For context see
Recently, I gave in Polish an opening lecture, “Can we salvage our global civilization?”, at a one-day conference of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences (PAU). The conference took place in the Isabela Lanckoronska Auditorium at the historic PAU building on Slawkowska 17 Street in Kraków. This conference, “Civic organizations and local communities faced with climate change disasters,” was organized by the Committee on Threats to Civilization of PAU. The last lecture was given by a young activist from a well-known non-profit, who manifestly misled the audience with his proposed implementation of the Green New Deal that would immediately shut down all coal-fired electric power plants in Poland, and replace them with wind turbines, PV arrays and geothermal wells. I pointed out to the nice young man that his radical solution would cause immediate power blackouts in Poland, and asked if he shouldn't have mentioned some of the problems with the transition? His answer was that the ordinary people were not ready to hear an inconvenient truth and thus must be fed reassuring fairy tales to move them in the right direction. Hmm, and then we wonder why so many people trust no one.
The only answer to the harrowing, complex questions of the Big Transition in population, power and lifestyles is science. Science is imperfect. Scientists make mistakes. Some scientists and their funding agencies cannot resist publicity ploys, and oversell their findings. Some scientists have big egos and claim that their particular answers are the only ones that will save humanity. But, science is the merciless quest for perfection, the continuous verification of all models, and the immediate disposal of failed assumptions and theories. Science is continuous doubt. I know the pain of doubting everything, because I am a scientist. In the end, science is the only thing humanity has going for it. Without science, we are merely the dumb, suicidal lemmings that stumble in the dark, all 7.6 billion of us.
So here is the latest science from EOS: "Legions of scientists have put together the computer model that simulates the planet’s climate: the Community Earth System Model (CESM). Last year, the latest version of CESM, CESM2, debuted. Results from this new version’s simulations point toward a much hotter future climate—driven by humans continuing to burn fossil fuels and pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere—than any previous version of CESM. The jump comes after what-if simulations in which researchers doubled the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, starting with levels that existed before the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. (Those concentrations were about 280 parts per million. Today, levels are about 415 parts per million.)
Results from the same simulation from older versions of CESM were 2.9°C of warming in 2006, then 3.2°C in 2009, and 4.1°C in 2012. Now the projected warming is 5.3°C. The real planet has already warmed by 0.7°C to 0.9°C." The difference between the two models is accounting for the super-bright, solar radiation-reflecting clouds made of supercooled water. These clouds disappear fast from the warming up atmosphere and its models.
The supercooled water clouds over Wimberley, TX. Because of the extraordinarily wet spring in Texas, lots of ground moisture is being evaporated here each day. Now, the greedy Brazilians led by the corrupt neo-Nazi, Bolsonaro, want to "develop" (read destroy) the Amazon forest and change it into the soybean plantations for export to China. During that development process, the giant captive cloud system over the Amazonia will disappear. Today this supercooled cloud system gives the hot tropical Amazonia appearance of a cold Arctic region. The accelerated destruction of the Amazonia is yet another way, in which the US, led by Trump and his tariffs, will speed up to the conversion of our hospitable planet into a hot hell for all of us. But the myopic, self-annihilating greed and stupidity are general human features. My friend, Rex Weyler, reports a bumper sticker seen in Colorado on a black pickup with huge wheels and rattling muffler: “My carbon footprint is bigger than yours.” With the Amazon forest gone, parts of Colorado are likely to become a sand desert. Source: T.W. Patzek, 7/6/2019.
Thus, there are no other paths but to shrink, shrink more and transit away from fossil fuels. You can stop reading here, but if you are courageous enough to keep on reading you will understand a little better the Herculean difficulties with the shrinkage and transition.
All right, here are more facts: since 2004, the annual increases of total electricity consumption in the world have outpaced all electricity production by all PV arrays in the world, see Figure 1. And the 2.7 TW of electricity in 2018 was only 16% of total primary energy demand in the world. If you read Part III of this post, you'll understand that even in Sector 1 of the global economy (electricity generation) solar PV electricity has not kept pace with the incremental demand for electricity. As bad as this finding is, it merely illustrates the fact that without stringent population control in the poor countries and massive depowering of the rich countries there will be no comprehensive Green New Deal or Energiewende. But I already made these difficult to swallow points in Part II.
