2022 Who Killed the Electric Car?

     Earth Day 2022 (April 22, ’22) Who Killed the Electric Car?

    The statistics and the forecasts for Global Warming and
    Climate Change are increasingly dire. The decision – and it is a decision – to do
    business as usual (buy big gas guzzlers) is becoming increasingly costly to the world. And the window to avoid
    the worst warming scenarios is closing. The CO2 and methane that we have been
    pumping into the atmosphere will persist for decades (centuries really)
    continuing to heat a warming world.

    On that note, a documentary is in order for Earth Day 2022, Who
    Killed the Electric Car     (2006). Read about it on Wikipedia,
    watch on many venues including IMDb and Prime Video. It pretty much describes the methods of
    Big Tobacco in its hay day, and the methodology adopted by oil companies for
    about a century. Lots of celebrities. Hard to find a single factoid that is not true.

    General Motors was starting to be very successful with its
    electric car in 2005, rolling it out to meet the aggressive zero emissions vehicle
    (ZEV) standards that California was phasing in at the time. The standard,
    appropriately call CARB, was suddenly watered down and phased out, with both
    the state of California (Schwarzenegger)
    and the Federal government (Bush) chasing after a shiny object: Hydrogen. Cool technology, but… Hydrogen is still not here, and will probably never be truly competitive for most applications.

    GM (and the other Big Autos) killed off their EVs. In GMs
    case, the recalled them all back from their leases (not renewing) and crushed
    them all (but 1). If GM had stayed with their EV program they would have been
    in the same market position as Tesla is now, only 15 years earlier.  GM bought controlling position in a wonderful
    battery technology that would have given the EV 200+ mile range (vs 60 for the antiquated
    lead battery technology they were implementing). But that battery was never
    utilized. This controlling stake in the battery company was later sold to …
    Chevron!

    The documentary investigates who were the murders of the EV
    and who were the accomplices. But the obvious victims are the general public
    and, of course, the environment! We continue to be addicted to oil. Ukraine is
    a stark reminder of what the power bought with oil revenues can do.

    For now, drive less. Plan for a small vehicle. Make sure
    your next vehicle is either electric of plug-in- electric hybrid.

    As we celebrate Earth Day of 2022, think about how easily
    the citizens can be manipulated away from objectives that are better for the
    world into paths that are only good for monopolies and the ruthless.

    Please let us know if there is anything that is factually untrue. Also, are the conclusions sound?

    #EV #PHEF #WhoKilledTheElectricCar #GlobalWarming #ClimateChange #EarthDay

     

  • Military Scenario Planning

    It is hard to imagine a world where the (US) military did not make plans for a pandemic like the coronavirus (COVID-19). Each and every military must have a plan for weaponized bio-warfare. In fact, every military will have their own plans for ways they can weaponize biowarfare. Think about the types of bioweapons the terrorist groups might want to employ?

    The military has been planning for the big issues of global warming and has been shouting out that climate change is one of the biggest risks to the world in the future. Droughts and rising sea levels will produce mass instability in regions, much along the line of the human tragedies in Chad, Sudan, Syria, etc. For decades now, the military has warned of the risks of climate change on US national security. Pentagon, for example, here.

    With the pandemics that have passed through (Ebola, SARS, mosquito-borne) over the last 10-20 years, this too is a national security threat.

    In the spirit of Scenario planning, setting up sign-posts and early warning signs, you have to wonder when the military started to escalate the coronavirus outbreak in China to the highest risk levels of world, and therefore US pandemic. November? December? The military would already have contingency plans to help other countries. By early December 2019, the signposts were visible for a spread from China to the rest of the world. By mid December, the US mainland would have been clearly at risk.

    The power of having scenario plans, early warning signs, and contingency plans, can break down anywhere along the line. All of the planning in the world is useless, if you don’t react and implement.

  • Those Sneaky Climate Alarmists

    A video came cycling around to me that provided gleeful evidence that the Climate Alarmists use sneaky methods to distort the information and make everyone shake in their boots because the world will end in less than 12 years. This guy, Tony Heller (aka Steven Goddard), even went so far as to create a tool to find the best point in any trend graph for best (mis)representing data.
    As with many such reports, I would always like to find myself wrong, and to discover that I’ve become a Climate Alarmist for nothing. All that lost sleep, spending time developing business ideas and models that are both sustainable, politically viable, and profitable.
    Sadly, Heller is simply a fraud. He used his own tool to make fun of activists, and to distract people from facts. Here is a great video by Mallan Baker that takes on a couple of Heller’s debunk graphs to debunks the junk.
    Why is Heller talking Continental US and pointing at specific US cities when we are talking GLOBAL warming. The US had some wicked hot years during the Dust Bowl, for example.

    Wikipedia can be the best overview source for highly active and rapidly updated pages like these: Global Warming, Climate Change, Sustainability in general, and Climate Change Denial.
    By now you know that everyone knows that there’s global warming. Thermometers tend not to lie.
    But I keep finding people who have been convinced that warming is not very much, or that it is a natural cycle to earth, or that humans are only responsible for a fraction of the warming we are experiencing.
    Even the oil companies now acknowledge that there’s global warming, but their business model is not conducive to any of the logical approaches to deal with the issue aggressively. In fact, according to internal documents, the oil companies have know for half a century that global warming was a byproduct of their product and hidden this from the public in order to protect their business-as-usual profits.

    With current technology, we can easily measure the energy that comes from the sun, and the amount that is reflected back into space. All evidence shows global warming is happening, and at an accelerating pace. You can use lots of good data sources related to land, ocean, air, ice coverage, etc. Statistically, solar flares, volcanoes, El Nino and other major factors can be isolated; warming can easily be primarily attributed to human factors.