Figure 1. Here is the scope of our problem: since 2004 (the beginning of meaningful solar power) , the annual increases of total electricity demand have outpaced total electricity production from all PV arrays in the world. The only exception was the year 2009, when the global financial crisis was in full swing. Please digest this plot for a second or two, because it shows the height of the power mountain we are on. Data source: BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2019; data extracted by my electrical engineer friend, Pedro Prieto, 6/13/2019.
Let's go back to the GHG emissions that have been increasing rather briskly at 2.7% in 2018, also see Figure 2. At a recent Atlantic Council meeting, Mr. Spencer Dale, chief economist of BP, was reported to have said this :
"Dale closed his presentation with a discussion of the power sector, emphasizing the importance of its decarbonization. Despite the renewable energy surge in the last decade, the power sector fuel mix remains the same as twenty years ago. Dale argued that switching coal production to natural gas is key to cutting emissions, as switching just 10 percent of global coal consumption to natural gas would have the same impact on emissions as doubling the renewables capacities of China and the United States." See Figure 3, to understand the scales involved.
Figure 2. Notice that international aviation (us flying and our Valentine roses being flown from Costa Rica), and maritime transport (our stuff being shipped everywhere throughout the global fossil amoeba) emit as much of carbon dioxide as the continent of Africa. Source: Ourworldindata.org
My dear green friends, even though Mr. Dale works for the oil industry, he is telling the truth. I'll come back to him a little later. There is no other quick way of limiting GHG emissions from electricity generation, unless the rich countries insist on the immediate and deep, really deep, power cuts that would spell the end of the current global economy that our visionary (just kiddin') president Trump wants to kill. Please remember that a vast increase of solar power postulated in Part III, would require heavy subsidies from fossil fuels and the concomitant increase of GHG emissions by perhaps as much as 25%, see Part II.
OK, let's move on. In Part III of this post, I offered you a magic conversion from coal and oil to equivalent solar electrical power. I expected a few of you to push me back by arguing that we do not need as much as 89 TWp (terawatt peak) of photovoltaic electricity to replace most of the 11 TW of global coal and oil. If you did, I would have answered, no, in fact we need several times more solar electricity during the day to run all the background processes of generation of hydrogen or other energy carriers to power the rest of the economy during the night and provide heat for other industrial processes. If hydrogen generated by the solar electrolysis of water were to leave the closed loop of generation/burning, the need for photovoltaic power would increase again, not to mention a steady waste stream of salts from the electrolyzed water, one way or another.
For example, a 1 MWp solar plant can deliver at best 20 tons of oil equivalent (or 20 tons of gasoline equivalent) per year as liquid or compressed hydrogen. That's one tanker truck per year! As my Spanish electrical engineer friend, Pedro Prieto, calculates, a 1 MWp solar PV plant delivers to the consumers only 22% of its electricity production as usable hydrogen. I hope that you understand just how arduous and inefficient a large scale replacement of fossil fuels with hydrogen would be.
In keeping with the tone of this four-part post, the ever-brilliant Onion tells us - the rich people - what to do in order to become more sustainable:
"PROVIDENCE, RI—Redefining the necessary adjustments required to address the accelerated pace of the growing global environmental crisis, a report published Wednesday by researchers at Brown University concluded that a single individual who wishes to do their part to stop climate change must remove 40,000 cars from public roadways and revive 20 square miles of coral reef. “As long as everyone on the planet intensifies their efforts by personally clearing 6.5 tons of plastic from the ocean, installing 7,000 solar panels in their community, and cutting back their use of fresh water by 300 million gallons, the human race may still have a shot at slowing climate change,” said atmospheric scientist Dr. Lauren Moffat, who further noted that each person on the planet would also ideally commit to saving at least three species from extinction every month while simultaneously working to reduce the world’s population by 1.3 billion in order to forestall global environmental collapse. “Some believe it may be too late to reverse the damage humans have done to our planet, but individual change can start with something as small as picking up four tons of garbage every day. At this point, it’s a cultural imperative for everyone to pitch in by performing small but measurable tasks—such as replacing 150 hectares of industrial buildings with hardwood forests in every U.S. city—if we want to stall the meteoric rise in global temperatures for a few more years.” Moffat added that reversing climate change can be as simple as removing every single car from the road or perfecting cold fusion."
OK, scientifically speaking, I may have some beef with the Onion, but in general they are soo correct. Except that their population reduction goal is way too small, and personal water use too high.
Not to be outdone by the Onion, the Guardian proclaimed that
"The UK’s biggest carbon capture project will soon block thousands of tonnes of factory emissions from contributing to the climate crisis, by using them to help make the chemicals found in antacid, eyedrops and Pot Noodle. Within two years a chemical plant in Cheshire could keep 40,000 tonnes of carbon from the air every year, or the equivalent of removing 22,000 cars from the UK’s roads. ..."
This real project will deliver roughly half of the personal goal set out by the Onion. We live in a world in which comedians tell the scientifically defensible truth, and the serious, independent media seem to suffer from acute meningitis. And so many others just want to manipulate us, truth be damned. Are we still laughing?
On a more serious note, the Houston Chronicle published this analysis quoting the same Mr. Dale:
"An economist with European oil major BP recently concluded an unexpected jump in global energy demand last year largely was due to a rise in the number of very hot and very cold days in some of the world’s most populated areas, including the United States, driving up consumption of power and heating fuels — and the carbon emissions that most of the world’s governments are racing to reduce “As they reach for the switch of the heater or air conditioner, energy consumption goes up,” Spencer Dale, group chief economist at BP, said at an event at the Washington think tank Atlantic Council earlier this month. “If there’s a link between the growing level of carbon in the atmosphere leading to the weather effects we saw last year that will signal the beginning of a more worrying, vicious cycle where increasing levels of carbon lead to more extreme weather patterns, which in turn lead to greater growth in energy and carbon.” Climate change and the global effort to combat it generally have been perceived as a threat to Texas’s sprawling oil and gas sector and other industries that produce large volumes of carbon dioxide. But BP’s analysis suggests at least in the short term, a warming planet could increase demand for fossil fuels."
I'll add that this "short term" could last for several decades, unless a major rearrangement of the status quo happens real fast. And we cannot afford several decades of annual increases of GHG emissions around the world.
Figure 3. Petawatt hours (1 peta = 1000 tera = 1,000,000,000,000,000 watts) of electricity produced from all sources (red curve) and solar PV + wind turbines. As you can see, the contribution of "renewable electricity" is visible, but hardly sufficient to drive the Green New Deal even in Sector 1 of the global economy. I have put "renewable electricity" in quotes to stress that the solar PV arrays and wind turbines are machines that repeatedly produce electricity for 20-30 years, after which time they must be replaced, if it is still possible in the greener simplified economy with much less power throughput.
In conclusion, paraphrasing somewhat a recent email from David Hughes: "An increase of renewable power did account for 33% of the increase in electricity consumption in 2018 (Sector 1, please read Part III), but renewables haven’t actually reduced non-renewable consumption. Unfortunately, that still leaves the 84% of delivered power that is non-electric (Sectors 2-4 of the global economy). And down the road when we all drive electric cars and fly in electric planes with our food delivered by electric drones, and create hydrogen via electrolysis for fuel to colonize Mars the annual increases are going to get larger." I would say many-fold larger. Did I mention the stupid lemmings stumbling in the dark?
...
The subjects of the previous blog are complex and warrant further explanation. A friend of mine and I have had a lively discussion on several issues I brought up in that blog. With his permission, I have decided to publish some of his comments with slight edits.
The referenced: blog article is here
Let us start from this comment:
"You lumped Internet, Facebook, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Apple (FAGMA) into one lot. This is not entirely accurate. These companies have different business models and different degrees of abuse. You also did not include Twitter, Netflix, eBay, and a myriad of companies that probably are more intrusive than, say, Apple or Microsoft."
Here is my reasoning. I have used annual revenues of the FAGMA oligopoly and other companies to compare their relative sizes. FAGMA dominates their respective markets so much so that all other runners up simply do not compare. Twitter is tiny (2018 revenue of $3 billion); and Netflix (2018 revenue of $14 billion) only deals in movies, however bad this might be. eBay probably needs some more consideration, but their revenue was only $10 billion in 2018.
In contrast, Amazon’s revenue was $233 billion, Apple’s $266 billion, Google’s $90 billion, Microsoft's $110 billion, and Facebook’s $14 billion. The runners' up 2018 revenues were: IBM $76 billion and Oracle $40 billion. Together, FAGMA had $713 billion of revenue in 2018. Twitter, and Ebay are in a different league. Only Facebook was similar to eBay in terms of revenue, but it terms of social harm they are almost infinitely more dangerous. Comparing eBay with Facebook is like comparing a skin scratch with the virulent pancreatic cancer.