    We don’t have time to debunk the deniers, people and lobbyists who are paid by deep fossil interests. We need to go about becoming more sustainable, like as if our collective lives depend on it. Business-as-usual (oil, gas, coal) is unsustainable. Being unsustainable is something that must change, sooner or later. Being unsustainable has a way of becoming more and more expensive, and coming to an ungraceful end.

    Fortunately, we will actually save money (i.e., more profits) from doing smart and sustainable things. Solar and Wind are now far cheaper than fossil fuels in most locations (even when combined with battery). Renewable energy is especially cheaper when considering all the externality costs of fossil fuels (pollution, health, national security).

    Energy efficiency offers a perpetuity of savings. The greenest gallon of gas is the one never pumped, refined, shipped and burned. The greenest electricity is the negawatt. We also like Teleworking, the greenest commute is zero-distance which consumes no time.

    Let’s all start with those things that can be done immediately (within weeks or a few months) and those that offer a perpetuity of savings. We need to start putting the magic of compounding to our advantage, not toward more non-sustainable practices.

    < * Notes & References * >
    Wikipedia is a great source on Climate Change. Start with the Global Warming Book.
    An excellent source for fact/fiction/myth is: SkepticalScience.com (I’ve never seen anything there that was not supported with sources and provable with current data.)

    The log entry for Baker video:
    A few days ago, noted Climate Change commentator Tony Heller released a
    new video with some killer facts that completely exposes the conspiracy
    over climate change.

    Or does it?

    Let’s discuss.

    The Mallen Baker Show is aimed at all people who see themselves as
    change makers, with commentary on issues and change movements with a
    particular focus on climate change and environment, social issues, free
    speech and corporate social responsibility.
    References in this video:
    Tony Heller’s original video
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8455K…
    The National Climate Assessment Report
    https://nca2018.globalchange.gov/down…
    Extreme heat and cold graphs
    https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicator…
    Wildfires analysis
    https://andthentheresphysics.wordpres…
    Interview with Dr Ottmar Endenhofer, IPCC (in German)
    https://www.nzz.ch/klimapolitik_verte…

    Integrated sea ice graph
    https://web.archive.org/web/201905241…
    Piecing together the arctic sea ice history
    https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-pos…

  • What history suggests about +3 to +4 degrees in sea level rise!

    Study of ancient caves in Europe show how high sea levels should rise when temps go up 3 or 4 degree C.
    You can figure about 20 to 60 feet (7 to 20 meters).
    A study published in Nature looks at what water levels might look like in a +3 world.
    The article is summed up in Phys.org…. Scientists discover evidence for past high-level sea rise.
    Of course, you can always model the global warming on earth to see where we land with +2 or more degrees.
    A scary study just out finds that ice sheets are melting from below at between 10 and 200 times faster than originally expected!

  • Democratization of Power

    SustainZine (SustainZine.com) blogged about a rather cool idea on the decentralization of power (here). The idea in Nature Communications is to have buildings everywhere use their renewable power sources to generate a biofuel of some type. And the authors had the Heating Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) unit extract CO2 from the atmosphere to generate the fuel. Some of the technologies they pointed to were new-er technologies that are now (hopefully) making their way into main-stream. (Read the nice summary article in Scientific American by Richard Conniff.)

    Basically, everyone everywhere can now produce their own power at rates that are a fraction of lifelong utility power. Storage is now the big bottle neck to completely avoiding the grid. The distributed power should only be a big plus to the overall power grid; however, the existing power monopolies are still resisting and blocking. So complete self-containment is not only a necessity for remote (isolated) power needs, but a requirement in order to break away from the power monopolies.

    In the US, there is the 30% Renewable Investment Tax Credit which makes an already good investment even better for homeowners and businesses. Plus, businesses can get accelerated depreciation making the investment crazy profitable after accounting for the tax shield (tax rate times the basis of the investment). Many of the states also sweeten the deal even more. But the 30% tax credit starts to reduce after 2019, so the move to renewable starts to drop off precipitously at the end of 2019.

    You would think that the power companies would join in the solutions, and not spend so much time (and massive amounts of money) on obstructing progress. All those tall buildings that are prime candidates for wind. Think of all the rooftops, roads and parking lots worldwide that are prime candidates for solar. Distributed power. As needed, where needed. No need for new nuclear, coal or nat-gas power plants. Little need for taking up green fields with solar farms.

    Of course, the oil, coal and gas companies need the perpetual dependence on the existing infrastructure. When we all stop the traditional fossil fuel train — and all indications from the IPCC show that we must stop that train sooner, not later — then all the oil and gas in the world will need to stay in the ground. Call me an optimist, or a pessimist, but I would not buy oil or gas for almost any price. I definitely wouldn’t buy into the Saudi-owned oil company spinoff.

    It is probably a mistake to think that technology to take CO2 out of the atmosphere after the fact can repair past sins. Avoiding putting pollution into the air, water and land — the negawatt and the negagallon, in this case — are by far the best approach.

    In Sustainzine, BizMan concluded with this thought about the here-and-now scenario, not in the future at all:

    “Hidden in this whole discussion is that scenario that is here and now, not futuristic. Renewable energy is cheaper and massively cleaner than conventional energy, and it can be located anywhere. Storage, in some form, is really the bottleneck; and storage in the form of synthetic fuels is a really, really cool (partial) solution.

    References

    Dittmeyer, R., Klumpp, M., Kant, P., & Ozin, G. (2019, April 30). Crowd oil not crude oil. Nature Communications. DOI: 10.1038/s41467-019-09685-x