Interestingly, the big box store company, Walmart, had the 2018 revenue of $518 billion, almost as large as FAGMA. But Walmart depends on China for their low prices and is loaded with physical infrastructure FAGMA seems to abhor. The companies like Google, Amazon and Facebook have virtual monopolies in their respective domains of operations. Microsoft and Apple in turn virtually monopolize operating systems of personal computers, tablets, etc.
My friend's second comment was a dark insight I simply did not have:
"Truly, these [FAGMA] companies are benevolent in terms of their deal: They take your data and your privacy and give you dopamine. See below for the companies that will take your data even if encrypted and analyze the hell out of view; no dopamine and no cigar. Read on.
What you did not list are companies that you may have never heard of, but they are the ones that collect information about you and steer you to the wolves, such as Chitika, Exponential [their website was blocked by my Chrome filter, TWP], RythmeOne, and PulsePoint, etc. This is where the real stuff is, and very few people know about them or understand what they do.
Did you hear of Cogent, Level 3, Akamai, UUU? Well, these companies carry your packets to their destination. If you are sending unencrypted stuff, they know you and they know what you do. If you try to send encrypted stuff, they will data mine you, machine learn you, and extract every bit of information about your habits."
I had no idea!
My friend continued thus:
"Yes, it is Orwellian, but I think your portrayal may not capture the entire picture. Seeing the evolution of American media since the Gulf War in 1990, I believe that the Department of Truth is really a combination of Reuters, Associated Press, and a few other news networks that are in the business of “making” news instead of reporting them. Then, this is fed to the Internet warriors who will massage the data, bias it, and use to bully or make a point. We live like sheep in a beautiful meadow, surrounded by very smart wolves that have mastered the art of sucking us dry while keeping us alive and happy."
He has a good point!
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Many people ask me how can I be happy writing and thinking about so many sad and desperate things? Well, let me explain. Happiness is the fleeting rush of dopamine I feel seeing my little grandson, my wife or children. As good as it might feel, it comes and goes. Think, please, about the happiness you purchase by sharing with your "friends" on Facebook a picture of a new pair of pink sneakers. Or think of the happiness you bring to your partner by giving her/him a bouquet of roses on the Valentine day.
You probably never pay attention to over a billion roses which are imported that day for your bouquet. They are flown refrigerated on transport flights from Columbia, Ecuador and Mexico. Once these cold roses land in Miami, they are rushed to other refrigerated planes and trucks, so that you can get them from a store refrigerator anywhere in the US. The energy cost of your bouquet is absolutely ginormous, but it is worth another minute or two of dopamine rush. Or is it?
Here is a dozen of roses for $600. You might give this box to your mistress (why would you spend that much money on your wife?) to impress her with your virility and give her a dopamine shot. While at it, you may send her a selfie with your dick. But when the little head sucks out blood from the big one, you may black out and forget that there is no privacy left, including your private parts. Someone will intercept your selfies to blackmail you. You may as well publish all you've got, just like I publish this blog. By my count, some 31 "unrecognizable" entities are monitoring it.
You probably don't know that just one rose you gave to your loved one needed about 10 liters of water to grow. In Bogotá, more than 5,000 wells have been drilled in the savanna in order to provide fresh water for Colombia’s exploding flower industry, and streams and wetlands have been disappearing. To be pest "safe," your roses are literally drenched in pesticides and herbicides. The unprotected laborers greatly suffer and some die. Several common pesticides used throughout Central and South American countries are listed below with health risks related to exposure: 1. Paraquat- Fatal poisoning; chemical burns in skin and eyes. 2. Mancozeb- Cancer. 3. Methyl bromide - Acute poisoning; air and groundwater pollution; depletion of ozone layer. 4. Carbofuran-Acute Poisoning. 5. Terbufos- Fatal poisoning. 6. Methamidophos- Acute poisoning; delayed peripheral neurotoxicity. 7. Methyl parathion - Acute poisoning. 8. Aluminum Phosphide -Acute poisoning. 9. Copper arsenate- Cancer. 10. Aldicarb- Acute poisoning; groundwater pollution; immunotoxicity.
I am happy, though, that you got your deserved dopamine moment, didn't you?
But I digressed. Joy - not happiness - is really what I feel. Joy is different. It is a feeling of content and completeness after going through many adversities, pain, and difficult periods in life and emerging from them a better, wiser human being. Joy is what I feel looking back on my personal and public life. Being joyful should never be confused with being happy one moment and throwing tantrums the next, just like my little grandson or president Trump.
Many millions of people today feel the chronic pain of being that detracts from their joyfulness. Their pain and desperation appear as anger, anguish and, yes, hatred toward the enemies real and imaginary. Welcome to the updated narrative of "nineteen eighty four," a novel by George Orwell. It is impossible to condense this dark prophecy in a few sentences. If you haven't done so already, you must read it (here is a free download); I have, at least three times, and listened to a masterful CD version.
In the dark world of Orwell's 1984, Great Britain is a small part of Oceania that encompasses the Americas, half of Africa, Australia and New Zealand. Oceania is in permanent war with Eurasia and Eastasia (sort of like our war on "terrorism"). The lowest echelon of the impoverished British society, the "Proles," (think of the Brexiters or core Trump, Orban, Kaczynski, etc. supporters) live in utter misery, and neglect of education and healthcare. The proles are kept sedated with alcohol, football, cheap repetitive pop music, pornography and a national lottery whose winnings are never actually paid out; that particular lie is obscured by propaganda and the lack of communication within Oceania. The impotent proles are freer and less intimidated than the middle-class Outer Party (think of the college educated Democrats with degrees in political science, history, philosophy or English literature). The very poor middle class is constantly monitored and controlled by the two-way TV sets that cannot be turned off and by secret police agents.
How does this Orwellian vision of world's future compare with reality thus far?
First, let me remind you that a pessimist is an optimist who shed his delusions and denial, and educated himself. Please keep this in mind, if you continue reading. If you don't, that's fine too. You will remain in your blissful bubble of denial and ignorance, which are the dominant genetic traits of most denizens of the fossil superorganism. Please understand that many democratically elected governments know very well about your truth aversion and are making best use of it.
Imagine now that your favorite airline offers a vacation package to a world-class city like the one shown below. That city is Beijing. China is the rising economic superpower that will collapse rather immediately, because there is not enough of the environment left to protect her 1.4 billion people from disease and death. But before China collapses, she will suck dry most of the world that remains. The brutal global competition for resources may precipitate a war between China and US.
By the way, a famous photographer, who captured China's multitudinous industrial achievements just went missing. And rightly so, why need we talk about the small side-effects of an economic miracle that lifted most from poverty? But what is poverty when a rich environment allows families to subsist with little cash? Conversely, what is affluence, when air, water and soil are toxic, and bees are dead?
Instead of telling you the dirty truth, your fossil amoeba airline will try to woo you like this. In the ad you just saw, this airline has relied on your life-long self deception and improbable lies you weave to remain "hopeful," that is inoculated from the cold facts staring into your eyes wide shut. They already know that you are a brainwashed fossil superorganism monkey. Snap out of it, will you? Recapture you atrophied power of human thinking.
All right, I might have woken you up from that hopeful stupor, punctuated by resentments from the perceived lack of privilege the fossil amoeba should have bestowed upon you, but didn't because she lied. But if you remain in denial, you are in good company. The gangster from New York and a suspected Russian agent, our President, has just rejected the science in the latest UN report published in Katowice, 25 km from Gliwice, where I was born. He also claimed that the current "yellow vest" upheaval in France was linked directly to the Paris climate agreement.
Not! The French riots are directly related to the depletion of many resources, but specifically to the intermediate distillates (abbreviated here as the naphtha fraction) that are disappearing from the refinery feedstock crudes worldwide. The ultralight condensates produced from the US shale plays have none. Naphtha is the petroleum fraction from which diesel fuel is produced. Since almost all trucks run on diesel fuel, which one would you rather have: food and other goods in stores or an unrestricted supply of fuel to private diesel cars?
The fossil amoeba will never admit that she is limited by anything. She cannot violate her own principle of indiscriminate, eternal growth that will pay for the ginormous debt the rich took everywhere to bail themselves out. This debt is now sloshing around the world killing what remains of the healthy environment and speeding up the collapse of our civilization.